This year's Newport Chartist Convention takes place on November 5 at St. Mary's Institute, Stow Hill (next to Westgate hotel building).
A Newport surgeon (Roger Morgan, re-enactor) will report on the injuries sustained in Newport on the morning of November 4th, 1839 and demonstrate how the wounded were treated. ... more»
After some months of being locked out of the admin section of this blog, I have now been able to get access once again and deal with the massive build-up of spam.
Over the course of the past 24 hours I have deleted some 1,200 "comments" and a similar number ... more»
Chartism Day is being held at the Brotherton Room, University of Leeds Library, on 2 July 2011.
This distinguished annual event is being held in Leeds for the first time. There will papers on a range of current and recently completed research, and a special exhibition of Chartist materials from ... more»
The online version of the Northern Star, the main Chartist newspaper and an invaluable source of information for family historians, has moved, so many of the links from Chartist Ancestors no longer work properly.
Are you looking for ancestors in the Greater Manchester area who had some connection with the trade unions or labour movement? Dr Wendy Bottero, an academic at the University of Manchester, would like to interview you for research she is conducting into the work of family historians.
Two dates of Chartist interest (with thanks to Malcolm Chase):
Wednesday 28 July 2010, 11.00am, BBC Radio 4: a 30 minute documentary on William Cuffay, the London Chartist (and son of a St Kitts slave) transported to Van Diemans Land in 1848.
NEXT YEAR Saturday 2 July 2011, 10.00-5.00, Brotherton ... more»
Newport-born actor Michael Sheen officially opened the Chartist exhibition at Newport Museum and Art Gallery on Wednesday 7 April 2010 (see picture below).
Speaking at the opening, Michael Sheen, said: “I was delighted to be at the opening of the exhibition and back in the city of my birth. It ... more»
Many of the most significant Chartist newspapers have now become available online to the public thanks to a British Library initiative to digitise and publish more than 2 million pages of material from 19th century newspapers.
Among the papers that can now be viewed are the Charter, Chartist, Chartist Circular, ... more»
The latest issue of the Labour History Review is given over entirely to a series of articles on Chartism, and is well worth getting hold of if you can.
Some of the best known academics in the field of Chartist studies (some of whom appear elsewhere on Chartist Ancestors) have ... more»
Edward Truelove's bookshop in John Street must have been a familiar haunt for many London Chartists.
If ever there were Chartist fundraising or social events in the capital, Truelove's shop was sure to be listed in the Northern Star as one of the principal outlets for ticket sales. In addition, ... more»
Samuel Holberry died in gaol, a Chartist martyr, his health broken by two years of imprisonment after he was found guilty of seditious conspiracy. But was he really planning an armed uprising that would seize control of Sheffield and spark insurrection across the north of England?
More than 1,000 poems appeared in the pages of the Northern Star, the principal Chartist newspaper, from its launch in 1838 to closure in 1852. This body of work, possibly constituting the most widely read collection of poetry in the Victorian era, is now examined in a new book, titled ... more»
A series of events to mark the 170th anniversary of the Chartist rising at Newport in South Wales begins on Saturday 18 April with events in Merthyr Tudfel market square.
Events continue through the year and on into January 2010 - the 170th anniversary of the day on which the ... more»
If ever I am asked to recommend a single book about Chartism and the Chartists, I suggest Malcolm Chase's Chartism: A New History.
Published in 2007, it is the first significant overview of the Chartist movement to be published in many years, and is in addition both eminently helpful ... more»
The Chartist Circular was among the most important and certainly one of the longest-lived of the many newspapers that sprang out of Chartism in Scotland.
Launched in September 1839 by the former handloom weaver and co-operator William Thomson, the paper was published weekly “from the steam press of W & ... more»
A month of activities to mark the anniversary of the Chartist uprising in Newport, South Wales, begins this week with a lecture at Merthyr Tydfil library followed by a guided walk and coach tour, plays and other events.
