A united people? Leaders and followers in a chartist locality, 1838-1848.

Hall, Robert G.

 "The Charter must and will be the law of the land, if a united people
 desire it." (Address of the Chartists of Ashton-under-Lyne, to their
 Brethren in Scotland, Northern Star, 27 July 1839)

In the first half of the nineteenth century, radicals and later Chartists struggled to make the image of "a united people" a reality and to create a distinctive style of democratic politics and leadership. "We want," argued the National, "not leaders, but representatives. We want, not parliament men to chalk out their own course for their own especial benefit, but men to do our work, under our direction, men who can honestly represent the people's wishes." (1) In trying to achieve this ideal, they encountered again and again the problem of how to define the relationship between leaders and followers in a democratic mass movement. Although historians have devoted a fair amount of time and energy to the study of the complex relationship between "the people" and national leaders, like Feargus O'Connor, they have not really explored the stresses and strains that shaped the relationship between leaders and followers out in the localities; more specifically, historians have not examined how the varying levels of literacy, intellectual and cultural sophistication, and radical commitment affected this crucial relationship. (2)

Over the last twenty years, studies of Chartist leadership on the local level have typically displayed one of two tendencies. One tendency has been to assume that Chartist leaders and activists out in the localities were solidly anchored, socially and politically, in the collectivity, "the people," that they claimed to represent; they were, to use Antonio Gramsci's concept, "organic intellectuals." (3) In depicting the organizers and activists of the movement in this way, historians have generally accepted the Chartists' emphasis on the oneness of leaders and followers and their portrayal of local leaders as "the elite" or "the cream of the working classes"; the most significant qualification has been to acknowledge the leadership role of shopkeepers and small tradesmen and professionals. (4) A second tendency has drawn on the work of the philosopher and historian Jacques Ranciere for inspiration. In his study of the French worker-poets and intellectuals of the 1830s, Ranciere has argued that the main motivation behind the politics of this marginalized group of workers was to escape the drudgery and degradation of their laboring lives; they ultimately turned to republican and utopian politics as a way of "seeking intellectual growth, an escape from the worker's world." (5) This way of conceptualizing the plebeian intellectual and activist also existed, in a somewhat different (and cruder) form, in the nineteenth century; contemporary critics often portrayed Chartist leaders as idle or disaffected workers who turned to politics as an easy alternative to earning a living by honest labor. (6)

One way of exploring the problem of democratic leadership in Chartist politics (and its consequences for the movement) is to create a collective biography of a single Chartist locality and to examine the dynamics of the relationship there between leaders and followers. There was, of course, no such thing as a typical locality, but the mill town of Ashton-under-Lyne was among the most militant centers of Chartist support in the cotton district, one of the industrial strongholds of the movement (see Table 1). Built on the banks of the Tame River, "a stream rising in the Yorkshire moors," Ashton was situated about seven miles east of Manchester; it was, Angus Reach thought, "as much a model cotton working town as any we have." (7) A classic example of the Chartist town where "slack religious and moral supervision" and the "unpoliced public street and meeting-place" were the rule, Ashton had in 1840 a police force of three constables and few watchmen; at this point, the population of the rapidly growing town came to almost 23,000 souls. (8) The 14,200 signatures that Ashton contributed to the 1842 petition, a total that represented about 62 percent of the town's 1841 population, demonstrates the extent to which Chartist ideas had touched the hearts and minds of "the people" in Ashton. (9)

This study of the activists and plebeian intellectuals in Ashton suggests a different way of conceptualizing the relationship between leaders and followers, a third way between the two extremes of the heroic "organic intellectual" and the alienated worker-intellectual. To borrow Samuel Bamuel Bamford's characterization of his relationship to "the people," they were at once "one of them, and still apart,--having thoughts, and ways, and views of [their] own." (10) The overwhelming majority of the leaders and activists in Ashton came from the manual working classes and chose to identify themselves with their "fellow operatives" and their rights and wrongs; in this sense, they were certainly one with "the people." (11) The "views" and "ways" of thinking of this highly politicized group of plebeian intellectuals and activists always threatened, however, to set them apart from the working men and women of their locality. Within the movement, the relationship between the "true Chartists" and "the multitudes" turned on the issues of radical commitment and intellectual and cultural difference; this complicated and at times uneasy relationship profoundly influenced the political fortunes and final fate of Chartism there and elsewhere. (12)

I.

Although the movement in Ashton and environs relied heavily on and defined itself through its identification with the working classes, Chartism was made up of individuals who came from diverse social backgrounds and brought to the movement different life experiences and differing levels of commitment to the Six Points. At the heart of the movement was a small but determined band of plebeian intellectuals and activists who organized and led the movement and linked it up to national leaders and organizations. Despite all the problems in reconstructing even this, the most well-known, group of Chartists, it is possible to identify for the first five years of the movement (1838-1842) about sixty-five activists and leaders who resided in the Ashton area. Their names and information about their Chartist careers have been culled from the columns of the Chartist and local newspaper press and the various files of the Home Office and Treasury Solicitor's papers as well as records of the Palatinate of Lancaster. To fill in details about family and marital status and missing information on occupation, I turned to the census enumerators' books for 1841 and 1851 and local directories. (13)

The sixty-five Chartists who made up this small but crucial group were speakers and lecturers, nominees to the General Council of the National Charter Association (NCA), propagandists and writers, travelling delegates, and neighborhood organizers. They sold Chartist newspapers and publications, drew up addresses and broadsides, chaired or spoke at mass meetings, and served as delegates, Chartist missionaries, and lecturers. Along with carrying out the mundane committee work and correspondence of the locality, these leaders and activists raised money for Chartist and labor causes and performed the necessary, but often boring and time consuming, work of organizing and publicizing meetings, lectures, tea parties, and dinners. "A Mr. Joshua Hobson," recalled Richard Carlile about one of his visits to Ashton, "did the business, engaged the suitable room, prepared the convenient accommodation, announced our intentions, distributed our circulars, assembled our friends, and walked to and fro between Stockport, Manchester, and Ashton, as if it were nothing." (14) Through these varied activities and the web of relationships, personal and political, that they had built up over years of radical and labor activism, William Aitken and his fellow militants were able to foster a sense of unity and mission among "the people" of their community and to forge connections between their locality and the greater Chartist world. Known to and trusted by both national leaders, like O'Connor, and the local rank and file, they were the crucial figures, the political and cultural go-betweens, in the bond of "democratic friendship" that linked the national movement to the hopes and dreams of ordinary men and women. (15)

Twenty-five of these leaders and activists briefly appeared on the Chartist scene and then disappeared, leaving behind only a name and a passing reference to their role in the movement. For forty of these individuals, however, their occupations, and sometimes something more about their lives and careers, have been established; out of this impressionistic collection of biographical details, certain distinctive features of the Ashton leadership have emerged. All forty were men, mainly English. (16) The only Scot was William Aitken, who was born in a barrack room near Dunbar; there were four Irishmen, a group that included John Deegan and Timothy Higgins, two of the most well-known and capable of the local leaders. (17) In its broad outlines, this ethnic profile of the leadership closely matched the findings of the Manchester Statistical Society in its survey of the native "country" of members of the Ashton working classes. (18) The religious opinions of leaders and followers also appeared to coincide; apart from a handful of ardent followers of the Rev. J.R. Stephens, there were within the ranks of the local leadership apparently quite a few of what Horace Mann called "unconscious Secularists." This lack of contact with organized religion was in line with the findings of the 1851 religious census on Ashton's working classes. On March 30th, only about 20 percent of Ashton's population attended a worship service; the majority who stayed away were working men and women. (19) The mean age of the group (35.4) obscured the extent to which this leadership cadre spanned the generations, from the teenage cotton piecer Samuel Sigley to John Hilton, a handloom weaver in his mid-fifties. For the most part, this was also a group of family men, husbands and fathers, typically with several children. (20)

