Radical Language and Ideology in Early Nineteenth-Century England: The Challenge of the Platform

There is no uniform technique for the study of popular protest and ideology: different periods require different forms of analysis. Historians of the eighteenth-century crowd, for example, have to de-code the rituals, symbols, violence, and theatre of seemingly tumultuous collective behavior in order to infer the legitimizing aims and beliefs of the plebeians who were so rebellious in defense of custom. Students of Chartism, by contrast, have a less daunting task. They have merely to consult the movement's literature and propaganda, the very language of which, it is now argued, did not simply mediate but actually served to determine the nature and limitations of proletarian ideology in early nineteenth-century England. There is no need to de-code or decipher this public political language: it must be read as it was phrased, within the structural conventions and constraints of traditional oppositional discourse. Eschewing the orthodox social and economic interpretations of Chartism, Gareth Stedman Jones has insisted that the movement's altogether political language was neither symbolic nor anachronistic. It was political monopoly, the Chartists proclaimed and believed, which led to polarization and immiseration; it was political power, therefore, secured by the venerable Six Points, which would facilitate economic and social amelioration. Phrased in the traditional radical idiom of political exclusion, the Chartist challenge acquired unprecedented conjunctural relevance and force in the 1830s as parliament and the state were reformed at the expense of the unrepresented. Regional rental variations notwithstanding, the uniform £10 franchise of the 1832 Reform Act left the working class alone as the excluded and unrepresented people, separated from the “shopocrats” who acquired the vote and joined the ranks of the politically privileged.