[In the following excerpt, Klaus analyzes the use of the historical novel in Chartist fiction, and argues for its importance in the development of working-class literature.]

The treatment of Chartism is symptomatic of the insularity that has overtaken so many academic disciplines: whereas the historians' fascination with the period manifests itself in dozens of publications every year, students of English have so far deemed it worthy of little more than the occasional footnote. It is not a question of parity, for Chartism's socio-historical significance clearly exceeds its standing in literary history. But if we agree with one definition of Chartism as 'a response of a literate and sophisticated working class, different in tone and temper from earlier protest movements',¹ then questions arise as to the scope, nature and artistic value of its literary output—questions, surely, to which students of English should be addressing themselves.

It would be presumptuous to attempt a comprehensive discussion of Chartist literature within the confines of a brief chapter, given its diversity and unwieldly profusion. Martha Vicinus lists 'speeches, essays, prison letters, dialogues, short stories, novels, songs, lyrical poems, epics, and, later in the century, autobiographies.'² To complete the tally, we should perhaps add politically committed literary criticism and the emergence of industrial reportage ('trades grievances').

In view of the multiplicity of genres, there is much to be said for concentrating at this stage on one particular area, that of the novel. But even here we immediately come up against a difficulty which is peculiar to Chartist literature as a whole, namely the virtual inaccessibility of the texts. Most Chartist fiction—indeed, most Chartist literature—was published in newspapers and journals, and it was only the odd exceptional work which reached its readers in book form.³ The serialisation of narrative and other works was of course not uncommon in the mid-nineteenth century, and many of the best-known novelists of the period availed themselves of the device (Dickens, Thackeray, Gaskell and others). However, when we examine the immediate context of such serial fiction, it is clear that most serial publications are at odds with the particular political and cultural ambience which radiates from the pages of the Chartist press. For a proper understanding of the Chartist conception of literature, it is vital at the outset to establish the nature of that journalistic context.

If there is one area which bears out Disraeli's apprehensive observation on the development of two separate 'nations' within one state, it is that of the press. The rise of a pauper press can be traced historically to the inability and unwillingness of the established periodicals to articulate any interests other than those of the ruling class. It was a state of affairs which continued fundamentally unchanged right up to the rise of Chartism as a mass movement at the end of the 1830s. Indeed, the war of 'the great unstamped' that had raged during the preceding two decades served merely to exacerbate the polarisation. When the struggle was over, effectively by 1836, it was clear that neither censorship nor the stamp tax could keep the poor men's newspapers down permanently. Individual papers may well have been killed off, but the journalism of the workers, artisans and radicals as a whole survived unscathed. And so it continued in the Chartist period: most Chartist periodicals had an extremely short life-span, but their impermanence was frequently overshadowed by the enthusiastic launching of yet another new publication.

The slogan, 'Knowledge is Power', which heralded the appearance of the Poor Man's Guardian (1831-5), was still redolent of enlightenment didacticism and hence not necessarily at odds with certain radical middle-class positions. In the Chartist press, however, an additional and decisive impulse is at work which is alien to bourgeois journalism, that is the emphasis on mobilisation and organisation. Ernest Jones, with whose work as a novelist we shall shortly concern ourselves, characterised this impulse, and thus the ideal conception of a Chartist organ, in the following terms:

The very first, the most essential requisite of a movement is to have an organ to record its proceedings, to communicate through, with its several branches—to appeal through, to exhort through, to defend through, and to teach through. It is the fundamental bond of union, the ensign of progress, and the means of organisation.⁴