The occupational profile of the forty Chartist leaders and activists varied in some significant ways from the statistical portrait of Ashton's industrial society as it appeared in the 1841 census (see Tables 1 and 2). One of the most striking (but not entirely surprising) differences was the absence from the ranks of the Ashton leadership of even a single member of the wealthy industrial and professional middle classes. Unlike the situation in neighboring mill towns, like Bolton, this small but powerful elite chose to avoid all contact with the Chartists. (21) In the late 1830s, the mass arming campaign in the Ashton and Stalybridge area and the violence of the rhetorical attacks on the "over-grown and all-devouring capitalists" had sent a collective shiver of fear through the ranks of "the owners of property" and had thoroughly alienated them from the movement. (22) Bound to the working classes by common economic interest and often by ties of kinship and the shared experience of factory work, the shopkeepers, master artisans, and small-time professionals of the lower middle classes represented, however, a proportionally high number (40 percent) of the leaders of Ashton Chartism. (23) In terms of wealth and status, they ranged from Abel Williamson, a prosperous shopkeeper who was supposedly worth three to four thousand pounds, to the "highly respectable" schoolmaster William Aitken and the tea dealer John Wilde, who was "dependent upon the working classes" for his livelihood. (24) But, overall, the majority of leaders came from the manual working classes; at the time of their involvement in the movement, twenty-four of the forty Chartist leaders (60 percent) were members of the manual working classes. (25)

One way (perhaps the only way) of putting together this kind of socioeconomic profile of the Chartist "masses" in Ashton is to turn to the Board of Trade list of Land Company subscribers. In the late 1840s, O'Connor and the directors of the company tried unsuccessfully to register the organization under the Joint Stock Companies Act; their efforts did lead to the collection of a national (though incomplete) list of subscribers. (26) Dorothy Thompson and others have pointed to some potential problems with using this source to reconstruct the social composition of the movement's mass following; in the end, though, the Board of Trade list represents, as Alan Little has argued, "the largest sample of ordinary Chartist sympathisers we are ever likely to have." (27) From this rich but very disorganized source, Jamie Bronstein has abstracted lists of subscribers for eleven mill towns in the cotton district; in the case of Ashton, the number of subscribers came to about 940 men and women. (28) The occupational profile of Land Company subscribers (see Table 3) underscored the similarities between the social backgrounds of leaders and followers. In this sense, there was no dramatic differences between the leadership cadre and the Chartist "masses" in Ashton; the critical fault line in their relationship was not social or class difference.

One thing that did distinguish this cadre of leaders and activists from ordinary Chartists was their occasional earnings from the "trade of agitation." Although very few were able to make, for any length of time, a full-time living as Chartist professionals, at least eighteen of the group of forty earned, from time to time, a few shillings (or a few pounds) through the sale of Chartist newspapers and products or through their services on behalf of the movement. The fact that Edward Hobson was able to sell 1330 copies of the Northern Star suggests the extent of the potential market for Chartist publications and goods; at about the same time, another big seller in Ashton and Stalybridge was a line of "pots and mugs and other articles of crockeryware" that were "embellished with the portrait of Mr. Stephens." (29) More mundane, but just as crucial to the "informal economy" of the movement was the Chartist lecture. In many ways, lecturing to "the people" was, however, a labor of love. Localities often compensated lecturers by offering them hospitality during the visit or by taking up a collection at the meeting; uncertain and erratic at best, payment was often insufficient to cover coach fare on a rainy night. (30) From time to time, nevertheless, members of the Ashton leadership delivered lectures on the local circuit; on occasion, they also took to the open road, like William Aitken "to revolutionise the empire, with 25s. in his pocket," as Chartist delegates and missionaries. (31)

Unfortunately, though necessary and indeed crucial to the Chartist attempt to create "a united people," these kinds of activities fit uneasily with the Chartist vision of democracy, one that emphasized volunteerism and participation and sought to break down the distinction between leaders and followers. (32) The practice of paying delegates and lecturers also struck Bamford and others as "a beggarly [way] of ... supporting a great Cause" and fed rank and file suspicions about the "jobbing politician" and the "paid political advocate." (33) In Bradford, there were, Peter Bussey proudly pointed out, "no paid missionaries" to agitate "the people"; "the organization of that place," he added, "was solely owing to the spirited exertions of a few individuals who felt that ardent love of liberty which carried them through everything." (34) This negative stereotype of the radical or labor activist as an unscrupulous agitator with a keen interest in "the people's pennies" was a fact of public life that Ashton's leaders knew firsthand and understood. "It was quite natural," Timothy Higgins conceded, "they [the people] should keep a watchful eye over those who were entrusted with the care of their interests." (35) In an indirect way, Aitken acknowledged this problem as well. "It seems to me," he observed about America in the 1840s, "as if all this strife amongst the leaders is for nothing more or less than place, power, and pelf." What was missing, he added, was "that noble disinterestedness which led the heroes of the revolution to oppose the armed legions of despotism." (36)

A second experience that set apart many of the local leadership from the Chartist "masses" was that of arrest and prison; between 1839 and 1843, fifteen were arrested at least once. (37) Imprisonment affected individuals differently; overall, however, the prison experience highlighted several issues for these leaders and activists. The isolation and hardship of prison life, together with the emotional and financial toll on prisoners' families, underscored the cost of activism and created tensions between the imprisoned "patriot" and "the people." The leaders of the movement, McDouall claimed in December 1839, "have generously sacrificed themselves to poverty, to neglect, and to a dungeon, and many, most likely, to the scaffold, that they might thereby save a people who had promised much, but never intended to fulfil anything." (38) Worn down by worry about his family and by his own "bodily sufferings," Higgins described with tears in his eyes the poverty of his wife and four children and bitterly criticized O'Connor for his failure to set "a bold and magnanimous example" at his trial and in prison. "A very trifling encouragement," concluded W.J. Williams, "would induce him to emigrate to the U.S."; apparently, the interviewer's impression was not far off the mark. (39) On his release from Chester Castle, Higgins was saddened to discover the apathy and divisions of "the people"; he soon dropped out of Chartist politics. (40)

Even though he left Kirkdale with his Chartist principles intact, William Aitken knew only too well the "ingratitude" of "the people" and the high cost of "boldly advocating" the democratic cause. Shortly before his trial, he wrote a letter to the Northern Star in which he criticized "the great bulk of the Radicals in this neighbourhood" for their neglect of the imprisoned McDouall and Higgins. (41) His own memories of the "solitude and gloom" of the prison cell also served to remind him that the reward of the "high-souled patriot" was too often "penury and insult, and all the woes that human flesh is heir to." (42) "My experience tells me," reflected Aitken in his autobiography, "as a rule, that all men who have hitherto taken the people's side of the question have had to sacrifice their own money and time. Their homes have been made desolate, themselves looked upon too often with scorn by the wealthy classes of society, their motives easily mistaken, and they have been ostracised from what is called good society. Imprisonment and exile have too often been the lot of the men who have hitherto advocated the political and social rights of the people." (43)

II.

Although Aitken and his fellow leaders out in the localities were well aware of these difficult questions about the "paid political advocate" and the "ingratitude" and apathy of "the people," they typically chose to emphasize instead an optimistic set of beliefs about democracy and the power of "the people" to bring about immediate social and political change. "The Government," Aitken defiantly asserted in 1839, "cannot put down the united voices and determination of the people of Great Britain." If "a free and enlightened people" stood united against "tyranny," then "the banner of democracy," he predicted, would soon wave in triumph. (44) The assumption of many contemporaries and later historians has been that Aitken and other Chartist leaders gave voice to and expressed the will of "the people" on these occasions. In its obituary notice, the Ashton News chose to stress this very point about the life and political career of William Aitken. "As one who sprung from the people," it noted, "he knew intimately their feelings and their wishes, and could express what the many felt with fullness and point." (45) To a considerable extent, this was true. Closely tied to the working classes by family, friendship, and the shared experience of factory work, Aitken and his fellow activists and leaders clearly identified themselves and the movement itself with the working men and women of Ashton. Their self-conscious identification with "the people" served to mask, however, the cultural and political differences that stretched between leaders and followers in their own locality and in the movement as a whole. Throughout this period, there was, as James Epstein has argued, a "constant tension" between the rationalism and far-reaching intellectual and political interests of the plebeian intellectual and radical activist and the "rougher" and less literate world of the "larger working-class public." (46)

