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BOOK REVIEW
| Robert G. Hall, Voices of the People: Democracy and Chartist Political Identity 1830–1870, Merlin Press, Monmouth, Wales, 2007. pp. ix + 218. £15.95 paper.
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| The historiography of Chartism abounds in local studies to such an extent that one may doubt if much more will be learned about the movement by adding another example to the list. Thus, although Robert G. Hall focuses on Ashton-under-Lyne, he wisely relates his research to the wider concerns indicated by the title of his book. Historians, he writes, have usually studied Chartism in the large cities, but it was 'strongest in the small and medium-sized towns of the manufacturing and mining districts' (p. 1). As part of the conurbation based on Manchester, Ashton was one of these towns; indeed it was the most 'Chartist of all the factory towns' (p. 2). It offers an ideal basis for a 'micro-history' of the relationship between local and national aspects of the movement (p. 4). |
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Hall constructs his inquiry around three 'perspectives' from which the history of Chartism in Ashton can be viewed: the town's economic structure; the democratic mass movement that arose there; and the viewpoint of William Aitken, Ashton's best known 'plebeian intellectual' (p. 8). The opening chapter follows the fortunes of the local cotton industry, and in subsequent chapters Hall examines the emergence of Ashton Chartism as the expression of a political identity which set democratically-minded workers against other Radicals, Liberals and Conservatives. By expanding the chronology to 1870 he investigates the decline of the Chartist movement and follows the activities of its proponents into mid-century Liberal and Conservative politics, a subject that has interested recent historians. The most successful part of the book is its meticulously researched delineation of the town's economic history. Hall shows how an industry that depended on small-scale units of production and domestic labour was transformed by the protracted introduction of new technology, especially the self-acting spinning mule, which deskilled many workers and altered the gendering of labour. Subsequent chapters are less satisfactory, leaving this reviewer disappointed with the structure of the book as well as its omissions. |
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This is a study of the 'politics of place' (p. 2), but Hall does little in a systematic way to construct a social geography of Ashton; there is not even a detailed map, surely de rigueur in a 'micro-history'. There are few allusions to urban planning and living conditions, although Frederick Engels wrote of a town that was 'more attractive' than its neighbours, and Hall himself refers to a remarkable growth 'from around 7 to about 50 per cent of the electorate' in the number of working men who satisfied the franchise requirements between 1832 and the early 1860s (p. 127). Apparently this was no factory hell. |
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Although he refers to the importance of gender, Hall says remarkably little about the female Chartists in the town. They were sufficiently militant to do battle with the police, but in other respects they seem to have been less noteworthy than contemporary middle-class women who were active in the anti-slavery movement and the Anti-Corn Law League. Hall consigns the names of their leaders to a footnote. As for the male Chartists, his compilation of information relating to the 65 local organisers of the movement stops short of a fully-fledged prosopography such as those offered by other historians who have studied popular movements during this era. The conclusion that 'the majority ... came from the manual working classes' is unsurprising, and Hall's summary of their interests relates to their 'Chartist careers' (pp. 87, 89). This is a pity, because we know from other historians that Chartism was not the only creed to appeal for working-class support in Ashton: there was a branch of the Anti-Corn Law League; from its base in nearby Preston the teetotal movement was vigorously proselytising for adherents; and the town was renowned for the millennial enthusiasm of those who had striven to build a New Jerusalem there. The fervour spilled over into Mormonism, and, although Hall does not mention this, William Aitken was sufficiently perturbed to visit Nauvoo, the Mormon centre, and write a book intended to check the flow of converts, many of them signatories of the Chartist National Petitions one may surmise, who were emigrating there. Even as a history of Chartism in a narrowly defined sense Voices of the People omits or devotes scant attention to important questions. Did the variants, factions and feuds that troubled the Chartists elsewhere have little impact on Ashton: Christian Chartism and Teetotal Chartism, for example? How did the town's Chartists react to the Complete Suffrage movement? Above all, it is to be regretted that Hall does not sustain the claim that Ashton was the most 'Chartist of all the factory towns' by comparing this 'micro-history' with those of other localities. |
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| La Trobe University |
ALEX TYRRELL | |
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