Author: Stuart Butler

The Poetry of Chartism; Aesthetics, Politics, History   Mike Sanders C.U.P. 2009

‘Between 1838 and 1852, the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, published over 1,000 poems written by more than 350 poets – as the readership of the Northern Star numbered hundreds of thousands, these poems were amongst the most widely read of the Victorian era.’

But who would know that?

But the poems were performed as well as read: ‘mass open-air gatherings, the anniversary celebrations, the reading groups, the feasts, the evening teas, the workplace lunches, the public house meetings, the extempore singing in prison’ (Timothy Randall, The Chartist Legacy). Sanders comments of ‘The sheer variety of situations within which Chartist poetry was reproduced’ means that we ‘need to think of a poem as both printed text and public event’.

The poetry was part of a cultural as well as a working-class political process: it helped sustain the movement over the years by giving it imagination as well as practicality. It marks an important moment in the establishment of a working-class aesthetic – similes and metaphors from the industrial workplace, for example, rather than from Arcadian medievalism. There was also a different perspective on the shared experience of the collective meeting, as opposed to the point of view of the detached, individualist sensibility. Phyllis Mary Ashraf put this well: ‘The public meeting and demonstration are moments of experience which awaken special feelings, not shared by other classes. The treatment … in bourgeois literature is not only different in tone and attitude, but also in the aesthetic sense.’(Introduction to Working Class Literature)

Here are a couple of stanzas as an example from S.J.’s 1842 ‘Presentation of the National Petition’:

It was Nature’s gay day,

Bright smiling May day,

Each heart was yearning our country to free;

The banners were bringing,

The people were singing,

Of the days of their fathers and sweet liberty.

 

With banners and band,

The mighty assemblage of Chartists doth go,

Their foes fill with wonder,

As proudly they thunder

Their shouts for their Charter, their hearts with hopes fill’d.

 

Some poems also help us to understand what it felt like to live in the reality of Benjamin Disraeli’s novel ‘Sybil, or the Two Nations’: ‘Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws.” “You speak of — said Egremont, hesitantly. “THE RICH AND THE POOR”.’

Mike Sanders commented that, ‘Chartist poetry draws attention to the psychological consequences of both exploitation and oppression … the denial of human dignity.’ He says that the following piece ‘emphasises the emotional degradation of the working class, (final part included here).

‘Oppression’, by D.C. (1842)

Shall we for ever lick the dust

Or fear the tyrant’s brooding frown,

And cringing, pander to the lust

Of pamper’d minions of a crown?

Shall we for ever bear the scorn

Of heartless wealth and fancied power/

Bequeath to ages yet unborn,

Our abjectness – a galling dower?

Shall we for ever be the spoil

Of greedy avarice? and brood

O’er festering wrongs and thankless toil

In calm and melancholy mood?

…

Forbid it God! The dignity

Of manhood must awaken’d be;

Justice demands, and Liberty

Proclaims we must and shall be free!

 

 

Some poems also touched upon the melancholy of emigration – a familiar Irish trope, but a Chartist one too.

Where we have plied our daily toil,

To raise the food of man,

Monopoly usurps the toil,

Or blasts it with its ban;

The Oligarchy deny us bread,

And vow that we rebel,

If we but say, ‘We would be fed.’

Old England, fare thee well.

(G. Sheridan Hussey; ‘The Emigrant Song’, 1842)

 

Now a stanza from ‘Thomas MacQueen’s Farewell to Britain’ (1842)

Dear Isle! I dream’d not twenty years ago,

That I should wander on a stranger land;

I dream’d not that the fond, fond filial gloom,

That bound my soul to thy bold rugged strand,

Should dim and darken ‘neath the withering wand

Of despot poverty.

Benjamin Stott’s ‘The Britons May Boast’ from 1842 looked at the part played by government spies and transportation (rather than emigration):

The patriot who dares to embosom his mind

…

Is humbled by perjurers, villains and spies;

And should he dare call for political right,

And tell to the world how humanity grieves,

He is dragg’d from his bed in the dead of the night,

And cramm’d in a dungeon ‘mid felons and thieves.

 

In derision he is next arraign’d at the bar,

And Justice is dealt him with unsparing hand;

He is sent from his country and kindred afar.

To pine and to die in a pestilent land.

But as Stott pointed out in a later piece, it wasn’t just spies, or judges, or ‘cultural hegemony’; there was also the army that would be used against the movement:

We know that our tyrants will strive to subdue us,

They have knaves to commit us, and soldiers to kill;

They will deal out the justice of despots unto us,

And the grave and the dungeon endeavour to fill.

 

The most notable poets: Thomas Cooper, Gerald Massey and Ernest Jones; also Linton, O’Connor, O’Brien, Harney, McDouall, Kydd; another 40 or so identified as Chartist local/regional/national leaders and occasional poets.