The function described here was fulfilled for many years by The Northern Star (1837-52). But besides this most durable of all the Chartist publications, the Chartist movement threw up a huge number of other papers and journals during its barely twenty-year history. All told there were nearly a hundred, but it is perhaps less their number than the fact that they were produced in centres throughout the regions which is most immediately striking. Wherever there was mass support for the six points of the Charter, efforts were made, using handbills, leaflets, tracts, newspapers or journals as the media of instruction to rally and mobilise the artisans and workers. The written and printed word carried many of the movement's great hopes for the progress and spread of reason. A proletarian public was thereby constituted which—for the first time in history—assumed national dimensions and expressed national aspirations, yet at the same time resisted unifying and centralising tendencies. The innumerable regional Chartist newspapers and magazines are therefore in no sense offshoots of a metropolitan-oriented paper—as tends to be the case of the ruling class's political press in the great provincial cities—but represent rather the outcome of self-discovery, solidarity and feelings of identity on a local level.

A further difference concerns disposition and status of literary texts in the newspapers of the period. It would be wrong to generalise and thereby gloss over the fine distinctions between one paper and another, but here again the two camps reveal clearly divergent tendencies. What is noticeable in the Chartist newspapers is that the literary columns, far from being consigned to a separate 'feuilleton' or arts section, enjoy equal prominence alongside the political, historical, temperance or whatever sections. Moreover, as often as not they have a close thematic or ideological affinity with the other columns. The literary texts published in the bourgeois press, on the other hand, are frequently found to bear little or no relation to the rest of the paper. Even when they are not actually hidden away among the political news, among the advertisements and—as industrialisation proceeds apace—the increasingly substantial economic section, they nonetheless constitute to an ever larger extent a foreign body in a whole that is directed by the principles of utilitarianism.

By contrast the Chartist press makes a constant programmatic point of emphasising the intimate relationship between literature and politics. Take, for instance, this statement from The Labourer:

We, however, had one great goal before our eyes—the redemption of the Working classes from their thraldom—and to this object we have made the purpose of each article subservient .. . we have placed poetry and romance side by side with politics and history.

Arguing in a similar vein, the editor of The Chartist Circular adds that in selecting material strict criteria were applied:

No silly romance—no coarse or immoral anecdote was to be admitted. In this generally fascinating walk of literature, all the biographical and historical sketches, all the narratives, stories, and occurrences written or selected for our periodical were to be such as would not only induce our youths to read, but have a tendency to impart to their minds a high moral tone—to inspire them with a noble love of liberty, and an honest detestation of every species of delusion and oppression.⁵

Ultimately, of course, the intermingling of literature and politics in Chartism is expressed most clearly in personal terms, in the fusion of poet/novelist and activist. The movement can no more bring forth the 'impartial' author or the author who writes about reality from a respectable distance than it can spawn 'specialists' or 'freelance Chartist writers'. In this it foreshadows a feature of the subsequent development of the working-class movement: just as all the most eminent Marxist theoreticians up to the beginning of the twentieth century put their principles into practice in the front ranks of the movement itself, so Chartism's most significant artistic contributions are made by authors who were active on its behalf as speakers, organisers and journalists. To take only a few examples from the field of fiction: Thomas Doubleday was editor of The Northern Liberator and one of the principal speakers at the 1839 mass rally in Newcastle; Thomas Cooper and Ernest Jones served two-year prison sentences for making inflammatory speeches; and Thomas Martin Wheeler was secretary of the National Land Company.

We have already detailed the many different genres which comprise the ensemble of Chartist literature. In so far as it is possible to draw any conclusions from an examination novel of a dozen the of the more important periodicals,⁶ much a minority form, is very and particularly so during the first Chartist decade (1837-47). It is all the more instructive, them, to note the tendencies manifested in these early works. Serialisations such as William Tell, or Switzerland Delivered; Calefi, an Authentic Tale of a Ferrarese Carbonaro; The Incendiary, a Tale of the German Peasant Wars; or Albert, or the Spirit of Freedom, have a number of features in common. First they are set in foreign countries; second, they revolve around struggles for freedom; third, they are rooted in the past (even if their message points to the present); fourth, they are all translations. Just how rudimentary the Charists' own production of fiction was at that stage is confirmed by Wheeler's prefatory remark in his novel Sunshine and Shadow. Looking back at the literary record of the movement he notes:

