The Northern Star and Its Readers: Intense Listeners, Warm Discussions, and the Making of Democratic Politics, 1838–1848

In the late 1830s, the Northern Star emerged, for a time, as the most widely circulated of all provincial newspapers in Britain. In recent years, historians and literary scholars have begun to explore an important question: how did Chartist readers read the Northern Star ? Of all the different ways of reading the Star , one of the most well-documented and revealing was the group reading experience – an “underrepresented” area in the history of reading. Friends and neighbours or workmates clubbed together to buy a shared copy (at 4½d.); after selecting a reader, they listened as a group to an oral reading of that week’s issue and took part, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, in a far-ranging and often heated discussion of its contents. Readers and listeners engaged with a variety of different texts: the weekly letter from Feargus O’Connor, Chartist and parliamentary speeches and news, letters from Chartist prisoners, and financial accounts of the National Charter Association. Grounded in the practices and problems of working-class life, these oral and collective readings point to the interplay of print and oral cultures and to the crucial roles of sociability and discussion for Chartist listeners and readers.