Most important literary influences: Milton, Burns, James Thomson, Shelley, Byron, the Romantics, Bunyan, Wesley, Shakespeare.

But it’s not just the poetry of the movement that has been buried, it’s also the history of the movement after 1848.

John Saville’s 1848 discusses how Chartism was broken by the ‘physical power of the state’, but then became ‘submerged in the national consciousness’ by ‘false understanding and denigration’. School histories so often focus on the disappointments of the Kennington Common meeting of April 10^th 1848: the ‘farce and debacle’ interpretation – thus ignoring ‘the strength that continued in the Chartism in the months that followed … even the memory of the mass arrests and jailings were wiped from public memory’.

Now, whether this indicates a ruling class conspiracy or just a coincidental reflection of upper and middle class cultural, political and historiographical tastes, played out in the market place, is a moot point – but, Saville is surely correct when he says: ‘The contemporary agencies of the media were extraordinarily effective in traducing the greatest of all mass movements of the nineteenth century … the almost complete obliteration of Chartism from public consciousness in the middle decades of the century remains a remarkable phenomenon’.

1848 was, as Mike Sanders points out, an ‘atypical year’ for Chartism, as the context was dominated by revolutions in Europe and Ireland. It was also a fertile year for fiction: ‘with Wuthering Heights, Jayne Eyre, Vanity Fair, Dombey and Son and Mary Barton, to name the most significant novels’. It is also a year that has been, as we see above, mythologised as the year of ‘final failure’ of Chartism. But Sanders echoes John Saville in reminding us that, ‘it is important to recover the sense of the unease and uncertainty, the excitement and the possibility’ that ran throughout the year. Sanders adds that it would only be in retrospect that 1848 would be deemed a year of Chartist failure, ‘and, as John Saville has shown, this same construction of ‘1848’ was part of a deliberate attempt to consign Chartism to historical and ideological oblivion. For although the British state was confident that it had neutralised Chartism’s immediate threat by the end of August 1848, there remained a widespread feeling that class conflict had been postponed rather than resolved.’

This extract from Massey’s poem show that:

The Voice of the Future, the sweetest of all,

Makes the heart leap to its clarion-call.

Hope, hope, hope!

Be of good cheer and step forth in the van;

For serfdom hath passed,

And labour at last

Shall enter the Brotherhood common to Man;

Hope, hope, hope!

 

This one comes from 1850:

Aye, it must come! The Tyrant’s throne

Is crumbling, with our hot tears rusted;

The Sword earth’s mighty have leant on

Is cankered with our best blood crusted.

Room for the men of Mind! Make way

You Robber Rulers! – pause no longer!

You cannot stay the opening day!

The world rolls on, the light grows stronger –

The People’s Advent coming!

 

 

An Anthology of Chartist Poetry, Poetry of the British Working Class 1830s-50s

Edited by Peter Schneckner AUP 1989

These poems are juxtaposed with the Chartist caricatures of novelists such as Dickens, Gaskell, Disraeli and Kingsley, who all portrayed individual Chartists and the movement in a relentlessly negative way – their sympathy for the working class stretched only so far. The novels of these writers are all treasured, but, for the author, ‘the poetry ‘ produced by Chartism in its twenty year lifetime, ‘represents one of the most passionate, clearly focused, radical … socially influential forces in British literature … read every week by hundreds of thousands … For one intense moment in nineteenth-century English literature, the gap between politics and culture virtually disappeared.’

The author thinks it possible that 20-30% of the 10 million adult population read The Northern Star; observers, both British and continental, commented on this working class love of reading, declaiming and writing verse – ‘a literate and sophisticated working class’ (Dorothy Thompson). But this cultural phenomenon didn’t spring out of nowhere: its provenance lay in ‘the ballads and broadsides of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (Schneckner). This tradition of performance and collective reading meant that in all probability, the poems of Chartism were known by far more than the 20-30% mentioned earlier: the oral tradition of the country was transposed to the town and city.

And this oral tradition fused with the campaign for a free unstamped press: the spoken and the written word came together, just as politics and culture came together. The consequence of this union was this magical efflorescence of working class writing. Some of the results of this can be seen below.

 

THE PAUPER’S DRIVE

There’s a grim one horse hearse in a jolly round trot,

To the churchyard a pauper is going, I wot:

The road it is rough, and the hearse has no springs,

And hark to the dirge that the sad driver sings:

“Rattle his bones over the stones;

He’s only a pauper, whom nobody owns!”

(Verse 1 of 6, The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 5 February 1842)

WHAT IS A PEER?

What is a peer? A useless thing;

A costly toy, to please a king;

A bauble near a throne:

A lump of animated clay;

A gaudy pageant of a day;

An incubus; a drone!

