Historians' views on Chartism as an economically and socially motivated movement

It may be doubted whether there was ever a great political movement of the people without a social origin. The chief material object of mankind is to possess the means of social enjoyment. Secure them in the possession of these and small is the care they have for political abstractions. It is the existence of social wrongs, which principally teaches the masses of the value of political rights.

R. W Gammage (1854)

Only in years of economic crisis when 'the knife and fork question' dominated politics had they any real opportunity of winning working-class support to intimidate if not to convince the government. When economic conditions improved after 1842 they inevitably lost ground. ...It was, above all else, the continued existence of hunger, which kept Chartism alive.

A. Briggs (1959)

For the Chartists...could not call on a united working class; their support came from disparate groups with different objectives; the handloom weavers in a declining trade had little in common with factory workers or skilled artisans, and the chances of these groups acting in unison were slim. Furthermore, it was claimed that Chartism could be only understood in a local, not a national context; in different towns and regions people calling themselves Chartists had quite different objectives, and quite different means of advancing their cause. Nothing but the name Chartist held together the Christian Chartists of Scotland and the advanced thinkers of the East London Democratic Federation.

H. Cunningham (1990)

Chartism should be seen as the political dimension of the way of life of the producers in early industrial Britain. The vote was the badge of citizenship but also the lever by which the property of the labourer, his labour, could be given the same protection in law, and receive the same respect in the community, as the property of the landowner or the entrepreneur. Chartism came about because people in differing manufacturing districts found themselves agreed on the need for a movement to protect their existing institutions and achievements, to resist the attacks being mounted on them by the newly enfranchised employing class, and to press forward for new freedoms. ...Its significance lay in its ability to hold together over a period of years a variety of impulses within a single programme, and to cover the whole of the British Isles in its appeal and organisation.

D. Thompson (1984)

Chartism can certainly no longer be regarded as basically a massive hunger protest, a mere Pavlovian response to the exigencies of the trade cycle and bewildering economic and social change. At a general level, there exists no simple or necessary direct correlation between economic deprivation and political extremism. The thousands who read the Northern Star and attended Chartist meetings were themselves evidence that the movement cannot be reduced to a 'knife and fork' question, but amounted rather to an enormous wave of popular protest, constantly threatening insurrection.

E. Wright (1988)