At one end of the political and cultural spectrum was the autodidact and "true" Chartist William Aitken himself. "The rudiments of knowledge," recounted his biography in the Oddfellows' Magazine, "were by him labouriously acquired in the jenny room, amidst the whirl of machinery, and in his solitary chamber after the day's prolonged toil." (47) Driven by "an extreme desire to acquire knowledge," Aitken urged all to "gather knowledge each passing hour" and to expand their intellectual horizons through the study of literature, history, science, and morality. (48) "How essential," he argued, "it is to make good use of our spare moments; and, instead of spending them in light frivolities let us be gathering the rich conceptions of men of science and literature from their books and periodicals." (49) This kind of passionate pursuit of learning, often until late in the night, "when the world around me was lost in the torpidity of sleep," was a transforming experience, one that opened up a whole new way of thinking and of perceiving the world. (50) "Every principle that ennobles," Aitken concluded, "is brought from the human mind by education"; reading itself was "a habit as necessary to an educated man's comfort as warmth and clothing." (51)

Well-read in literature, history, and science, Aitken embodied this "spirit of inquiry" and the high intellectual standards of the autodidact tradition. (52) Over the course of the 1840s, he lectured on current events, scientific and political topics, ancient and modern governments, "The Progression of Man" from his savage state to the present, and "The Life, Times, and Doings of Socrates"; he also published A Journey Up the Mississippi as well as popular science articles on hydrostatics and Archimedes and poetry. (53) "He was extensively acquainted," noted the Ashton News in its obituary notice, "with the writings of our best poets, with many of the best passages of which he was accustomed to adorn his speeches"; among Aitken's favorites were William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, William Cowper, John Milton, Robert Burns, and Alexander Pope. (54) For Aitken, the pursuit of "useful knowledge," scientific and literary alike, opened one's eyes to truth and freed the individual from the chains "of sophistry, and the bewilderments of superstition"; he firmly believed in the power of reason and science to liberate the human mind and dismissed "superstitions" and "visions and signs" as "relics of a barbarous by-gone age":

 Science will remove the unhallowed influence which a venal and
 hypocritical priesthood, have for thousands of years held over the
 whole human family, it will shed a ray of light over all your musings,
 wanderings, and private conversations, and will eventually (to use the
 emphatic words of the great Lord Byron,) "Conduct the world at last to
 Freedom." The improvements which are now making in the scientific
 world, will remain, as so many land-marks in the flood of time, to
 show the wish of the philosopher, to mend the social condition of
 mankind, and will also show the perfidy of the government who allowed
 a nation's best and most useful prop--the people--to fall amidst so
 many great and beneficial improvements. (55)

Although Aitken scattered references and allusions to authors and books throughout his speeches and writings, he left behind no narrative account of his nights of study and reading; however, two of his fellow poets and radical autodidacts, Samuel Bamford and Benjamin Brierley, devoted considerable space in their autobiographies to their entry into the world of books and ideas. In both cases, learning to read was one of the great formative experiences of their lives. "When I first plunged, as it were," recalled Bamford, "into the blessed habit of reading, faculties which had hitherto given but small intimation of existence, suddenly sprung into vigorous action. My mind was ever desiring more of the silent but exciting conversation with books." (56) From the very beginning, their choice of reading material was a highly eclectic mixture of famous works from the canon of English literature, popular tales and romances, and Enlightenment and radical writings. The young Brierley started his life as a reader with the Bible; he then moved on to "Cleave's Gazette," the Pickwick Papers, and the Northern Star and read with equal enthusiasm penny copies of "Gulliver's Travels" and "Tom Thumb" as well as Burns, Byron, Shakespeare, and Shelley. (57) The list of titles in the small personal library of Samuel Collins of Hollinwood highlighted the far-ranging, restless curiosity of the plebeian intellectual; on the blank pages at the end of his copy of Paine's Age of Reason, he proudly jotted down a catalog of his library. Classical works, like the Iliad and the Aeneid, rested side by side with poetry in the Lancashire dialect, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, and other classics of English literature; there were also books on grammar, geography, and arithmetic as well as Hume's history of England, a biography of Oliver Cromwell, and Volney's Ruins of Empires. (58)

At the other end of the cultural and political spectrum were the Chartist "masses," ordinary men and women who seemed to inhabit an altogether different mental universe. A telling sign of this difference was the fact that in the early 1840s only around 40 to 50 percent of the grooms in Ashton and other mill towns of the cotton district were able to sign the marriage register; for this same period, the percentage of bridal marks ran at a considerably higher level. (59) "If writing, therefore, is to be considered a criterion of the education of a people," Coulthart gloomily concluded about the situation in Ashton, "verily the inhabitants of this town are in a pitiable condition." (60) The emphasis that Sunday Schools and dame schools placed on reading, at the expense of writing and other skills, meant that in the cotton district these figures on the ability to sign clearly underestimated, however, the size of the reading public. (61) A house-by-house survey of the state of education in a working-class neighborhood in Salford underscored some of the problems with the practice of relying on signature rates as the basic test of literacy. "About half of those who can read," the report concluded, "can write also, but not quite one-third can ciper." (62) In the mid-1830s, another survey by the Manchester Statistical Society suggested that among the working classes in Ashton, the number of persons "who can read only" (4334) almost equalled the number of persons "who can read and write" (4723). (63)

And yet, even if the majority of working men and women had access to the world of print, they often read at a very basic level and lacked what Samuel Smiles called the "means and opportunities" to develop or even to practice their reading skills. (64) "When I was a little boy," Aitken recalled about the 1820s, "such a thing as a child reading was almost unknown, and boys who could work the rule-of-three were considered wonders"; with little free time or spare money for even the cheapest of publications, the young Samuel Fielden kept in practice by reading "all the advertisements that I could see on the dead walls and in the shop windows" of Todmorden. (65) Things did not improve dramatically once one reached adulthood. There were only a limited number of places that offered working men the "means and opportunities" to read newspapers or books; in the 1840s, these "reading sites" in Ashton and environs included: "conservative" and "reform" newsrooms, the mechanics' institution, the Dukinfield Village Library, the Chartist Association's room, various circulating libraries, and friendly society lodges. (66) For all but "the better-paid mechanics or artisans," the relative expense of books and newspapers or a subscription to a circulating library or mechanics' institution (10s. p.a. for the latter in Ashton) placed serious limitations on the reading habits of most working men and women; in fact, many members of the working classes, Smiles and others claimed, eventually lost "the art of reading in their adult years." (67)

For many of those who did not completely fall out of the habit, reading was often a difficult and laborious task, more work than pleasure. "There are," observed James Heywood about a working-class neighborhood in Miles Platting, "very few of the heads of families, included within this enquiry, who have formed the habit of reading, or are capable of understanding or enjoying a book." (68) In the mid-1840s the prison chaplain Rev. John Clay described the limitations of the "mechanical" style of reading that he encountered among inmates at Preston:

 Very often have I found boys and young men able to read fluently the
 printed characters in the New Testament, though quite unable to
 comprehend the sense of what they read.... To one of these young men I
 expressed my surprise that, though he could read so well, he should be
 so ignorant of what he read. He replied, in a tone of indignation,--
 whether at what he considered injustice or imposition, I know not,--
 "Why! they never learned me the understanding of the words!" (69)

This same young man was able, however, to unlock the meaning of other texts and "easily comprehended, assisted by coarse but intelligible engravings, the exciting stories of 'The Newgate Calendar Improved,' and of Dick Turpin and his black mare!" (70)

Among the working classes of the 1840s, "studious" readers, with a taste for Hume and Smollett or the writings of Paine and Cobbett, were, Thomas Frost claimed, "as they still are, the minority among readers, and the majority wanted only to be amused." (71) The relatively well-to-do shopkeepers, artisans, clerks, and factory workers who used the library of the Ashton and Dukinfield Mechanics' Institution preferred the novels of Dickens and Marryat and other forms of light reading; "abstruse and learned works, requiring close application," the library committee noted, "lie upon the shelves quite neglected--the members have neither time nor taste to read them." (72) The favorite reading matter of "the poorer reading classes" typically did not run to "works of a high scientific character" or even to Oliver Twist, but rather to penny copies, often "adorned with woodcuts," of "The Brigand," the dubious "Memoirs of Lady Hamilton," "Jack the Giant Killer," or the dialect classic "Tummus and Meary." (73) For many of the readers of these tales, the line between fact and fiction blurred or sometimes disappeared altogether. As a young boy Samuel Bamford spent every farthing that came his way on "Saint George and the Dragon," "Account of the Lancashire Witches," and other romances and "implicitly believed them all." (74)

