Privileged Slayers: Chartism, Police Violence and the Democratic Deficit in Nineteenth-Century Britain

The 1830s and 1840s saw a collision between two new forces in British social and political life: Chartism and the ‘new police’. This collision produced a new politics of policing centred on police violence. Violence was a key feature of Chartist thinking about the police, from large-scale clashes between officers and protesters to everyday brutalities in routine law enforcement. Early Chartists followed a long-standing tradition by claiming the new police were unconstitutional, but in the later 1840s they developed new tactics and new arguments in response to police violence. These focused especially on the lack of legal redress. The killing of an active Chartist by a police officer in 1847 prompted a national campaign for justice which drew connections between unaccountable police violence and working people’s exclusion from the franchise. The problem of unaccountability was exacerbated in 1848, when fear of Chartism among judicial and police authorities made it even less likely that officers would be punished for the use of force. The history of early Victorian police violence sheds new light on Chartist political thought and the politicisation of policing. This represents an important starting point in the longer, largely unwritten history of the relationship between police violence and radical politics.