The fiction department of our literature has hitherto been neglected by the scribes of our body, and the opponents of our principles have been allowed to wield the power of imagination over the youth of our party, without any effort on our part to occupy this wide and fruitful plain.⁷

Wheeler perhaps overstates his case, but if what he has in mind is literary prose that focuses on the worker and renounces fanciful flights into the realms of the aristocracy, he is right. Jones's 1847 romances, for instance, continue to exhibit blatant concessions to the popular literary taste of melodrama, even if he is clearly concerned to portray the corruption and wickedness of those who seduce his working-class heroines as symptomatic of social conditions generally. But—and this is decisive—it is still the nobility and the military élite who are held to blame for such vices. The other principal enemy of the Chartists, the industrial bourgeoisie, does not figure at all in these romances. There was precious little innovation, either, in that early Chartist fiction which derived its themes from the freedom struggles of other peoples and other historical epochs. When William Tell was published in The English Chartist Circular in 1842, there were already at least four other versions of the story in circulation.⁸ Works of this kind represented essentially an attempt to adapt the received form of the historical novel to more radical interpretations of the past.

Only two longer tales, both published anonymously and buried in obscurity for 140 years, stand out from the general run of early Chartist efforts: Political Pilgrim's Progress (1839) and The Pioneers (1842). Political Pilgrim's Progress, which has recently been attributed to Thomas Doubleday, first appeared in The Northern Liberator.⁹ As its title indicates, it borrows a great deal from Bunyan, an astute move on the author's part, given the popularity which the original enjoyed among the literate artisans and workers. The visionary dream, the motif of the journey, the allegorical form, the use of personified abstractions—all these features reappear. Philosophically, however, Political Pilgrim's Progress marks a radical turn toward secular and contemporary political concerns. The obstacles and opponents that stand in Radical's way, as he moves from the City of Plunder to the City of Reform, are the oppressive powers and institutions of contemporary England as well as the intellectual and political adversaries to Chartism. Each and every confrontation which the protagonist has to win through, whether by argument or by struggle, is designed to raise the political awareness of the readers and, where necessary, to arm them in readiness for real struggles.

Similarly, The Pioneers, or a Tale of the Radical Rising at Strathaven in 1820, to give its full title, attempts to update and put to effective use a traditional form. It may well have been intended to become a large-scale project, but the Scottish Chartist Circular, in which it was serialised, ceased publication after the fourth instalment, and so it remains a fragment. The Pioneers distinguishes itself from the derivative historical novels mentioned earlier in two important respects.

For the first time, the struggle for freedom is no longer transposed to another country or an earlier epoch, but is located in the still-continuing historical present. The character of the novel therefore ceases to be metaphorical; it reflects the contemporary situation without resorting to complicated mediating devices. 'If we succeed', says one of the insurgents, 'it will not be a rebellion, it will be a revolution, and instead of punishment, we will receive the gratitude and thanks of a free and happy nation.'¹⁰ As in Political Pilgrim's Progress, where Radical's companion, Moral Force, falls by the wayside, the reader can hardly fail to notice the warning that it may be necessary to prepare for armed struggle.

Secondly, the author is not afraid to deviate occasionally from Standard English when it comes to the dialogues, the use of Scottish dialect underscoring his solidarity with the people. In one scene where the fighters are requisitioning weapons, we find the following sentence: 'jist gae wa' and gie us thae guns, as we hae na' muckle time to palaver wi' ye'.'¹¹ Such unselfconscious use of the Scottish vernacular had of course been given considerable impetus by the breakthrough achieved earlier in Sir Walter Scott's novels, and it is noteworthy that there are no comparable passages in the prose of the English Chartists. In England even Elizabeth Gaskell, with regard to the use of working-class speech the most audacious of the social-problem novelists, felt obliged to defer to her readers' sensibilities by adding footnotes to, or translating into Standard English, the colloquial utterances of her working-class characters.¹²

