Teaching the Chartist Movement as Subculture

The Chartist Movement appears in the vast majority of textbooks used in European History, Western Civilization, and Advanced Placement® European History courses at United States universities and secondary schools. These commonly present Chartism as a political struggle provoked by economic recessions and locate its political goals in the famous Six Points of the People’s Charter. They conclude that, although it collapsed ignominiously after Parliament rejected three attempts to deliver the Charter, happily mid-Victorian reformist gradualism attained what militant agitation could not.

   Chartism, however, was much more than a politico-economic pressure group; it was a working-class subculture that sought to develop group cultural identity as well as political cohesion. It did so by means of the customary Victorian media of newspapers, tracts, lectures, sermons, and rallies. Other pressure groups also used those media. But Chartism went beyond to use other means of constructing community cohesiveness: poetry, music, and song; portraits, cartoons, and decorations; clothing and caps; souvenir neckerchiefs, needlepoint, and trinkets; breakfast foods and dietary supplements.

   This paper, first, will situate the Movement as a subculture rather than a counterculture. Second, it will present several examples of Chartist community-building: the construction of a radical poetical canon to legitimate Movement poetry; choral singing; the symbolic public use of dress and objects to convey the Chartist message; and the production and display of products (including images and food) for use in the home, thereby turning domestic space into Chartist space. Third, it will show their use in specific teaching examples.

   Attention to these unorthodox methods of communication and community-building will help students enter into the mentality of an early-nineteenth-century subculture; teach them that such things as dress, music, and food can be forms of conducting politics; and liven up the classroom.