Rethinking the Language of Chartism

For decades, the study of Chartism has been one of the most vibrant fields of modern British history. Indeed, this nineteenth-century radical movement was a major empirical focus for proponents of the so-called linguistic turn that has exerted such a major influence on the discipline. Interest in the Chartists does not abate, with valuable recent studies all combining—to greater or lesser extent—close attention to Chartist verbal and symbolic forms of communication with novel thematic concerns. However, more remains to be said about the language of Chartism, the topic that provided the original impetus for so much subsequent work. Specifically, the generally accepted argument that languages of constitutionalism and democracy were inextricably intertwined can be questioned, a task made easier by digitization of key organs of the Chartist press. This article revisits this intertwining in the pages of the Northern Star from the movement’s beginnings in the late 1830s to its disintegration in the late 1840s. It commences with results of a quantitative analysis of Chartist discourse and reconsideration of the relationship between the constitutional and democratic idioms in the movement’s early phase. Four factors are then discussed, which help explain the increasing prevalence of the language of democracy through the 1840s: heightened social conflict during the general strike of 1842; Chartist engagement in formal politics; international developments; and the crisis of 1848. However, despite the dominant linguistic trend, connections between democracy and social class, forged in the early 1840s, were not immutable but contingent.