It is true that The Pioneers (together with Political Pilgrim's Progress, though the character and thrust of the latter work is quite different) is something of an oasis in what is otherwise a fictional desert. Nonetheless, it does anticipate, and prepare the way, for developments later in the 1840s, when the Chartist novelists strove to consolidate its tentative advances. What were those developments and tendencies? First and foremost, continuing recourse to the historical novel as a generally appropriate genre; secondly, thematic concentration on events from the national past—or, more precisely, on the turbulent political history of the preceding fifty years; and thirdly, the taking up of local struggles and conflicts.

There are two particular novels which embody these tendencies at their most highly developed. They are generally regarded as the greatest achievements in the history of the Chartist novel—and, indeed, in contemporary socialist prose generally. Thomas Martin Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadow, a Tale of the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1849-50, and Ernest Jones's De Brassier, A Democratic Romance, The History of a Democratic Movement, compiled from the journal of a demagogue, the confessions of a democrat, and the minutes of a spy, appeared in 1851-2. The subtitles announce the choice of genre, and in fact the authors make no bones about it. In his foreword Jones declares, 'Fiction does no more than frame the historical picture', and Wheeler concludes his novel with the remark, 'Our object was to combine a History of Chartism, with the details of our story.'¹³

It is, then, all the more puzzling that the critics have made so little of the sense of history which both novels display. Martha Vicinus stresses the formal borrowings from the conventional melodramatic romances as one of their essential characteristics, whereas Jack Mitchell sees both works as examples of the political journalist gaining the upper hand over the novelist.¹⁴ The presence of such elements, which militate against a realist narrative style, is undeniable, but they can only partially explain the strengths and weaknesses of the two novels.

The most immediately noticeable innovation in both novels is that they take Chartism itself as their subject matter. De Brassier, it is true, is written as a parable about the dangers that threaten 'every democratic movement' (the term Chartism is not used), but Wheeler, in accordance with his stated objective, actually mentions the movement by name. At this point a short summary of the two novels may help to make it clear that in neither case is Chartism treated peripherally.

De Brassier follows the progress of an impoverished nobleman to the leadership of a popular movement. After denouncing all his rivals and thereby eliminating them, he exploits the movement for his own private purposes and finally allows it to collapse in ruins. Some readers and critics have read the novel as a condemnatory attack on the Chartist leader, Feargus O'Connor, but the character study of a demagogue is only one aspect of the whole, and not a central one at that.¹⁵ Jones is more concerned to represent the movement and its enemies in all their political, ideological and sociological complexity. He does this by means of extraordinarily complicated plots, constant changes of setting and a motley array of characters that need not detain us here. The novel is anyway most memorable for its individual vignettes: the description of an impressive torchlight procession embracing thousands of workers and artisans, for instance, or the caricature of a Cabinet meeting (which was probably not too wide of the mark). And beyond that we are left with an overall impression that the author, for all that he criticises the desperado elements in the movement and, more generally, the corruptibility of the popular masses, never falters in his confidence in the ability of those selfsame masses to learn.

By comparison with the expansive, frequently melodramatic and bombastic scenic representations of Jones's novel, Wheeler's Sunshine and Shadow is a remarkably concise, sober and at times even lifeless work. The plot revolves entirely around the proletarian protagonist (and, in the early stages at least, his bourgeois counterpart), and follows his life with all its vicissitudes—one of the several levels of meaning of the 'sunshine and shadow' metaphor. But after a certain point Arthur Morton's life story is overtaken by developments in Chartist political history, and from then on the fate of both are seen to be inextricably interwoven. After making a rousing speech at the Birmingham Bull Ring, which leads to a riot (1839), the hero is forced to disappear into exile. It is not until 1842, when the next great wave of agitation is sweeping across the country, that he reappears in England. Given this interlocking construction, it is clear why Arthur—and not Edward, the colourless mechanic and ineffectual opponent of De Brassier—should have become the first 'broad prototype of the proletarian hero'.¹⁶