Thousands of men from across south Wales marched on Newport on 4 ... more»
If you would like a Chartist Ancestors calendar for 2009, you can now get one simply by clicking this link.
This year's calendar, which shows all 12 months on a single side of A4, includes a picture of a medallion issued to mark Feargus O'Connor's release from prison, and ... more»
It has been claimed that between 1854 and 1916, “not a single book of permanent value on the history of Chartism had been published in England”.
This is certainly going too far: the autobiographies and memoirs published by Thomas Cooper (1872), George Jacob Holyoake (1892) and W E Adams (1903) ... more»
Feargus O’Connor was never happier in life than when at the centre of a controversy. In death, the Chartist movement’s greatest leader remained also its most disputed figure, blamed by earlier generations of historians for his bluster but now at least partially rehabilitated and admired once more.
The culture of Chartism was inextricably tied up with the development of popular print. Many leading Chartists were long-time opponents of stamp duty taxes on newspapers, and the movement spawned some remarkably successful publishing businesses.
The Manchester Chartist Abel Heywood graduated from running a penny library to printing Chartist tracts ... more»
The Chartist land settlement at Heronsgate has come a long
way since the 1840s. Then it was a refuge for industrial workers seeking a
cottage of their own and two or three acres to farm. Now it is one of the most sought-after
of areas for London commuters.
William Lovett occupies a pivotal place in the history of Chartism.
He drafted the People’s Charter, was secretary to the London Working Men’s
Association, and subsequently served as secretary to the first Chartist
Convention of 1839.
Importantly, William Lovett also wrote and published an
autobiography. The Life and
Struggles of ... more»
Nearly 40,000 people have visited Chartist Ancestors over
the past 12 months. Each visitor looked on average at just over two pages and
spent around 2 minutes 20 seconds on the site before moving on elsewhere.
I know this because last July I signed up to Google’s Analytics service. ... more»
"We had to shut the main gates on Great Russell Street
to prevent more people from coming in. It was the first time we did that since
the Chartist riots of 1848 - although on that occasion the staff were actually
on the roof, armed with stones."
Throughout 1841 and 1842, anyone reading the Northern Star would have come across the name of its proprietor, Feargus O’Connor, an average of 40 times in each weekly issue.
Over the course of the 15 years from 1838 to 1852 during which O’Connor owned and ran the paper, his name ... more»
Stephen Roberts’ new book on Thomas Cooper and Arthur O’Neill is being launched at the Birmingham & Midland Institute in Birmingham city centre on Saturday 13 September.
The book, titled The Chartist Prisoners, focuses on the lifelong friendship between Cooper and O’Neill formed when they shared a cell in Stafford ... more»
The name of Isaac Ickersgill appears briefly in R G Gammage’s
History of the Chartist Movement. Along with a number of other Bingley men, Isaac
was charged with having rescued two local Chartists from police custody in the summer
of 1848.
Not for the first time, however, Gammage made a ... more»
James Watson was one of the six working men whose names
appear (alongside those of six radical MPs) on the People’s Charter, and played
a prominent role in establishing free speech in this country.
A veteran of the struggle of the unstamped press in the
1820s and 1830s, he became ... more»
The Charter had all the necessary elements to become one of
the great success stories of the radical press.
A short history of The Charter and those involved with it,
including a list of the members of its management committee, now appears on
Chartist Ancestors.
Our current series of Chartist portraits finishes with John
Skevington, the working class radical leader from Leicestershire who
represented both Derby and his home town of Loughborough in the First Chartist
Convention of 1839.
The series ends here because this is the point at which The
Charter newspaper drew to ... more»
MEET THE EDITOR Hello and welcome to chartists.net news. My name is Mark Crail, and I set up Chartist Ancestors back in 2003. I have been building it up ever since with the help of many very kind individuals who have provided both information and advice. This blog aims to highlight new additions to the site and developments in the wider world of Chartist studies. I hope you find it and the main site both informative and enjoyable.