I would like to begin this lecture with a few autobiographical reflections. John Halstead would not have minded, I think, because one of his many admirable qualities was that he gave you the feeling that he was always genuinely interested in what you had to say, not only about ‘history’ in the abstract but also about one’s personal relationship to the discipline. Besides this, and despite having some misgivings about the fashionable tendency among some historians to bring their own subjectivities into their work, my most recent research on oral testimony has confirmed for me the view that, like memory, all historical writing is inextricably bound up with selfhood. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Chartism did not feature on the history syllabus at the grammar school I attended in Worcester during the early 1970s, but after leaving school and working for a few years, I encountered the subject at the college of further education where I took my A levels. 

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