Chartism: A New History

Chartism, the mass movement for democratic rights, dominated British domestic politics in the late 1830s and 1840s. It mobilized over three million supporters at its height. Few modern European social movements, certainly in Britain, have captured the attention of posterity to quite the extent it has done. Encompassing moments of great drama, it is one of the very rare points in British history where it is legitimate to speculate how close the country came to revolution. It is also pivotal to debates around continuity and change in Victorian Britain, gender, language and identity.