• 1838 People’s Charter published by the moderate Chartist leader William Lovett
• Britain’s economy takes a downturn and many skilled craft workers (e.g. weavers) start to feel threatened by competition from steam powered machinery
• 1839 First National Convention, meeting of Chartists from all over the country
• First petition to Parliament to accept the Charter rejected
• Newport Rising – John Frost leads an armed force of Chartists against Newport in South Wales. Clashes with troops followed. The Chartists were defeated, with 24 killed and 125 arrested
• 1842 Second Chartist petition rejected by Parliament
• 1843 Feargus O’Connor’s Land Plan launched, to give working people the chance to own and manage a smallholding and improve their quality of life
• Mid-1840s Britain’s economy begins to pick up, partly because of boom in building railways. Also, many new laws passed relating to working conditions in factories and mines. Chartists begin to feel that government is finally listening to the wishes of the people
• 1847 O’Connorville opens, first Chartist community under the Land Plan
• 1848 Third petition and meeting on Kennington Common. Massive security presence from the government proves unnecessary
• Chartist Convention agrees a political programme for Chartism called ‘The Charter and Something More’
• George Harney and Ernest Jones become leaders of Chartist movement
• 1858 Last Chartist convention
• Rest of 18^th century: many Chartists become leading figures in Trade Union movement, Co-operative movement and Labour Party in 1880s and 1890s

The origins of the Chartists movement are complex. One of the problems we have in understanding the Chartists is that today we live in a world of monolithic political parties. There is a leader, a few senior members of the party and some sort of guiding committee. There are party policies, party rallies, head offices and party workers who keep the party faithful in touch with the leadership and vice versa. This explains why many students find Chartism hard to understand. They try to understand Chartism in these terms, but it won’t fit! How could it, when the terms we are talking about did not exist for many decades after the Chartist movement?

The fact is that there were many different Chartists. Students quite reasonably tend to assume that what held the movement together was the Charter. There is no doubt that there were many ‘political’ Chartists, who felt that the priority of the movement was to achieve the Charter. Once working men could vote, and could stand in Parliament, then society would treat working men with fairness and justice. However, these terms, fairness and justice, are the real key to the Chartists. For many Chartists the Charter was simply one of several tools they employed. Their aim was not the Charter, it was fairness and justice.

A very large number of them believed that the Charter was the best way to achieve fairness and justice. However, that did not mean that there were no other ways to achieve fairness and justice. Many working people joined the Chartists because they were opposed to the new police forces which were being set up in different parts of the country (the most famous was Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police Force). They saw the police forces as opponents of fairness and justice. Others supported Chartism because their jobs, their very way of life, was being destroyed by machine powered factories. Today, we may shrug our shoulders and argue sadly that such is the nature of capitalism. However, to a working man, perhaps the fourth generation of his family to be a weaver in a particular area, what kind of justice was there in a system which destroyed one man’s livelihood so that another could make more profit than he needed to live on?

Once we look at Chartism in these terms, the movement becomes easier to understand and to place in its historical perspective. It is often said that Chartism failed because it was a disunited movement. However, many Chartists did not think of the movement as an exclusive organisation. When the Ten Hours Movement was campaigning to cut the hours in textile factories, working people with little spare time available to them went into that campaign rather than to Chartism. A working person did not have to belong to one or the other. He or she made the decision as to which organisation was most likely to achieve the fairness and justice they wanted.

Thus, historians in the universities have long been questioning the idea that Chartism was a revolutionary movement which failed in 1848. They point out that the Chartists ran schools and creches. They held tea dances. There were Temperance Chartists, who tried to convince people of the evils of drink and to help those who had succumbed to those evils. Chartists ran literary and poetry societies and classes. They conversed across regions through the columns of the Northern Star. As well as all of these ‘social’ activities, Chartists were engaged in many political activities as well. They supported the campaigns to improve working conditions in mines and factories. They opposed the New Poor Law which put the unemployed into workhouses. They linked up with other working class movements in Continental Europe and they supported the Irish Nationalists who wanted to see Ireland run by its own Parliament rather than from Westminster. By the late 1840s many of their aims had been achieved. The Charter had not been achieved, but many other things (such as factory reform) had. As a result, the massive demonstrations were no longer needed. Chartism did not die in a pointless futile attempt at revolution in 1848 (as indicated by much of the press of the time). In the words of the leading historian on Chartism, Dr Owen Ashton, Chartism faded in its profile after 1848 because it was no longer needed.