Unlike Aitken and other like-minded opponents of the supernatural and magic, many of Ashton's working people turned, not to science, but to cunning men and women, astrologers, and fortune tellers and all sorts of "weird legends and superstitions" to explain the mysterious workings of society and the physical universe. "Dreams," noted the Ashton Reporter, "are still read, charms and spells are occasionally resorted to, and signs and omens yet prognosticate lucky and unlucky events to follow." (75) Belief in "fairies and boggarts" lived on in the "vales and nooks" and isolated hamlets of the cotton district. "Many an old wood," Edwin Waugh claimed, "many a retired clough and running stream, many a lonely well and ancient building is still the reputed haunt of some old local sprite or boggart." (76) People continued to consult "cunning men and wise women" about lost property (and persons), money matters, and love affairs and to believe, in some cases, "in the power of certain persons to do ill through peculiar connection with the evil one." (77) There was also a tendency among many working men and women "to attribute a wonderful, a sort of super-human influence" and "sovereign authority" to the role of luck, good and bad, in human affairs. (78)

For all his rationalism and passion for science, Aitken understood the power of these beliefs and admitted that "giants and ghosts" had haunted his imagination as a child; however, he had little sympathy for those who continued to believe in "superstition" and divination. "In these days of literature and of science," he argued, "the man who believes it is deceived with his eyes open--is the dupes of knaves, and is to be pitied for his credulity." (79) For Aitken and other politically committed autodidacts, dispelling the mists of superstition and the irrational was central to their struggle for freedom and democratic reform; "searching into the depths and mysteries of science," Aitken argued, was an invaluable means of training the mind "to trace out cause and effect" and exposing political and religious error. (80) "Science, with its eagle eye," Aitken confidently asserted, "is irradiating the world. The errors and superstitions of other days are vanishing before the influence of cause and effect; and mankind generally can never again be led away by the bewilderments of superstition or of priestcraft." (81) Students of science, like all seekers of "useful knowledge," were thus participants in the struggle to overturn religious and political oppression and corruption and to bring about social and political change.

At the same time, though, the pursuit of "useful knowledge" also set apart the plebeian intellectual and radical activist and threatened to strengthen the divisions between the highly politicized and "studious" autodidact and ordinary men and women. (82) There was, as Robert Roberts noted, a persistent strain of anti-intellectualism in working-class life: "'Put that book down!' a mother would command her child ... 'and do something useful.'" Among many working men, moreover, "any interest in music, books or the arts" was seen as unmanly and suspect. (83) The depth and extent of this kind of intellectual and cultural difference came through clearly during a chance encounter between an "old man from Yorkshire" and Aitken during his American travels. The one thing that the fellow countrymen had in common was a hearty, mutual dislike. "A more illiterate and vulgar fellow," Aitken, the proud autodidact, noted, "it would be impossible to meet. His greatest enjoyment being eating, emptying a whiskey bottle, and talking the essence of vulgarity and brutality." Between bouts of drinking and fishing, he devoted his spare time to mocking and annoying the high-minded Aitken and his friends and dismissed "with a grunt of dissatisfaction" their earnest conversations about politics, science, and literature: "youn to mich sense for me, yo han." The old man, Aitken fumed, "had as much contempt for an intelligent man as an intelligent man had for him, and on that score he was level." (84)

To a dedicated Chartist, like Aitken, the politics of the Chartist "multitude" in Ashton and elsewhere in the cotton district also fell short of the ideal of "a free and enlightened people"; in fact, their political opinions probably bore an uncomfortable resemblance to the vague, pro-Chartist notions that Henry Mayhew discovered among London's costermongers in the late 1840s. As a body, these "street-folk" regarded with deep-seated mistrust the police and "an aristocracy of birth or wealth" and were, in terms of political sympathies, "nearly all" Chartists. And yet, although the costermongers regularly attended meetings and thought Feargus O'Connor "a trump," they looked to "one or two of the[ir] body, more intelligent than the others" for guidance on political matters and lacked a sophisticated grasp of the movement's ideas and goals. "A Chartist costermonger told me," Mayhew recalled, "that he knew numbers of costers who were keen Chartists without understanding anything about the six points." (85) The illiterate "T.H.," who wound up in prison in Preston for selling ale without a license, viewed politics from a similar perspective. In a prison interview, he dismissed Whigs and Tories alike as "gentlemen" and enemies of "the poor" but spoke favorably of the Chartists: "men as stands up for their rights, and for sending who they like for parliament-men." (86) Even worse was the apathy and indifference of many to politics. One mule spinner dismissed with contempt the passion of his work mates for radical reform. "It had never cost him," he muttered, "from first to last, a single thought--for his part he was content, for he thought it would do us no good in the world." (87)

For all their determination to counter sneers about the "ignorance and intemperance" of the Chartist "mob," leaders and activists themselves had concerns about the "ignorance" and apathy of "the people" and about the presence of many like "T.H." in the movement. (88) "He considered," declared James Taylor, "the education of the people a question of great and paramount importance, for if ever the people were instructed as he could wish them to be, they would not suffer oppression and insult as they had done." (89) Worried about this very issue, John Deegan brought forward at the 1839 convention a motion about appointing missionaries to instruct "the people"; he argued that the "ignorance" of thousands of "the multitude" in effect debarred them from full participation in the Chartist struggle:

 By acceding to his present resolution, the Convention would assist to
 dispel the vast masses of ignorance which floated over the minds of
 the multitude, with regard to the means in their hands of obtaining
 liberty and happiness. (Hear, hear.) Thousands upon thousands of them
 were not in the knowledge of what their rights consisted in; they knew
 nothing of the objects of the Chartist principles, and by consequence
 were debarred from taking any part in the struggle going on to
 vindicate the rights of labour against the monopoly and aggression of
 the oppressors of the people. (Hear, hear.) It was their duty to
 prepare the people by proper instruction for the great change which
 must soon take place in the institutions of the country. (90)

The drunken violence and destruction that marred the 1841 parliamentary election in Ashton underscored these concerns of Deegan and raised awkward questions about the political progress and Chartist commitment of "the people." Setting aside their earlier attachment to the Six Points, hundreds of working men took to the streets in early July in support of either Jonah Harrop, local coal owner and Conservative candidate, or the well-known Liberal and mill owner Charles Hindley. Over the course of two days, the town slipped into chaos, as partisan crowds brawled in the streets, threatened shopkeepers and publicans, and smashed windows. Although Aitken ultimately blamed the election riots on the failure of "our perfidious government" to provide the working classes with the means of expanding "their intellectual faculties," he was deeply disturbed about what the riots appeared to reveal about "the people." "Lowering themselves to the condition of brutes," the drunken railway navvies and factory workers who rioted under Tory or Whig banners committed, to his mind, the worst of all political sins--they helped to prop up the political ascendency of the corrupt "factions who have brought our nation to bankruptcy and disgrace, and are literally starving to death the industrious classes." (91)

III.

And yet, despite these doubts and misgivings, Aitken and his fellow activists and plebeian intellectuals do not closely resemble the alienated workers of Ranciere's account; they never really formed an estranged group of outsiders "at the frontier of encounters with the bourgeoisie." (92) The attitude of Aitken and the other leaders toward Ashton's middle classes was at times hostile and antagonistic and at best cool and distant for much of the late 1830s and 1840s. Once, in the early 1840s, there had been an attempt by the Anti-Corn Law League to enlist Chartist support; but, as one anti-corn law activist put it, their leaders "could make nothing of" the Chartists. (93) Nor did the mill town of Ashton offer leaders and activists many opportunities to earn a living either from the "trade of agitation" or from the republic of letters. Over the course of his public life, Aitken supplemented the income from his day school with odd jobs as an accountant, delegate and lecturer, and writer for local newspapers and friendly society publications; however, he was apparently unable to support his family on these occasional earnings from politics or journalism. (94)

For the most part, then, members of the Ashton leadership did not find Chartist politics a ready means of entry into the world of middle-class culture and politics; nor did they show any real inclination to pursue this possibility. In this way, they also differed from the alienated worker-intellectuals who figure so prominently in Ranciere's work. Most of the local leaders and activists came from and maintained close social and economic ties to "the people" and chose to identify themselves with "their fellow working men"; this was true even of those who had no direct connection to the world of manual labor. (95) Well-liked among people from all walks of life for his outgoing and "free and generous nature," Aitken avoided, however, the social and political circles of Ashton's middle classes and "Mr. Hindley's friends." (96) Among his friends and associates, were old work mates from his days as a spinner, neighbors and former students, fellow labor and radical activists, and friendly society members. The students at his flourishing day school came almost entirely from the "operative" classes; in the early 1840s, he lived in a working-class section of town, with an Irish pig dealer and a family of card room hands as his next-door neighbors. (97)

