Who were the Chartists?

The occupational analysis
Judging from the evidence of signatures on the petitions, Chartism at its peak appears to have involved 2-3 million people out of a total adult population of 10 million in 1841. Other sources confirm that, despite the presence of some shopkeepers, traders and small employers, Chartism was an overwhelmingly working class movement. Whilst the evidence is still too patchy to produce a systematic occupational analysis of Chartist membership, it is possible to draw a number of broad conclusions:

• Apart from agricultural labourers (21.7% of the workforce in 1841), virtually all working class occupations were represented in Chartism, from 'modern' factory-based work to increasingly 'obsolescent' handworkers in the domestic textile industry.

• Textile workers appear to have formed the largest single occupational grouping within the Chartist movement, with handloom weavers predominating within this broad category.

• Shoemakers were also a particularly prominent group - their control of the pace of work and relative lack of noise in the workplace being cited by historians as the major factors promoting political discussion amongst this particular occupational group.

• Tailors, like shoemakers, were members of a craft which was under severe pressure from dilution (the challenge to traditional skills through the introduction and increased use of machinery) and resultant wage cuts. They were consequently also prominent in Chartist activity.

The involvement of groups like these has led some historians to conclude that Chartism was in fact a backward looking movement - its incidence and support being related to the increasingly desperate actions of a dying breed of handicraft workers. It is of course highly likely that many of these workers were motivated by economic factors to join Chartism - in particular the declining living standards experienced during the depressions of 1838-9, 1842 and 1847-8. For increasingly desperate occupational groups such as handloom weavers, Chartism may indeed have been out of necessity 'a knife and fork question'. However, the sheer diversity of occupations involved in Chartism suggests that it should not be seen simply as a reactive protest by deprived and increasingly displaced members of the proto-industrial workforce.

As a result, some historians now prefer to explain the nature and extent of Chartist support in terms of the specific structures and traditions of different local communities. It has been argued that in many places, the intensity of Chartist activity depended on the presence of groups and individuals that had been involved in radical activity since the 1790s - those who were able to command allegiance to a communal sense of identity and dignity. It is this factor, rather than occupation per se, which some historians believe to be more significant in explaining the distribution of Chartist support. It is therefore also in this sense that a study of the localities becomes important.

Who were the Chartists? The occupational analysis The geographical analysis Was Chartism a national movement? Activity