Tickets for Chartism Day 2026 are now available. This year’s event takes place on Saturday 19 September at Friends Meeting House, Warwick, and is open to all. Among the topics covered in this year’s conference will be talks on: The eighteen fustian jackets: who carried the 1841 petition? Augustus and Arthur Beaumont and Chartist Apologias for American Slavery The Northern Star’s local correspondents in 1839, … Continue reading Chartism Day 2026 Registration
Chartism Day 2026 will take place at Friends Meeting House, Warwick on Saturday 19 September. Please add the date to your diary. Further details including information on how to register will be published here nearer the date. Call for papers The Chartism Day Conferences were launched at the University of Birmingham in September 1995 by the renowned Chartist historian Dorothy Thompson (1923–2011). Apart from the … Continue reading Chartism Day 2026: venue, date and call for papers
Academic and independent historians, Chartist enthusiasts and the Chartism curious gathered in Huddersfield for the annual Chartism Day event, the latest in a series of conferences that first ran in 1993. With centuries of history as a site of working-class radicalism from Luddism to Owenite socialism and beyond, Huddersfield proved to be the ideal venue for Chartism Day 2025. Taking place at Heritage Quay, a … Continue reading Chartism Day 2025 report: landscape and the crowd, emancipation and revolution
Liberal interpretations of the Chartist movement continue to dominate the views of historians and of general society, Professor Peter Gurney argued in delivering the Society’s fourth annual John Halstead Memorial Lecture at the John Rylands Library in Manchester in June. Setting out to challenge the dominance of liberal readings which commonly argued that those Chartist demands which had proved feasible had eventually found their way … Continue reading The Chartist Revolution: a challenge to liberalism and market capitalism
The books listed below are reviewed in Labour History Review (2024), 89, (3). Read more. Joseph Stanley reviews John Sanders, Workers of Their Own Emancipation: Working-Class Leadership and Organisation in the West Riding Textile District, 1829–1839, London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2024, pp. xii + 536, p/b, £24.99, ISBN 978 19161 58672 John Cunningham reviews Peter Gray, William Sharman Crawford and Ulster Radicalism, Dublin: UCD Press, 2023, pp. xix + 467, … Continue reading Book reviews in Labour History Review volume 90 (2025), Issue 1
In the final part of our series on meetings with figures from labour history, Quentin Outram tells the story of miners’ leader Thomas Hepburn’s encounter with mine owner Lord Londonderry, and the two men’s very different lives. Thomas Hepburn (1796-1864) and Charles William Vane, formerly Stewart, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, KG, GCB, GCH, PC (1778-1854) ‘Where is this great man of yours, your leader Hepburn?’ … Continue reading Class Encounters: Thomas Hepburn, pitmen’s union leader
In the sixth of our series on meetings with figures from labour history, Vic Clarke encounters the Chartist leader, MP and newspaper proprietor Feargus O’Connor. Any collective effort is bound to include a clash of personalities, and self-proclaimed ‘people’s friend’ Feargus O’Connor certainly came to clashes in the Chartist movement. A surprisingly understudied figure, O’Connor’s charismatic and bombastic editorials, or ‘letters’ to his readers in … Continue reading Class Encounters: Feargus O’Connor, Chartist leader
In the third of our series on meetings with figures from labour history, Mark Crail encounters George Julian Harney, editor of the Northern Star and Red Republican. On a bitterly cold Christmas Day 1840, George Julian Harney walked eighteen miles across North-East Scotland from Elgin to Keith in the hope of reviving the town’s Chartist Association. But when he got there, no lecture room could … Continue reading Class Encounters: George Julian Harney, Chartist journalist
If you could meet one person from labour history, who would it be? We asked labour historians to tell us who they would invite for a cup of tea, a pint at the pub or even Christmas Dinner. In the first of a new series, Joe Stanley encounters miners’ union activist John Auty I first encountered John Auty when he was named ‘Paymaster General’ of … Continue reading Class Encounters: John Auty, miners’ trade union activist
One hundred and eighty years after was published in Leeds for the final time, the Chartist Northern Star newspaper now has a blue plaque in the heart of the city marking its importance as a voice of working-class radicalism. Unveiled by Shirley Chase, whose late husband, the Chartist historian Professor Malcolm Chase, long sought to have the paper commemorated in the city where it was … Continue reading Northern Star shines in Leeds once more