Many members of Ashton's "shopocracy" relied almost exclusively, like Aitken, on the working classes for their livelihoods and felt almost immediately the ill effects of any reverse in the cotton trade. In his study of the family economy of the working classes in Manchester and Dukinfield, William Neild noted the close connection between the small tradesman and his working-class customers:

 It is a very common, if not the general, practice for the working
 classes of this district to select a particular shopkeeper with whom
 they deal for all their provisions, and to whom they are generally in
 debt, and when a time of suffering comes, arising from reduced wages,
 want of employment, dear food, or the combination of all three, as is
 the case at present, they become more and more involved with the
 shopkeeper. This class of persons (the shopkeepers) are generally the
 first to feel reverses in manufacturing districts; and in all
 instances of considerable depression in trade numbers of them are
 ruined. (98)

There were also personal and family ties to the factories among many of the lower middle-class members of the Ashton leadership. Forced to leave the spinning room, because of either the blacklist or old age, a number of ex-mule spinners became publicans, street sellers, small tradesmen, or grocers and tea dealers; one well-known member of this group was James Duke, who ran the Bush Inn, an important meeting place for the Chartists in the late 1830s. In Ashton and environs, it was also a common practice for the sons and daughters of small masters and shopkeepers to work in the spinning mill or weaving shed. (99)

Although this cadre of radical activists and plebeian intellectuals typically lived and labored side by side with "the people," they were at the same time very different as well. The irony of their situation was that the very qualities that made them ideal leaders of a working-class movement, like Chartism, also set them apart from the majority of working men and women; their fluency as speakers and writers, together with a studious (or even artistic) turn of mind and boundless energy and enthusiasm, were at once marks of distinction and signs of difference (and even of strangeness and peculiarity). (100) To portray them simply as "organic intellectuals" is to overlook the ways in which these kinds of intellectual and cultural differences complicated the relationship between leaders and followers; they had, as Bamford put it, "thoughts, and ways, and views of [their] own" and were often of two minds about "the people." (101) An 1842 address of the South Lancashire delegate meeting voiced these ambivalent feelings in an unusually straightforward manner. On the one hand, this group of leaders and activists looked, with hope, to "a united people" to vanquish the enemies of liberty and to overturn "class-constituted tyranny"; on the other hand, they knew only too well "the disunion of the working classes" and acknowledged that many of "the people" were apathetic and "ignorant of true politics." (102) This perspective came through, in an indirect way, in "The Captive's Dream," a poem that Aitken wrote in prison. (103) Under the influence of "bright reason," "working-men" joined together "throughout the earth's extensive ball" to debate their rights and to take action against injustice. United and determined, they "slew the monster tyranny" and ushered in a new age; the poem concluded:

 Equality her banner wav'd,
 And from destruction Britain sav'd;
 Despotic laws were known no more,
 And freedom rang from shore to shore.
 And rich and poor in union join'd,
 And all their energies combin'd,
 That freedom's star might brightly beam,--
 I 'woke, alas! 'twas but a dream.

But, what was the dream? Was it the union of the rich and the poor, or was it a united and rational working class?

In their efforts to create "a united people," the Chartists also ran up against the daily struggle for existence and the fatalism and resignation that affected many members of the working classes. In his poem, "What is Man?," Isaac Richardson chose to highlight this aspect of working-class life, one that he knew only too well:

 What is man? He's but a bubble,
 Blown with pride; upon life's tide,
 Frail he rises, born to trouble,
 Fearing ev'ry breeze that blows;
 At length he bursts, and down he goes
 To the surface whence he rose.

For all but a fortunate few among the working classes, life was always difficult and uncertain; living on the edge of poverty, the laboring poor, Thomas Frost recalled, tended to focus on the immediate problems of the here and now--"how to get the next meal, to replace some worn-out garment, or to pay the rent." (104) The hard and precarious nature of their daily lives drained away the time and energy available for politics and discouraged any easy optimism about the ability of the Six Points (or any other plan of reform) to bring about a real improvement in their situation. Perhaps a pint of ale or a cup of tea, mused one lecturer, "would do them more good than any amount" of Chartist speeches. (105) In the end, though, the harsh realities of everyday life in mill towns, like Ashton and Stalybridge, fostered not so much an acceptance of the status quo as a recognition of the difficulty of changing things. On a wet evening in Rochdale in the early 1840s, George Holyoake experienced himself the "damp" and depressing weight of life in a "manufacturing town." That night he was to deliver a lecture on cooperation in a "small Dutch-looking meeting-house":

 It was one of those damp, drizzling days ... when a manufacturing
 town looks like a penal settlement. I sat watching the drizzling rain
 and hurried mists in the fields as the audience assembled--which was
 a small one. They came in one by one from the mills, looking as damp
 and disconsolate as their prospects. I see their dull hopeless-
 looking faces now. There were a few with a bustling sort of
 confidence, as if it would dissolve if they sat still--who moved from
 bench to bench to say something which did not seem very inspiring to
 those who heard it. (106)

Right before he began, as he looked out on his audience, Holyoake too was overcome, for a moment, by a sense of weariness and the hopelessness of it all.

Over the years, the experience of defeat, together with the melting away of the Chartist "masses," reenforced these longstanding concerns among the plebeian intellectuals and activists of the movement and undermined their faith in the oneness of leaders and followers and the potential of "a united people" to bring about immediate social and political change. "I cannot count," claimed one Chartist true believer, "the thousands, or say millions, who made noises at monster meetings. Indeed they never were counted. Why should they have been? They were no part of our party. This is what we were." (107) Discouraged by the collapse of the 1848 campaign, the veteran Chartist James Taylor shared this growing sense of disillusionment with the mass politics of the platform. Looking back over the history of "the democratic cause" during his lifetime, he singled out the "indiscriminate admission of members" as one of the most serious problems for the movement:

 They were in times of excitement too eager to admit members
 regardless of their character or condition; this was the cause why
 Ashton had brought disgrace on the cause; one of the men who was to
 give evidence against the Chartists in the Lancashire trials, was the
 very man who was the most anxious to force them into a physical
 outbreak. He had watched the democratic cause from the Blanketeering
 movement, the Peterloo massacre, and Reform agitation, until the
 present time, and was certain that this indiscriminate admission of
 members was a primary cause of their previous and present
 misfortunes. (108)

The recent uprising in Ashton, he argued, was a direct consequence of this policy of admitting "members regardless of their character or condition"; it was no coincidence that many of the participants in arming and drilling that summer were new and unproven converts to the cause. (109) The events of August 1848 also made a lasting impression on the youthful members of the Ashton Mutual Improvement Society. The commitment of this small group of autodidacts and plebeian intellectuals to radical politics and cooperation never wavered, but they came to see the 1848 campaign as one more example of "the folly and uselessness" of the physical-force strategy and Chartist reliance on numbers alone. These lessons of 1848, J.K. claimed, "lingered in the minds of the working classes of Ashton." (110)

Across the Pennines, these lessons also affected Chartist localities in "the industrial hives" of Yorkshire, one of the other "strongholds of Democracy"; there too, a growing skepticism about relying too heavily (and uncritically) on "members unlimited" shaped Chartist politics in the late 1840s and 1850s. (111) Toward the end of his prison sentence, George White reflected on the pain and suffering that his activism had caused his "cruelly neglected" family and frankly expressed his mixed feelings about the rank and file. "Sometimes," he admitted, "I have looked vaguely on the sombre walls and iron spikes, and calculated on the cold indifference of the masses--their willing slavery--their apathy and downright dishonesty. I next began to excuse them with that sublime and truly holy saying, imputed to Christ, 'They know not what they do.'" (112) Other leaders were not so willing to forgive and to forget. Too often, Christopher Shackleton charged, the thousands who attended Chartist meetings typically gave "no assistance beyond shouting at the said gatherings." The optimistic belief in the power of "the people," he added, underestimated "the anti-democratic habits, prejudices, and indifference of a vast number of the population"; any plan of Chartist organization required, above all, an effective system for "the better dissemination of our principles." (113) The disillusionment of other leaders, like Halifax's John Snowden, sometimes took on an even more bitter and cynical tone. "Many of those that were once active Chartists," he wrote Ernest Jones in 1859, "have emigrated. And others, though residing here as usual have become so thoroughly disgusted at the indifference and utter inattention of the multitude to their best interests that they too are resolved to make no more sacrifices in a public cause." He advised Jones, in the future, to "look to your own personal interest and work for your self regardless of the multitude." (114)

