1848 Known in Europe as the ‘decade of revolution’, the British label is ‘the hungry forties’. The nearest the country came to national insurrection was the great demonstration, for the third presentation of the ‘Chartist Petition’, on 10 April 1848. The six ‘points’ of the Charter were:
Universal manhood suffrage
Secret ballot
Abolition of property qualifications of MPs
Payment of MPs
Equal electoral districts and redistribution of seats
(All except the first were introduced as reforms over the next hundred years.)
The Chartists organised a ‘monster rally’ for 10 April on Kennington Common – across the river from Westminster. It was claimed that the petition contained 5,706,000 signatures. When examined by the Clerks of the House, only two million were counted – some of them, such as that of ‘Victoria Regina’, clearly fraudulent.
Ever since their formation, nine years earlier, the Chartists had been split between ‘moral forcers’ and ‘physical forcers’. The 1848 demonstration was dedicated to moral force.
10 April proved to be a fine sunny day. Some 50,000 were in attendance (the Chartists claimed 500,000, the government 15,000). Many were unemployed, many ‘hungry’, all desperate for reform.
There was fiery oratory from the ‘Lion of Freedom’, Feargus O’Connor, the radical MP, demagogue, and proprietor of the Northern Star newspaper. Addressing the massed crowd as ‘My Children’, O’Connor declared:
I have now for a quarter of a century been mixed up with the democratic movement – in Ireland since 1822, and in England from the year 1833. I have always, in and out of Parliament, contended for your rights, and I have received more than 100 letters, telling me not to come here today, or my life would be sacrificed. My answer was, that I would rather be stabbed in the heart than abstain from being in my place. And my children, for you are my children, and I am only your father and bailiff; but I am your fond father and your unpaid bailiff.
My breath is nearly gone, and I will only say, when I desert you may desert me. You have by your conduct today more than repaid me for all I have done for you, and I will go on conquering until you have the land and the People’s Charter becomes the law of the land.
The petition was duly taken to Parliament in three hansom cabs (stickered with slogans such as ‘the Voice of the People is the voice of God’). The authorities had banned any procession – which they expected would be the prelude to a riot (as had happened in industrial areas of the kingdom). Troops and police were astutely placed on the bridges across the Thames. Over 100,000 special constables had been recruited.
Truncheons and muskets were not needed. The event went off peacefully – and pointlessly. The petition was contemptuously refused, and Chartism, as a political force, petered out. A couple of years later, O’Connor died of terminal syphilis – in his madness he made a fool of himself in Parliament. Nonetheless, 40,000 mourners attended his burial.
Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’s Communist Manifesto had appeared earlier in 1848; the failure of the petition confirmed their scorn for ‘moral force’. The Kennington Common Chartist event is commemorated, centrally, in two great Victorian novels: Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) and Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850). Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ trilogy (particularly Sybil, 1845) reflects his keen interest – and some sympathy – for the Chartist programme, parts of which he incorporated into his 1867 Reform Act.