Britain in 1848 Dr Robert Saunders

1. Britain in 1848Dr Robert Saunders

2. Punch, April 1848 • Mob Orator: Tell me, minion! Is it the intention of your proud masters at all hazards to prevent our demonstration? • Magistrate (blandly): Yes, Sir. • Mob Orator: Then know, o myrmidon of the brutal Whigs, that I shall go home to my tea, and advise my comrades to do the same.

3. Chartism, 1837-c.1852

4. The ‘Six Points’ of the Charter • Universal Manhood Suffrage • Secret Ballot • Equal Electoral Districts • Annual Parliaments • Payment of MPs • Abolition of the Property Qualification for MPs National Petitions: 1839, 1842, 1848

6. ‘Go to now, ye rich men, wail and gnash your teeth, for the miseries that shall come upon you’ (James 5:1) • ‘Thy Princes are rebels, and companions of thieves’ (Isaiah 1:23)

7. ‘O Lord, you God of Vengeance, you God of Vengeance shine forth! Rise up, O judge of the earth, and give to the proud what they deserve! O Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked exult?’ PSALM 94

8. ‘How long shall babes of tender yearsBe doomed to toil for lazy peers –The locusts of our land?Make bare thine arm, O Lord! defendThe helpless, and, be thou their friendAnd shield them with thine hand!’ Chartist Hymns

9. Chartist Religion • ‘Christ was the first Chartist, and Democracy is the gospel carried in practice’ (Ernest Jones) • ‘Our politics are the politics of the Bible – the religion of the Bible; their politics are the politics of the state’ (Rev. Rayner Stephens)

10. Chartist Colonies

11. The National Petition, 1839 ‘our workmen are starving; the home of the artificer is desolate, and the warehouse of the pawnbroker is full; the workhouse is crowded and the manufactory is deserted’.

14. The Poor Law (Amendment) Act, 1834 ‘The Workhouse Test’ ‘Less Eligibility’

15. The National Petition, 1839 ‘The energies of a mighty kingdom have been wasted. The few have governed for the interests of the few, while the interest of the many has been neglected or insolently and tyrannously trampled upon’.

16. ‘Our civilisation has doomed countless millions to perpetual labour, absolute ignorance, and sufferings as impossible to remedy as they are undeserved. What ferments will not be produced in these uncultured intelligences, in these embittered hearts, by passionate and artful instigations to their hopes, their covetousness, their desire for revenge? Who will predict the day of the explosion, that on which the storm will break, the incredible ruins which will pile up?’ (1847) Sir Robert Peel

17. Repeal of the Corn Laws, 1846

18. ‘the people are contented, Chartism is extinguished and any wish for organic change in the Constitution – for addition to popular privileges – is dormant’. ‘But we have reduced protection to agriculture, and tried to lay the foundation of peace in Ireland; and these are offences for which nothing can atone’. Peel in 1845

19. The 1848 Revolutions • ‘There are people alive who remember the whole of the first Revolution, and we of middle age are familiar with the second; but this, the third, transcends them both, and all other events which history records’ • Charles Greville, Diaries

20. The Morning Herald, 11 April 1848 • ‘We have gazed so intently at revolutions … that we cannot look at ordinary movements among ourselves through any other than a continental medium’

22. Discrediting the Charter

25. Chartists Far and Wide William Cuffay Henry Clubb

26. 9 November 1850 The Communist Manifesto, translated by Helen Macfarlane. ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe…’ Chartism and ‘Charles Marx’