Both works end with the failure of the movement. Jones puts his finger on the smouldering internal disputes, the subjective factor, as the main cause; Wheeler, however, goes further and refers to 'the power of adverse circumstances'¹⁷—in other words, objective difficulties. There is yet another point of difference: Jones's (unfinished) novel breaks off at an earlier stage, whereas Wheeler brings his story almost up to the time of writing. Which leads us back once more to that aspect of the novels which has already been mentioned, the diminution of the gap between the time that is being narrated and the narrative time itself. In this case the process is pushed to the point where history appears to have actually caught up with the authors. Or to put it another way: the fact that the novel can now encompass Chartism—and in this context we should also mention Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet (1850) written by the Christian socialist, Charles Kingsley—is the surest indication that the movement is in decline.¹⁸ For in order for it to be able to do so, certain conditions must obtain, particularly as far as the protagonists are concerned. The movement needs to be in all essentials 'reviewable', relatively complete and historically as close as possible. Only thus can it become the objective of aesthetic reflection—and it is important to stress 'aesthetic', because considerable differences can open up between the imaginative grasp of historical reality on the one hand and theoretical or political utterances about it on the other. While Jones—in the very periodical in which his novel was published—was still campaigning for the renewal of the Chartist movement, and while Wheeler was still championing the Land Plan at the time he was writing Sunshine and Shadow in O'Connorville, their novels convey the aesthetic recognition that the movement is finished, even if they do so without a trace of defeatism.¹⁹

What reasons prompted the Chartists to turn to the historical genre, what were their anticipations, what did they hope to achieve by their choice? The first thing to mention is that Chartism went hand in hand with a marked increase in historical consciousness. Ample evidence is provided by the movement's press, for there is hardly a journal that does not carry regular 'historical sketches'. But this concern with history, the interest in historical writings, and of course the predilection for the historical novel are not by any means peculiar to Chartism but common throughout the literate classes of the age. By the same token, there was nothing original in the fact that the Chartist novelists turned their attention to the nation's past and attempted to politicise the genre. The redoubtable Bulwer Lytton, highly esteemed by Wheeler as a practitioner of this particular form, had already trodden a similar path. He, too, viewed the terrain of history as a sounding board for the articulation of political propaganda, albeit in the interests of Disraeli's Tory democracy.

What sets the Chartists' understanding of history apart from most other contemporary conceptions is its operative principle. Characteristically, Jones's column in Notes to the People is entitled 'Lessons from History'. The writings of Bronterre O'Brien, the 'schoolmaster of Chartism', stress the role of the masses as the agents of history and introduce the concept of class as a historical category.²⁰ Historical consciousness thus comes to be regarded as a necessary precursor of class consciousness. In their novels Wheeler and Jones suggest as much when, faced with the problem of resolving the class conflict they have depicted, they adopt an uncompromising position. This is in stark contrast to the attitude of their middle-class contemporaries, the authors of the social-problem novels, who are more concerned to eliminate class conflict altogether, whether through a change of heart on the part of an individual or through pleas for mutual understanding.

The Chartist conception of history performs another function, too. It serves to keep in check the potentially overwhelming elements of melodrama and romance, as well as distancing the novel in terms of subject-matter from the elevated realms of the aristocracy.

Wheeler at least was fully aware of this: 'We might have made our tale more interesting, by drawing more largely from the regions of romance, but our task was to combine a History of Chartism, with the details of our story.'²¹ Similarly, Jones's novel represents a marked advance in terms of realism on his earlier romances, The Confessions of a King and The Romance of a People, although the latter work, a 'historical tale, of the nineteenth century' to some extent presaged the new tendency.

