Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The Chartist Revolution * I would like to begin this lecture with a few autobiographical reflections.John Halstead would not have minded I think because one of his many admirable qualities was that he gave you the feeling that he was always genuinely interested in what you had to say, not only about 'History' in the abstract but also one's personal relationship to the discipline.Besides this, and despite having some misgivings about the fashionable tendency among some historians to bring their own subjectivities into their work, my most recent research on oral testimony has confirmed for me the view that, like memory, all historical writing is inextricably bound up with selfhood.1 Unsurprisingly perhaps, Chartism did not feature on the history syllabus at the grammar school I attended in Worcester during the early 1970s, but after leaving school and working for a few years, I encountered the subject at the college of further education where I took my 'A' levels.I was lucky: one of my lecturers introduced me to History Workshop at Ruskin College in Oxford (the notorious one where Edward Thompson launched his ill-tempered and ill-judged attack on the structuralists), and he invited Dorothy Thompson to talk to our year group about the Chartist movement.A great deal of all this went over my head at the time, naturally, but some of it must have made an impression.Dorothy argued the case for a social interpretation of Chartism I remember, against historians who were endeavouring to restrict its meaning to more narrow political ends.As an undergraduate at Sussex University a few years later taking the 'Special Subject' on Chartism established by Asa Briggs and J. F. C Harrison and taught by *This is a lightly revised and slightly extended version of my John Halstead Memorial Lecture delivered at the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 14 June 2025.Many thanks to the executive committee of the Society for the Study of Labour History for inviting me to give this annual lecture. 1 Peter Gurney, Matthew Grant, and Joel Morley, National Service Life Stories: masculinity, class and the memory of conscription in Britain
Source: Labour History Review
DOI: 10.3828/lhr.2026.1
Author: Peter Gurney
Institution: University of Essex
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7140125813
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