Chartism, Cultural Memory and Popular Politics in the early Victorian period.

Abstract

This thesis explores remembrance at the dawn of the Victorian age. It does so by using cultural memory, a framework concerned with acts of engaging with the past through rituals, texts, and memorials. These were all facets of Chartism’s commemoration culture that were used to remember radical icons like Thomas Paine. The reporting of this activity in the Chartist press allows this memory to be retrieved and analysed. The comparison of these transcripts reveals how the past was customised and reproduced through commemoration, an engagement with the past that allowed representations of an ‘illustrious dead’ to conflict and proliferate. Through this analysis we see a multiplicity to Chartist memory – one of the main outcomes of this project. Acknowledging this aspect allows the fluidity of memory to become part of the discussion around how Chartists used radical memory to support their campaigns for major political change. Reinterpreting the past was common for this period, as was hunger, popular politics, and innovations in journalism. These themes intersect and reveal how cultural memory formed part of Chartist identity against a social-political elite they were attempting to restructure. Whereas scholars have explored the means of commemorating the past, less attention has been placed on the outcomes of commemoration and how this memory was customised. This thesis approaches Chartist memory with the view to better understand what was said about the ‘illustrious dead’. It is possible to retrieve these sentiments by examining coverage of commemoration in Chartist newspapers like the Northern Star. This catalogue of print, or ‘paper pantheon’ as scholars have termed it, contains the many representations of Paine. By comparing these portrayals, the layers of Paine’s memory, so selectively reconstructed by Chartists, are themselves restored, the multiplicity revealed, and Chartism’s relationship with the past better understood.

Date of Award	8 May 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Edge Hill University
Supervisor	BOB NICHOLSON (Supervisor) & Alyson Brown (Director of Studies)