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Chartism
Why Did It Happen? Sharon Chau
“The approaching termination of the great war, the burdensome weight of taxation, the increasing distress of the people revived popular agitation. The vain struggle against machinery attested to the misery of the people and the incompetence and heartlessness of their rulers” . This quote by George Julian Harney, a critical Chartist leader, demonstrates the hardship from which Chartism was born. At its core, Chartism argued that “all men are born with equal rights” and consisted of a large group of working and middle-class individuals calling for parliamentary reform and universal suffrage. Demanding six terms, namely Universal Manhood Suffrage, abolishing property qualifications for MPs, holding yearly elections for the House of Commons, establishing equal electoral districts, a salary for MPs, and a secret ballot, Chartism was seen as one of the most influential working-class movements in the nineteenth century. However, it was also seen as a “knife-and-fork” movement correlating with rising economic woes as much as it was a political one. In this essay, the reasons leading to the rise of Chartism will be examined, including long-term economic and ideological factors and shortterm economic and political factors.
For the long-term, these include the process of industrialisation, the influence of the French Revolution, Britain’s intellectual climate and the nature of the Chartist movement; for the short-term, these include the economic depression and rise in food prices, as well as disappointment towards the Great Reform Act and Whig reforms and the growth of the popular press. These factors were all indispensable to the rise of Chartism, but ultimately short-term economic and political factors were the matches that set alight the powder keg of economic hardship and intellectual radicalism. The first long-term economic factor for Chartism’s rise was industrialisation, which had three crucial effects. Firstly, industrialisation caused increased job insecurity. Royle notes that industrialisation and urbanisation were transforming the lives of the people drastically , as the rise of automation meant that much of the working class had been replaced or were worried about losing their jobs to machines. Secondly, industrialisation led to increased economic inequality and an unequal distribution of benefits to the population. Such inequality left the working class feeling “isolated, neglected, and exposed” , prompting action to be taken for
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