Just as the loss of faith in "the people" contributed to Chartism's decline, the steady thinning out of leaders and activists also weakened the movement during the 1840s and 1850s. Their decision to leave the movement represented a serious loss of human capital for their locality and snapped one by one the personal and political links in the cord of "democratic friendship" that joined the locality to national organizations and leaders. (115) Of course, many Chartist veterans struggled on long after 1848 to keep alive Chartist memories and ideals; however, the way that they chose to do so also intensified the decentralization trend in Chartist politics. Turning away from the mass platform and its vision of "a united people," plebeian intellectuals and activists in Ashton and other localities retreated into the quietist world of democratic dinners, lectures, discussion classes, book funds, and libraries. (116) "Devoted as ever to the cause of Chartism," they and other members of the Chartist faithful lamented the apathy and indifference "prevailing throughout the kingdom" and decided to confine "their exertions chiefly to their own domestic circles." (117) From the perspective of these leaders and activists, this shift in emphasis represented a necessary first step in freeing "the people" from "superstitious fears" and in educating the rising generation in sound democratic principles. (118) In pursuing these worthy (and impeccably radical) goals, they severed, however, the "bond of union" between their locality and the national movement and returned democratic politics to the state of things in 1837. With the fading away of Chartism, the democratic cause took the form, once again, of a scattered host of small radical communities, alone and isolated, "without unity of aim and method." (119)

Table 1 The Social Structure of Ashton-under-Lyne in 1841

 Total Number Percentage of
 of Adult Males Adult Males

Farmers and Gardeners 54 1%
Agricultural Laborers 80 1%
Cotton Spinners and Manufacturers 65 1%
Master Artisans 224 4%
Professionals 82 2%
Shopkeepers 325 6%
Publicans 89 2%
Clerks 94 2%
Cotton Workers 2,250 43%
Journeymen Artisans 1,086 21%
Coal Miners 121 2%
Laborers 461 9%
Others 322 6%
 5,253 100%

Source: PP, 1841 Census, Occupation Abstract, England and Wales
(Commons) 1844 [587] XXVII: 68-96.

Note: The occupational abstract did not distinguish between employers
and employees. I went through Pigot's 1841 directory to establish the
number of cotton spinners and manufacturers and master artisans in
Ashton and then subtracted the cotton masters and master artisans from
the occupational abstract's totals for cotton workers and the handicraft
trades. For all categories, percentages have been rounded off.

Table 2 Chartist Leadership in Ashton-under-Lyne, 1838-1842

 Total Number Percentage

Master Artisans 3 7.5%
Professionals 2 5%
Shopkeepers 5 12.5%
Publicans 1 2.5%
Newsagents and Printers 5 12.5%
Cotton Workers 17 42.5%
Journeymen Artisans 7 17.5%
 40 100%

Source: This occupational profile draws primarily on published lists in
the Northern Star of nominations to the NCA General Council; the prison
interviews in PRO, HO 20/10; Pigot's 1841 directory; the 1841 census
enumerators' books in PRO, HO 107/532.

Note: The totals for the lower middle class include five former factory
workers: William Aitken (spinner), John Deegan (cardroom hand), John
Williamson (spinner), James Duke (spinner), and Timothy Higgins
(spinner). Two national figures, J.R. Stephens and Peter Murray
McDouall, have been excluded.

Table 3 Chartist Land Company Subscribers in Ashton-under-Lyne,
1847-1848

 Total Number of Adult Males Percentage of Adult Males

Farmers and
 Gardeners 12 1%
Master Artisans 11 1%
Professionals
 and Clerks 10 1%
Shopkeepers 15 2%
Cotton Workers 549 62%
Journeymen
 Artisans 185 21%
Coal Miners 26 3%
Laborers 45 5%
Others 38 4%
891 100%

Source: PRO, Board of Trade, BT 41/474-76. I am indebted to Jamie
Bronstein for a copy of her data on Land Company subscribers in Ashton
and Stalybridge.

Note: The fifty-two women who appeared in the list of Land Company
subscribers have been excluded. To distinguish between employers and
employees, I looked up the names of subscribers who worked in the cotton
industry or in one of the handicraft trades in Pigot's 1841 and Slater's
1848 directories for Ashton. If the name of the individual appeared in
one of the directories, I assumed that he was an employer of labor. For
all categories, percentages have been rounded off.

ENDNOTES

For their helpful comments on earlier drafts, I owe a special thanks to Carolyn Malone, Owen Ashton, Jamie Bronstein, James Epstein, Philip Harling, Martin Hewitt, Paul Pickering, and Stephen Roberts. I presented a shorter version of this essay at Chartism Day 2003 in Great Dodford; I would like to thank the organizers, Diana and John Poole, and the participants for a memorable experience.

1. National (1839): 52.

2. For the problem of democratic leadership in the movement, see James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist Movement 1832-1842 (London, 1982), pp. 90-94; idem, "National Chartist Leadership: Some Perspectives" in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds., The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (London, 1995), pp. 33-54; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1984), pp. 95-101; Eileen Yeo, "Some Practices and Problems of Chartist Democracy" in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds., The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-1860 (London, 1982), pp. 345-80; Paul Pickering, "Chartism and the 'Trade of Agitation' in Early Victorian Britain," History 76 (June 1991): 221-37; John Belchem and James Epstein, "The Nineteenth-Century Gentleman Leader Revisited," Social History 22 (May 1997): 173-93; Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819-1869 (Oxford, 2003).

3. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (London, 1971), pp. 3, 5-23. James Epstein, "'Bred as a Mechanic': Plebeian Intellectuals and Popular Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century England" in Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid, eds., Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform (Ithaca, 1996), pp. 53-58. For examples of this approach, see Thompson, Chartists, pp. 91-233; Christopher B. Godfrey, "Chartist Lives: The Anatomy of a Working-Class Movement" (Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1978), pp. 9-190; Paul Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London, 1995), pp. 139-72. Jonathan Rose has tended to portray the radical autodidact in this way and to conflate the "intellectual life" of the working classes with the autodidact tradition. See his The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven, 2001), pp. 12-13, 57-58, 190-92, 253-54, 286, 366-67, 371-72, 430-31.

4. William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism: A New Organization of the People (London, 1840; reprint, New York, 1969), pp. 17-18; Democrat and Labour Advocate, 10 November 1855. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, pp. 152, 189-210. Thompson, Chartists, pp. 152-72; Kate Tiller, "Late Chartism: Halifax, 1847-1858" in Epstein and Thompson, eds., Chartist Experience, pp. 335-37.

5. Jacques Ranciere, "The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History," International Labor and Working Class History 24 (Fall 1983): 4-5, 10-11; idem, The Nights of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by John Drury (Philadelphia, 1989). For examples of the influence of Ranciere's work, see Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 48-49, 152-53; Epstein, "'Bred as a Mechanic,'" pp. 53-73; Miles Taylor, "The Knife and Fork Question," London Review of Books 23 (29 November 2001): 28-29.

6. For portrayals of John Deegan and Timothy Higgins in this way, see Manchester Times, 9 June 1838; Manchester Guardian, 3 July 1839.

7. J. Ginswick, ed., Labour and the Poor in England and Wales, 1849-1851: The Letters to the Morning Chronicle 8 vols. (London, 1983), 1: 86. Dorothy Thompson has described Ashton as "perhaps the most radical and Chartist of all the factory towns." See Chartists, p. 133.

8. Thompson, Chartists, p. 338; Manchester Guardian, 27 May 1840; Parliamentary Papers (hereafter PP), Population Tables, North Western Division (Commons) 1852-53 [1632] LXXXVI: 42-43.

9. Northern Star, 23 April 1842.

10. Samuel Bamford, Walks in South Lancashire (Blackley, 1844; reprint, Brighton, 1972), p. 17.

11. Northern Star, 11 April 1840.

12. For George Julian Harney on this issue, see Ibid., 6 January 1849.

13. Other valuable sources of information were prison interviews with the following Ashton Chartists: William Aitken, John Broadbent, James Duke, Timothy Higgins, John Hilton, George Johnson, John Wilde. See Public Record Office, Home Office (hereafter PRO, HO) 20/10.