 

What is a peer? A nation’s curse –

A pauper on the public purse;

Corruption’s own jackal:

A haughty, domineering blade;

A cuckold at a masquerade;

A dandy at a ball.

 

Ye butterflies, whom kings create;

Ye caterpillars of the state;

Know that your time is near!

This moral learn from nature’s plan,

That in creation God made man;

But never made a peer.

 

Signed Midland Progressionist

(The Northern Star and National Trades Journal, 25 November 1848)

 

E.P.

THE MANY AND THE FEW

AN APPEAL FOR THE RIGHT

The soil is rich with nature’s fruits – with nature’s bounties fair.

The earth is teeming with her stores to bless the tiller’s care.

The idle revel in their halls – their costly boards are prest

With all the treasures of the land – the rarest and the best.

The gorgeous feast, the wassail loud, the wine-born lordly glee –

The dazzling joys of wealth and pride, and fashion’s high decree.

All pleasures of the court and camp – the ball – the chase – the field,

All, all to those who labour not, the right to might must yield.

(4^th stanza of 8, The Chartist Circular, 28 December 1839)

 

ONE AND ALL

“One and all“, is Cornwall’s cry –

One and all, let us reply;

Hand to hand, and heart to heart,

Let us act a nation’s part;

Let us free our native isle

From the rule of despots vile;

And send apostles o’er the world

With the Chartist flag unfurled.

 

One and all, let us proclaim

He who bears a bondman’s name,

And seeketh not to cleanse its shame

Deserves to live in scorn, and die

With the vilest things that lie

Grovelling on their mother earth,

‘Midst the spawn which gave them birth.

Earth will curse the dastard grave

Of the mean and cringing slave.

 

One and all! Let tyrants quail

Now that sound is on the gale.

Who dare meet a nation’s frown?

Who can keep a nation down?

Millions claim their rights as men,

Millions brave corruption’s den,

Millions shout, from sea to sea,

“One and all”, we will be free!

The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 25 June 1842

NB WE COULD REWRITE THIS FOR THE FILM; REPLACE CORNWALL WITH SELSLEY

TO THE CHARTISTS OF SHROPSHIRE

Raise the Chartist banner high,

Plant it in the Wrekin,

Let its mottoes proudly fly,

To the tyrant speaking.

Agitate each wooded vale,

Agitate each village;

Show the wife and orphan pale,

How the factions pillage.

Leave no spot in Shropshire wide

Until it owns the Charter;

Spare the man who would divide

Your ranks, or freedom barter.

Prove that in each vein now runs

The British blood of old;

And that – crushing freedom’s foes

Ye dare be firm, and bold.

Cease not in your noble cause,

Until you freedom gain;

And liberty, and equal laws,

Are England’s own again.

Then bear the Chartist flag once more,

O’er mountain stream and vale;

A cause like yours, so bright and pure,

Is never doomed to fail.

The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 27 May 1843

 

THE FACTORY CHILD

I hear the blithe voices of children at play,

And the sweet birds rejoicing on every spray;

On all things the bright beams of summer hath smil’d,

But they smile not on me the poor factory child.

 

Oh! Who would not mourn for a victim like me,

A young heart-broken slave in the land of the free;

Hardly tasked, and oft beaten, oppress’d and revil’d,

Such, such is the fate of the poor factory child.

 

In the dead of the night when you take your sweet sleep,

Through the dark dismal street to my labour I creep;

So the din of the loom till my poor brain seems wild,

I return – an unfortunate factory child.

 

Oh! Pity my sufferings e’er yet the cold tomb,

Succeed my loathed prison, its task, and its gloom;

And the clods of valley untimely are pil’d,

O’er the pale wasted form of the factory child.

McDouall’s Chartist Journal and Trades’ Advocate, 21 August 1841

(4 of 6 stanzas)

 

J.H.

FROST

He is far from the land where his offspring sleep,

And the waves around him are playing,

But he only turns from the view to weep,

For his thoughts to his home are straying.

 

Oh! He turns to a spot where the sunbeams rest,

When they promise a gloomy morrow;

They shine o’er his form like a smile from the west,

From his own lov’d island of sorrow.

The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 2 May 1840

(2 stanzas of 4)

 

R.M.B.

NURSERY RHYMES

“LITTLE JACK HORNER SAT IN A CORNER”

New Reading

Little Jack R-ss-ll sat on his bustle,

Counting his sal-a-ry;

Then into his fob he popp’d every bob,

Saying “What a great man am I.”

The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 29 February 1840

(Verse 1 of 16)

Ebenezer Jones

A COMING CRY

The few to whom the law hath given the earth God gives to all

Do tell us that for them alone its fruits increase and fall:

They tell us that by labour we may earn our daily bread,

But they take the labour for their engines that work on unfed.

