ontrol long-rising social tensions, Chartism spoke to concerns that had been building for a generation. This paper examines why so many people at that time believed that the political and social changes promised by Chartism would bring about such a drastic improvement in their overall condition. In addition to examining this issue, this paper also considers whether Chartism was a unique phenomenon or an episode in the tradition of English political Radicalism.
The People's Charter contained six specific demands, including suffrage for all male citizens 21 years of age and over, elections by secret ballot, annual parliamentary elections, abolition of property qualifications for members of Parliament, payment of members of Parliament and equal electoral districts. Together these ôsix pointsö (although sometimes one or another of the points was omitted by different Chartists and the resulting sets of demands called the ôfive pointsö) had a unified purpose. Collectively, this half-dozen set of demands was designed to give equal access to all (male) citizens to the political processes of the country.5 (It should be noted that while the charter called only for male suffrage, many women were very active in the Chartist movement. This may have been because by breaking apart forever the connection between home and paid employment û and by consigning women almost entirely to domestic service jobs in the waged-labor force û the Industrial Revolution affected women even more dramatically than men.6 Certainly women had been especially hard hit by the New Poor Law.7)
Before one can understand Chartism û and certainly before one can place it either within or alongside the context of English political radicalism û one must look at the historical conditions that brought it about. As Thompson notes, the PeopleÆs Charter was only one of the events that marks the beginning of the Chartist movement. Of these one was perhaps even more importa...