14. Lion, 24 July 1829.

15. Northern Star, 11 June 1842. The wide range of associates and friends of Aitken came through in his autobiography; they included local people as well as national figures, like Feargus O'Connor, Peter Murray McDouall, and Richard Oastler. See Robert G. Hall and Stephen Roberts, eds., William Aitken: The Writings of a Nineteenth Century Working Man (Tameside, 1996) (hereafter William Aitken).

16. There were two women in the group of sixty-five: Mrs. Williamson and Miss Mary Ann Hughes. They chaired meetings of women Chartists. Northern Star, 2 February and 1 June 1839.

17. William Aitken, p. 14; Northern Star, 22 August 1840; in the 1841 census, Higgins gave Ireland as his birthplace. See PRO, HO 107/532. The two other Irishmen were James Milligan and Bernard Treanor.

18. By multiplying Manchester Statistical Society data on the native "country" of heads of working-class families times its estimate of average family size, I came up with a rough estimate of the ethnic composition of Ashton's working classes in the mid-1830s: English (87 percent), Irish (11.5 percent), Scottish (1 percent), Welsh and "foreigners" (0.5 percent). See Report of a Committee of the Manchester Statistical Society, on the Condition of the Working Classes, in an Extensive District in 1834, 1835, and 1836 (London, 1838), pp. xi, xiv.

19. Mann meant that most working men and women never or only rarely attended church services. PP, 1851 Census: Report and Tables on Religious Worship, England and Wales (Commons) 1852-53 [1690] LXXXIX: clviii. PRO, HO 129/474. "Conscious" secularists included: James Duke, Edward Hobson, Timothy Higgins, Thomas Storer, John Williamson. For the three Stephenites (John Broadbent, George Johnson, Abel Swann), see Michael S. Edwards, Purge This Realm: A Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens (London, 1994), pp. 154-57.

20. These estimates are based mainly on information in PRO, HO 20/10 and the 1841 census enumerators' books, PRO, HO 107/532. In sixteen out of twenty cases where reliable information on age and marital status has been discovered, the individuals were married men.

21. Peter Taylor, Popular Politics in Early Industrial Britain: Bolton, 1825-1850 (Keele, 1995), pp. 107-13.

22. Northern Star, 1 December 1838; PRO, HO 40/38, Bentley to Russell, 17 December 1838.

23. An investigation of the occupations of former mule spinners living in the Ashton area revealed that in the early 1840s this group included sixty-one shopkeepers, forty-two publicans and beer sellers, and eleven grocers and tea dealers. See Morning Chronicle, 9 May 1844.

24. Northern Star, 5 January 1839; PRO, HO 20/10, Interviews of William Aitken and John Wilde. Aitken made about three pounds a week from his school.

25. The most common occupations were powerloom weaver (eight), mule spinner (three), and clogger and shoemaker (three).

26. The Board of Trade list gives the names, addresses, and occupations of some 25,000 to 30,000 Land Company subscribers. Yeo, "Chartist Democracy" in Epstein and Thompson, eds., Chartist Experience, pp. 370-71; Alan Little, "Appendix: Liverpool Chartists; Subscribers to the National Land Company, 1847-8" in John Belchem, ed., Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History 1790-1940 (Liverpool, 1992), pp. 247-49.

27. Little, "Appendix: Liverpool Chartists," in Belchem, ed., Popular Politics, p. 249. Problems include gaps in the Board of Trade list and the presence of some subscribers who had no previous connection to Chartism. See Ibid., pp. 247-49; Thompson, Chartists, pp. 93-94.

28. Special thanks are due to Jamie Bronstein for a copy of her Board of Trade data on Ashton subscribers. See her "Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and America, 1830-1860" (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1996), Appendix 1, pp. 376-86; idem, Land Reform and Working-Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800-1862 (Stanford, 1999), pp. 185-87, 308.

29. Pickering, "'Trade of Agitation,'" pp. 221-37. Northern Star, 23 February 1839. For Stephens' collectibles, see PRO, HO 73/55, Mott to Lefevre, 22 March 1839.

30. Pickering, "'Trade of Agitation,'" pp. 228-29; W.H. Maehl, ed., Robert Gammage: Reminiscences of a Chartist (Manchester, 1983), pp. 8-9, 12-16; Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis, eds., Robert Lowery: Radical and Chartist (London, 1979), pp. 173, 107-08. Newton Heath and Hollinwood paid lecturers respectively nine pence and one shilling and three pence. See Northern Star, 3 December 1842.

31. Ashton Reporter, 2 October 1869. Between 1839 and 1842, four of the most active lecturers were William Aitken, Timothy Higgins, Thomas Storer, and James Taylor.

32. For Chartist democracy, see Yeo, "Chartist Democracy" in Epstein and Thompson, eds., Chartist Experience, pp. 345-80; Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, pp. 49-55.

33. Martin Hewitt and Robert Poole, eds., The Diaries of Samuel Bamford (New York, 2000), p. 23; Northern Star, 3 December 1842 and 1 June 1839.

34. Northern Star, 27 April 1839.

35. Ibid., 1 June 1839; 6 January 1838.

36. William Aitken, A Journey Up the Mississippi River from its Mouth to Nauvoo, the City of the Latter Day Saints (Ashton, [1845]), p. 30.

37. For 1839-40, these include John Deegan, John Williamson, and the seven Ashton Chartists who appear in HO 20/10. In 1842 Abel Duke, Albert Wolfenden, Richard Pilling, George Johnson, William Woodruffe, Thomas Storer, and Samuel Sigley were arrested. For the prison experience and the Manchester leadership, see Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, pp. 148-51.

38. McDouall made this charge from Chester Castle in a letter "To the Men of Ashton" in the Northern Star, 21 December 1839. Aitken later claimed that Ashton Chartists failed to pay McDouall the agreed-upon "pound a day while sitting" as their delegate at the 1839 convention. See William Aitken, pp. 29-30.

39. PRO, HO 20/10, Interview of Timothy Higgins; Northern Star, 17 April 1841; Stephen's Monthly Magazine (August 1840): 187-89.

40. Northern Star, 17 April 1841.

41. Ibid., 22 February 1840.

42. Tameside Local Studies Library (hereafter Tameside), L322, William Aitken, "To the Non-Electors and Electors of the Borough of Ashton-under-Lyne" (Ashton, 1841); Aitken, Journey, p. 29.

43. William Aitken, p. 30.

44. Northern Star, 18 May 1839; McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 31 July 1841.

45. Ashton News, 2 October 1869.

46. Epstein, "'Bred as a Mechanic,'" pp. 64-65.

47. Oddfellows' Magazine (July 1857): 129-30.

48. PRO, HO 20/10, Interview of William Aitken; Aitken, Journey, pp. 29, 25-26.

49. Aitken, Journey, p. 26.

50. Ibid., p. 29.

51. Loyal Ancient Shepherds' Quarterly Magazine (July 1847): 288.

52. Ashton News, 2 October 1869; Aitken, Journey, p. 29.

53. Northern Star, 23 January 1841; 23 April 1842; 17 October 1846; 8 January 1848; McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 10 April-28 August 1841.

54. Ashton News, 2 October 1869. Manchester Guardian, 1 August 1846; McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 10 April 1841; Aitken, Journey, pp. 8, 11, 21, 29.

55. McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 10 April 1841. Aitken, Journey, pp. 30, 38.

56. Samuel Bamford, Early Days (London, 1849), p. 91.

57. Benjamin Brierley, Home Memories and Recollections of a Life (Manchester, 1886), pp. 11-12, 21, 23, 32, 38.

58. Alain Kahan, Patricia Arnison, and Helen Bowyer, "Samuel Collins' Library," Working Class Movement Library Bulletin 2 (1992): 56-63.

59. W.B. Stephens, Education, Literacy and Society, 1830-70: The Geography of Diversity in Provincial England (Manchester, 1987), pp. 94-95.

60. John Ross Coulthart, A Report of the Sanatory Condition of the Town of Ashton-under-Lyne (Ashton, 1844), p. 42. Illiteracy was not a bar to participation in Chartist politics. For the poet John Stafford, see Robert G. Hall, "Creating a People's History: Political Identity and History in Chartism, 1832-1848" in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds., The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 244-45.

