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Levellerism in Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century Britain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

F. K. Donnelly
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Extract

This article explores the connections between the seventeenth-century Leveller movement and the democratic radicalism of the period 1790 to roughly 1840. At first glance the two appear to have much in common. Both were concerned with the extension of the franchise, the idea of a written constitution, and the equality of citizens before the law. Various commentators on the subject, including some historians, have suggested that such a continuity does indeed exist. Unfortunately this conclusion has been based for the most part on vague connections indicating a lack of solid research on this topic. An exception in this regard is the 1962 essay of Olivier Lutaud which traced many of the linkages of Leveller ideas and phrases in European literature.

By contrast historians of seventeenth-century England have tended towards a too ready acceptance of a discontinuity between the Levellers and the democrats of the post-1788 era. They have been content to consign the Levellers to “relative oblivion” and “near-oblivion,” and to assert, quite erroneously, that Leveller pamphlets were not reprinted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time we must be aware that the historian of early nineteenth-century radical movements is not confronted with a powerful body of evidence indicating strong Leveller-radical connections. The influence of Levellerism on subsequent radical-democratic movements was subtle and somewhat oblique in nature.

Type
What Was Saint Anselm?
Information
Albion , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , Summer 1988 , pp. 261 - 269
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1988

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Footnotes

*

The research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

References

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