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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 January 2009
Chartism, the first genuinely working-class mass political movement, has attracted numerous general, regional, and local histories. The overwhelming proportion of these works concentrate on Chartism's strongholds in London, provincial urban centres, and the theatres of industrialism — including those in Scotland and Wales. Yet despite these regional characteristics, the common assumption is that Chartism was a national movement. This assumption is implicit in works including J.T. Ward's Chartism, while Dorothy Thompson, the author of the most recent notionally national overview, suggests that countryside Chartism has been underestimated.
1 Ward, J.T., Chartism, (1973)Google Scholar; Thompson, D., The Chartists, (1984), esp. pp. 173–9.Google Scholar
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3 Pugh, R.B., ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’Google Scholar, in Briggs, , Chartist Studies.Google Scholar
4 Kenmitz, T.M., ‘Chartism in Brighton’, (unpublished D.Phil, thesis, University of Sussex, 1969).Google Scholar
5 Hobsbawm, E.J. and Rudé, G., Captain Swing, (1973 edition), pp. 41–3.Google Scholar
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10 In the event his attendance was ‘utterly impossible’, owing to his inability to pay somebody to work on the Essex smallholding, provided by trade unionist campaigners for the Martyrs on their return. Loveless, to Lovett, , 13 04 1838Google Scholar, B[ritish] L[ibrary] Add.Mss. 34245A, f.240.
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22 Sussex Agricultural Express, 4 05 1839Google Scholar; Sussex Advertiser, 6 05 1839Google Scholar; Brighton Patriot, 7 05 1839.Google Scholar
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31 Seymour to the Home Office, 13 Mar: Letters to Richmond from Seymour, 7 June, 18 July and 2 Aug., and Chichester, 1 and 14 Aug. 1839, WSCRO. G.Mss. 1600, 1606; Sussex Advertiser, 29 07 1839Google Scholar; Richmond, to Russell, , 14 10 1839, PRO. HO. 40/24 (2), ff. 210–3.Google Scholar
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