The Chartists were right to contend that 'the voice of Romance must die before the words of History',²² but the new direction they were taking imposed its own special burden on the novel. The novelist now ran the risk of descending to the level of a mere historiographer. And in fact there are long passages in Wheeler's work which are best described as narrative reporting rather than graphic representation. The author is constantly obliged to take himself in hand, as he does, for example, after a digression on the city of Birmingham: 'But we are not writing a political essay, and therefore must discontinue this theme.'²³ Moreover, his characters generally lack life because he insists on 'characterising' them directly, seldom allowing them to develop in the course of the action and almost never through dialogue.

Having escaped one dilemma, then, the socialist novel seemed to be moving towards yet another impasse. But even if one set of difficulties had replaced another, this is not to suggest that the novel was simply marking time. A number of advances had in fact been made without beat of drum. At the level of subject matter, for example, the goal of representing a worker in a positive light and making him the central figure in the story had been realised. When it is borne in mind that 'As recently as the 1830's it had often been doubted whether the middle classes were sufficiently interesting to have novels written about them',²⁴ then the fact that here was an even lower social class which had yet enforced its claim to be represented in literature is undoubtedly of major significance. Additionally, and of particular relevance to the aesthetics of literary production and reception, the leading Chartists recognised that the terrain of the novel could no longer be simply left in the hands of the upper classes; it was now the task of the working class 'to occupy this wide and fertile plain'.²⁵ And thirdly, the bourgeois entrepreneurs, in the shape of Walter North in Sunshine and Shadow and Dorville in De Brassier, were now clearly identified as the principal social adversaries of the working class, whereas in the romances the reader's outrage had always been directed against the nobility.

It seems to me more fruitful to view the emergence and development of the nineteenth-century socialist novel as a history of such small steps forward (with of course the occasional reverse), rather than to get involved in the discussion as to why the Chartist novel did not advance beyond the rudimentary stage. If the assumption were to be proven that the nineteenth-century socialist novel cannot stand comparison with the socialist poetry of the same period, then we should indeed be confronted with a problem of general aesthetic relevance—and one, moreover, which could not be dismissed simply by pointing to the lack of creative talent among the working-class and socialist novelists. But the history of the genre is still too incomplete to warrant any such claim, and in any case the arguments which have so far been advanced, although correct in some respects, leave many questions unanswered. The most common contentions are:²⁶

• whereas the poem (hymn or song), a short form that is easy and quick to compose, can be made politically operative at any time and in any situation, the novel is by comparison an unwieldy medium;
• poetry is rooted by tradition in popular culture, but the novel demands of author and reader alike a high level of education;
• the Chartist poets (and their successors) were able to call for inspiration on the revolutionary example of the English Romantics (Shelley, Byron), whereas there was no such point of reference for the novelists;
• the nineteenth-century socialist novelists too often regarded the novel as merely a vehicle for ideas.

Even the most recent and ambitious attempt to transcend such partial explanations and throw new light on the problem fails to lead us much further forward. Jack Mitchell, who regards everything that comes before Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as under-developed, argues that a proletariat that is still caught up in the process of developing and shaping itself will of necessity lack a coherent proletarian conception of man. Hence, he concludes, a highly developed socialist novel was a historical impossibility during the Chartist era. Referring to Wheeler and Jones, he writes:

the proletariat was not yet really aware of its new type of revolutionary human validity.... although, in Chartism, the pre-1850 proletariat had a working-class Idea to set against the bourgeois Idea, it was a partly Utopian Idea which misunderstood and underestimated the present and future role of the working class in history.²⁷

The trouble with this explanatory model is that it proceeds in almost hypostatising fashion from a proletarian conception of man that has been fixed once and for all, whereas of course that conception, like the structure and social position of the working class itself, is subject to historical change. Apart from that the argument fails to tell us how it was that a quite different literary form of the period, the working-class autobiography, did in fact contain clearly delineated features of a proletarian conception of man. But the main weakness of Mitchell's case is that it is based on an over-estimation of Tressell, who seems to emerge like a giant out of nowhere.