And so we starve; and now the few have publish’d a decree –

Starve on, or eat in workhouses the crumbs of charity;

Perhaps it’s better than starvation, – once we’ll pray and then

We’ll all go building workhouses, million, million men!

 

Kovalev, Y.V., ed. An Anthology of Chartist Literature

(Verse 1 of 4)

THE SILENT CELL

They told me ‘twas a fearful thing

To pin in prison lone;

The brain became a shrivelled scroll,

The heart a living stone.

 

They’ll find me still unchanged and strong,

When breaks their puny thrall;

With hate – for not one living soul –

And pity – for them all.

Notes to the People, 1851, vol.1, p.66

Composed, during illness, on the sixth day of my incarceration, in a solitary cell, on bread and water, and without books, – August 1849

(First and last stanzas – 9, in all)

 

THE SONG OF THE LOW

We’re low – we’re low – we’re very, very low,

As low as low can be;

The rich are high – for we make them so –

And a miserable lot are we!

And a miserable lot are we! Are we!

A miserable lot are we!

 

We plough and sow – we’re so very, very low,

That we delve in the dirty clay,

Till we bless the plain with the golden grain,

And the vale with the fragrant hay.

Our place we know – we’re so very low,

‘Tis down at the landlord’s feet;

We’re not too low – the bread to grow

But too low the bread to eat.

We’re low – we’re low – we’re very, very low,

As low as low can be;

The rich are high – for we make them so –

And a miserable lot are we!

And a miserable lot are we! Are we!

A miserable lot are we!

Notes to the People, 1852, vol. 2, p.953

The Song of the Low was among the most popular of Jones’s poems. It was set to music by John Lowry. (Verses 1 and 2 of 6)

 

THE SONG OF THE FUTURE

AIR – “THE FOUR LEAVED SHAMROCK”

The land it is the landlord’s;

The trader’s is the sea;

The ore the usurer’s coffer fills,

But what remains for me?

 

We bear the wrong in silence.

We store it in our brain;

They think us dull – they think us dead;

But we shall rise again.

Notes to the People, 1852, vol. 2, p.993

2 verses of 16)

William James Linton

RHYMES FOR THE LANDLORDED

NUMBER 2: PROPERTY

The black cock on the pathless moor,

The red deer on the fern,

Yon cloud of rooks the ploughed field o’er,

The river-watching hern,

The pheasant in the lofty wood, –

Aud all God’s creatures free,

To roam through earth, and air, and flood, –

These are not Property.

 

But earth, its mines, its thousand streams, –

And air’s uncounted waves,

Freighted with gold and silver beams

To brighten lowliest graves –

The mountain-cleaving waterfall, –

The ever-restless sea, –

God gave, not to a few, but all,

As common Property.

Spartacus, The Friend of the People, 21 December 1850

(Verses 1 and 2 of 3)

WILLIAM JAMES LINTON

For an Obelisk in Printing-House Square

(Erected to the Gentlemen of Puddledock)

A page of the “Times” the Devil read,

And he flung it down:-Ahem!

I’m father of lies, I know, he said;

But I’m damn’d if I’d father them.

 

RHYMES AND REASONS AGAINST LANDLORDISM

THE SLAVE OF THE SOIL

The ass is fed, they muzzle not

The ox that treads the corn;

But they leave their human labourer

To starve and die forlorn.

The rich man’s hound hath his kennel, and

His meat both night and morn;

‘Tis only the human labourer

Is left to die forlorn.

The English Republic, 1851, p.94

Verse 1 of 3)

 

WILLIAM S. VILLIERS SANKEY

SONG

AIR – “YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND”

Ye working men of England,

Who plough your native soil,

Whose hands have reared her fabrics

With unabated toil;

Though your labours clothe her nobles,

The Monarch on the throne,

Yet bereft, ye are left,

In slavery to groan;

While the wealthy revel proudly,

Still in slavery you groan.

In battle field contending,

With the might of England’s woes,

Your fathers won those laurels

Which twine with England’s Rose;

Yet when ye sought the Commons’ House,

Your Suffrage rights to own,

Still bereft, ye were left,

In slavery to groan.

While purse-proud voters pass you by,

And ye in slavery groan.

They boast of England’s freedom,

And toast it o’er their wine,

While millions of her bravest sons,

In want disfranchised pine;

But the nation is degraded,

While ye, her sons are known,

Thus bereft, to be left,

In slavery to groan,

While the millions are disfranchised,

And still in slavery groan.

Yet, working men of England,

Give way not to despair,

For your banner yet shall proudly

Float high upon the air;

Your rights shall be conceded,

The bugle shall be blown,

To the fame, of your name,

When none in slavery groan –

When ye have won your freedom,

And none in slavery groan.

The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 25 April 1840