A new posthumously published article by the late Malcolm Chase appears in the current issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture thanks to the efforts of his family and friends¹. It deals with the champion of working-class self improvement Samuel Smiles, and is made available on open access here.

The article is based on papers which were never published, but which Malcolm gave in person, including at the Society for the Study of Labour History’s conference, ‘The Labours of Asa: The Contributions of Asa Briggs to Labour History’, held at the University of Leeds in May 2017.

Drafts and notes were recovered from Malcolm’s papers by Professor Fabrice Bensimon and Professor Robert Poole, with help from Shirley Chase and Sarah Hill (Chase), and prepared by them for publication.

In the now published paper, Malcolm argues that Smiles’s involvement in working-class politics in Leeds in the Chartist period was fundamental to his later writings. Despite the wishful thinking of liberals and later Thatcherites, who liked to see him as all about individual advancement, Smiles always saw improvement as a collective project with a political element.

Malcolm concludes: ‘his concern was never with mere self-improvement.’ 

Malcolm Chase is remembered as the pre-eminent historian of Chartism of his day, and as the author of Chartism: A New History (Manchester University Press, 2007). His interests, however, ran far more widely than that, and he researched and wrote on early trade unionism and agricultural radicalism as far back as the seventeenth century – a period into which labour historians seldom venture.

He spent his career at the University of Leeds, where he became professor of social history in 2009, and contributed his time generously to a range of history organisations, including the SSLH and the Social History Society, in both of which he held office. He died tragically early from cancer of the brain at the age of 63 in 2020.

Professor Bensimon and Professor Poole are currently working on Malcolm Chase’s papers, with the backing of his family, with a view to making them available to scholars.

1. Malcolm Chase, Robert Poole, Fabrice Bensimon, ‘Samuel Smiles, Asa Briggs, and Working-Class Leeds’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2023. Open access article available here.

See also: Obituary: Malcolm Chase (1957-2020).