My concern is not to gloss over the shortcomings of the Chartist novel, nor to belittle Tressell's achievement and talent. But given the present state of research, I believe that general aesthetic discussions should cede priority to the task of reconstructing the tradition itself. Without that knowledge, all attempts to clarify theoretical questions are bound to remain speculative. This is just one of several reasons for my asserting that the study of the Chartist novel, with all the artistic shortcomings referred to above, can be a meaningful and rewarding undertaking.

The Chartist novel merits critical attention because it occupies an early stage in that long if sporadic and uneven tradition which has seen working-class and socialist writers attempting to appropriate productively a literary form which, given its close ties with the rise and history of the middle class, turned out to be a major stumbling block. It is thus important not to approach the Chartist novels with false hopes. Generally speaking, 'working-class literature does not come on the scene with a triumphant succession of great artists.'²⁸ Hence the proposal to proceed from the small advances and successes and to take account of the reverses.

To concern oneself with the Chartist novel is to take stock of demands made of literature that are seldom encountered in modern literary theory, namely that it should be both operative and agitational. To put it crudely, the Chartists did not conceive of their works as art for art's sake, nor did they write in order to make money. Their best works are informed by the aim of contributing to the consolidation of the movement and driving a wedge into the hegemony of aristocratic and bourgeois culture. This they achieve by validating in aesthetic form the collective experiences of the working masses.

The period in which the Chartists were grappling with the problems of the novel form, the 1840s, is of special interest because it was then that the oppositional elements of proletarian culture began to acquire a literary dimension on an unprecendented, and even in later times rarely equalled, scale. With this development the ensemble of literary areas, practices and interests, was first properly constituted, which is still with us today, albeit in modified form. By this I mean the essentially different, if overlapping and contested areas of 'high-brow art', literature for mass-consumption—and, now, working-class and socialist literature.

Finally, a hint on method. The Chartist novel need not be studied in isolation; not only its aesthetic shortcomings, but also its promise and potential can best be worked out by undertaking an analysis that contrasts it with a novel written from a middle-class perspective that has a similar thematic orientation. The reverse also holds good: the works of Disraeli, Gaskell, Kingsley, Dickens and others should no longer be represented as the only examples of the early Victorian social-problem novel, but ought to be confronted with their Chartist opposite numbers.²⁹

¹ J. F. C. Harrison and Dorothy Thompson, Bibliography of the Chartist Movement (Sussex, 1978), p.xi (my emphasis—HGK). I would like to acknowledge the help of Michael McColgan in preparing the English version of this chapter.

² Martha Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Literature (London, 1974), p. 94.

³ Of the works discussed below only Political Pilgrim's Progress was reprinted in book form (Newcastle, 1839). Ernest Jones had his Woman's Wrongs, first serialised in Notes to the People (1851-2), republished as Women's Wrongs. A Series of Tales (London, 1855), and an altered version of his The Romance of a People, from The Labourer (1847-8), saw the light again as The Maid of Warsaw, or the Tyrant Czar (London, 1854).

⁴ 'A People's Paper', Notes to the People, II (1852), p. 753.

⁵ 'Preface', The Labourer, I (1847), no page numbers. This probably comes from the pen of Ernest Jones, the editor. 'Our Last Circular', The Chartist Circular, II, no. 146, 9 July 1842 (editor: William Thomson).

⁶ I have consulted The Northern Star, The Chartist Circular, The English Chartist Circular, Reynolds Political Instructor, The National, The Northern Liberator, The Labourer, Notes to the People, The Democratic Review, MacDoualls Chartist Journal and Trades Advocate, The Red Republican, The Friend of the People, and The Northern Tribune. Details about these papers and journals in Harrison and Thompson, op. cit.

⁷ Dedication to Feargus O'Connor prefacing ch. I, The Northern Star, 31 March 1849.

⁸ Louis James, Fiction for the Working Man (Harmondsworth, 1974), p. 86.