61. Ginswick, ed., Labour and the Poor, 1: 68; Frederic Hill, National Education; Its Present State and Prospects 2 vols. (London, 1836), 1: 17, 104; Martin Hewitt, "Confronting the Modern City: the Manchester Free Public Library, 1850-80," Urban History 27 (2000): 64-65.

62. "Report of a Committee of the Manchester Statistical Society, on the State of Education in the Township of Pendleton, 1838," Journal of the Statistical Society of London 2 (March 1839): 73.

63. Report on the Condition of the Working Classes, in an Extensive District in 1834, 1835, and 1836, xii.

64. PP, Report of the Select Committee on Public Libraries (Commons) 1849 [548] XVII: 125.

65. PP, Special Report from the Select Committee on the Sale of Liquors on Sunday Bill (Commons) 1867-68 [402] XIV: 383; "Autobiography of Samuel Fielden" in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Autobiographies of the Haymarket Martyrs (New York, 1969), p. 136.

66. Manchester Guardian, 16 July 1845 and 5 October 1844; Northern Star, 29 October 1842; Slater's Directory, 1848; Loyal Ancient Shepherds' Quarterly Magazine (April 1855): 103. See Gideon Reuveni, "Reading Sites as Sights for Reading. The Sale of Newspapers in Germany before 1933: Bookshops in Railway Stations, Kiosks and Street Vendors," Social History 27 (October 2002): 273-87.

67. PP (Commons) 1849 [548] XVII: 179, 129; Manchester Guardian, 5 October 1844; "On the State of Education in the Township of Pendleton, 1838," pp. 67-68.

68. James Heywood, "Report of an Enquiry, Conducted from House to House, into the State of 176 Families in Miles Platting, within the Borough of Manchester in 1837," Journal of the Statistical Society of London 1 (May 1838): 35. Hill, National Education, 1: 17, 104.

69. Walter Lowe Clay, ed., The Prison Chaplain: A Memoir of the Rev. John Clay (Cambridge, 1861; reprint, Montclair, NJ, 1969), p. 509.

70. Ibid., pp. 509-10.

71. Thomas Frost, Forty Years' Recollections: Literary and Political (London, 1880), p. 79.

72. Manchester Guardian, 5 October 1844; Tameside, MI 1/1/1, Ashton and Dukinfield Mechanics' Institution, Minute Books, 1825-44, Annual Report (1844): 2. The books in the greatest demand at the Dukinfield Village Library, a lending library that catered to a working-class audience, were travel narratives and "works of light reading." See Manchester Guardian, 5 October 1844.

73. Tameside, MI 1/1/1, Annual Report (1844): 2; Ginswick, ed., Labour and the Poor, 1: 61-64; Brierley, Home Memories, p. 32.

74. Bamford, Early Days, p. 90. See also Brierley, Home Memories, p. 32.

75. Ashton Reporter, 26 September 1857; Edwin Waugh, Sketches of Lancashire Life and Localities (London, 1855), pp. 213-14.

76. Waugh, Sketches of Lancashire Life, pp. 213-14. W.E.A. Axon, The Black Knight of Ashton (Manchester, [1870]), pp. 4-5.

77. Axon, Black Knight, pp. 4-5; Waugh, Sketches of Lancashire Life, pp. 213-14; Bamford, Walks in South Lancashire, 205-10.

78. Manchester Ministry to the Poor, Sixth Report (1840): 20.

79. Aitken, Journey, pp. 46-47.

80. McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 10 April 1841; Aitken, Journey, p. 30. See also David Vincent, "The Decline of the Oral Tradition in Popular Culture" in Robert D. Storch, ed., Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London, 1982), pp. 33-36.

81. Aitken, Journey, p. 38.

82. Vincent, "Oral Tradition" in Storch, ed., Popular Culture, p. 42.

83. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (Harmondsworth, 1986), pp. 50-51, 54-55. See also J.R. Clynes, Memoirs 2 vols. (London, 1937), 1: 45.

84. Aitken, Journey, pp. 15-16.

85. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor 4 vols. (London, 1861-62), 1: 22, 8, 27.

86. PP, Eighth Report of the Inspectors of Prisons for the Northern and Eastern District (Commons) 1843 [517] XXV and XXVI: 67-68.

87. Herald to the Trades' Advocate, no. 36 [28 May 1831].

88. Northern Star, 3 November 1838.

89. Ibid., 16 November 1839.

90. Ibid., 27 April 1839.

91. McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 31 July 1841. For the riots and street brawls during the 1841 election, see Robert G. Hall, "Work, Class, and Politics in Ashton-under-Lyne, 1830-1860" (Ph.D. dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1991), pp. 162-66.

92. Ranciere, "The Myth of the Artisan," pp. 10-11.

93. PRO, Treasury Solicitor's Papers (hereafter TS) 11/813/2677: 46-49.

94. Ashton Reporter and Ashton News, 2 October 1869; PP (Commons) 1867-68 [402] XIV: 382.

95. Northern Star, 4 December 1841.

96. Ashton News, 2 October 1869. Tameside, L322, William Aitken, "To the Non-Electors and Electors." Reference is to the political "friends" of Charles Hindley, Liberal MP for Ashton.

97. For his friends and associates, see William Aitken; Ashton News and Ashton Reporter, 2 October 1869; PRO, HO 107/532.

98. William Neild, "Comparative Statement of the Income and Expenditure of Certain Families of the Working Classes in Manchester and Dukinfield, in the years 1836 and 1841," Journal of the Statistical Society of London 4 (January 1842): 322.

99. Morning Chronicle, 9 May 1844; PRO, HO 20/10, Interview of James Duke. By 1841 John A. Stewart, radical and former handloom weaver, had taken a shop in Wellington Street. Two of his daughters were powerloom weavers; a teenage son was a cotton piecer. PRO, HO 107/532.

100. Maehl, ed., Robert Gammage, p. 49; Clynes, Memoirs, 1: 62. For the role of "superior speaking or argumentative powers" and education in the selection of leaders, see John Bedford Leno, The Aftermath (London, 1892), p. 53; PP, First Report of Commissioners on Employment of Children in Factories (Commons) 1833 [450] XX E: 18; Clynes, Memoirs, 1: 62.

101. Bamford, Walks in South Lancashire, p. 17.

102. Northern Star, 17 September 1842.

103. McDouall's Chartist and Republican Journal, 15 May 1841.

104. Isaac Richardson, Poems (Ashton, 1845): 87. A block printer, Richardson lived for most of his life in Hooley Hill, near Ashton. Frost, Forty Years' Recollections, p. 225.

105. Maehl, ed., Robert Gammage, p. 64.

106. George J. Holyoake, The History of Co-operation in England 2 vols. (London, 1879; reprint, New York, 1971), 2: 18.

107. English Republic (1851), vol. 1: 175.

108. Northern Star, 11 November 1848. For the 1848 uprising in the Ashton area, see Hall, "Work, Politics, and Class," pp. 214-27; John Belchem, "The Spy-System in 1848: Chartists and Informers--An Australian Connection," Labour History 39 (1980): 20-21, 24-26.

109. Most veteran members of the Ashton leadership were on the periphery of the plot to launch "a general strike & to get the Charter by rising." PRO, HO 48/40, no. 34, Deposition of John Latimer, 8 September 1848; HO 45/2410B, Hall and Taylor to Grey, 16 June 1848. For the relative youth of those arrested, see Manchester Guardian, 9 and 20 September 1848.

110. J.K., History of the Ashton-under-Lyne Mutual Improvement Society (Ashton, 1858), pp. 5, 9-11, 13.

111. Northern Star, 19 October 1850; E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966), pp. 17-22.

112. White to Norman, 2 October 1849, in Frank Gees Black and Renee Metivier, eds., The Harney Papers (Assen, 1969), p. 86.

113. Red Republican, 19 October 1850.

114. Manchester, Chetham's Library, Ernest Jones papers, A.O. 10 (4), Snowden to Jones, 16 October 1859.

115. Northern Star, 11 June 1842.

116. Ibid., 15 June and 19 January 1850; 18 January 1851.

117. For a report on the state of Chartism in north Lancashire, see Ibid., 5 April 1851.

118. People's Paper, 12 February 1853; Northern Star, 9 November 1850.

119. This was how a West Riding activist characterized the situation in his village before the rise of Chartism. See John Bates, A Sketch of his Life (Queensbury, 1895).

By Robert G. Hall

Ball State University

Department of History Muncie, IN 47306