⁹ See Horst Rößer, 'Literature und politische Agitation im Chartismus. Eine Studie zu Thomas Doubledays Political Pilgrim's Progress', Englisch Amerikanische Studien, III (1981), pp. 108-21. The work was serialised in The Northern Liberator from 19 January to 30 March 1839.

¹⁰The Pioneers was serialised in The Chartist Circular, II, from 21 May (no. 139) to 9 July 1842 (no. 146). The quotation is from 28 May 1842 (no. 140).

¹¹ibid 9 July 1842 (no. 146).

¹² See Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. A Tale of Manchester Life (London, 1848), esp. chs. I-X.

¹³ 'Preface', Notes to the People, I (1851), p. 20; ch. XXXVII, The Northern Star, 5 January 1850 (my emphasis—HGK).

¹⁴ Martha Vicinus, 'Chartist fiction and the development of a class-based literature', in H. Gustav Klaus, ed., The Socialist Novel in Britain (Brighton, 1982), pp. 9-10; Jack Mitchell, 'Aesthetic Problems of the Development of the Proletarian-Revolutionary Novel in Nineteenth-Century Britain', in David Craig ed., Marxists on Literature (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 257.

¹⁵ R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (London, 1969 [1854]) pp. 361-6; Vicinus, 'Chartist fiction', pp. 19, 25. But see John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist (London, 1952), pp. 251-5 who categorically denies any such claim and argues in my view convincingly that 'by no stretch of imagination can O'Connor be identified with the character of Simon de Brassier' (p. 253). Peculiarly enough, if there are any parallels to be drawn between De Brassier and a real-life Chartist leader, then Jones himself comes nearest. Descending from an aristocratic family, he was initially a thoroughgoing conservative and joined the Chartist movement only after a financial disaster in 1845-6. cf. Diary of Ernest Jones, 1839-47, Our History, Pamphlet 21 (1961).

¹⁶ Mitchell, op. cit. p. 256.

¹⁷ Ch. XXXVII, The Northern Star, 5 January 1850.

¹⁸ Kingsley started writing his novel at about the same time as Wheeler, early in 1849. Jones was then still in prison.

¹⁹ cf. the opening lines of Jones's poem 'We Are Silent':

We are dead, and we are buried!
Revolution's soul is tame!
They are merry o'er our ashes,
And our tyrants rule the same!

The following verses 'But the Resurrection's coming/As the Resurrection came', with their religious overtones, seem to affirm an unshakeable belief rather than actually refute the prevalent note of dejection. (Notes to the People, I, 1851, p. 92.)

²⁰ See, for instance, his The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery, serialised in Reynolds Political Instructor, I (1850), later reprinted in book form (London, 1885).

²¹ Ch. XXXVII, The Northern Star, 5 January 1850.

²² Ernest Jones, The Romance of a People, The Labourer, II (1847), p. 12. However, this work is still very much a blend of romance and older historical novel. Its theme is not English history, but scenes from the Polish freedom struggles.

²³ Ch. VIII, The Northern Star, 26 May 1849; see also ch. XXVII, 6 October 1849.

²⁴ Raymond Williams, 'Forms of English Fiction', in Francis Barker et al. eds., 1848: The Sociology of Literature (Essex, 1978), p. 279.

²⁵ See note 7.

²⁶ The following arguments are summed up and criticised by Mitchell, op. cit. pp. 245-6.

²⁷ibid. p. 265.

²⁸ Ashraf, Englische Arbeiterliteratur, p. 23 (my translation—HGK).

²⁹ Until some publisher undertakes to bring out these Chartist novels, there remains for study in class the problem of inaccessibility, though it is not really insurmountable. Most university libraries will have a copy of the 1968 reprint of Ernest Jones's Notes to the People. And it is always possible to order individual photostats from the British Museum Newspaper Library in Colindale, which has a file of The Northern Star (in the case of Wheeler's novel).