GENDER and DISABILITY: Hidden History
Grace Handworker-French reports on CHARTISM DAY 2024
When the eMAG editor suggested I attend and ‘cover’ the Chartism Day Conference, this year held at Reading University close to my home, I wasn’t sure as to what I was letting myself in for. As a very recent graduate from Cardiff University, this summer’s brood, and an English Lit student to boot, not History, I was somewhat reticent to say the least. Twelve papers delivered between 9.30am and 5.30pm – seemed a tall order to sit through.
However, I was put at ease when Dr Allen in her opening remarks mentioned her first meeting in 1993 with the late Dorothy Thompson. She had been “completely in awe of being in such stellar company and ever so slightly terrified.” My feelings were obviously quite normal, and I settled in. Looking around I could see an audience of all ages; although all the lecturers during the day, bar one, a schoolteacher, were of the older generations, there was a fair sprinkling of young research students in the audience – and they were not afraid to join in.
I was even happier, when our host, Professor David Stack, (University of Reading) confessed he had found no evidence of Chartist activity in the district. I had been worrying all week as to why I had been schooled in the Thames Valley and never been taught about the Chartists. It was true. Looking online I could find no mention of Chartists in Berkshire but plenty in neighbouring Wiltshire. Clearly, absence of evidence, needs explaining and I found that ‘Captain Swing’ prowled the county and one of his followers, William Winterbourn was hanged in 1831 at Reading Gaol. As to this town, we can only conclude it must have been a prosperous place, where anybody with Chartist aspirations kept out of sight.
Reading the briefing notes provided, I could see the word ‘poetry’ appeared in several papers. Nobody had mentioned Chartist poetry in my English studies, nor the Northern Star, the most read Chartist newspaper, and it apparently had a weekly poetry column for most of its existence. Vernon was one of the most regular contributors of verse in the pages of the Northern Star. Professor Simon Morgan (Leeds Beckett University) in his paper The real James Vernon couldn’t stand up - Recovering the life of a disabled poet and Chartist, corrects the record of this poet from South Molton, Devon. He puts Vernon’s life, back at the centre of his own story as a disabled poet whose condition was an important part of his muse.
In Morgan’s words, “He became a Chartist for a brief span of time as a way of exercising freely his political imagination. Through the pages of the Northern Star, he transcended the physical limitations of a body, which he described as a ‘decaying tenement’ and which confined him to a room he likened to a prison or tomb”.
Half the papers of the day were biographical - male tales of Price, Vernon, Hanson, Woodford continue to predominate. However, a female biography by David Black has this year been published: Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen MacFarlane(1818-1860). Black has spent many years researching the life and ideas of Helen MacFarlane. He spoke of MacFarlane’s commitment to Chartism and how this had followed on from her involvement with the anti-slavery movement in Glasgow and climaxed through her experiences in Vienna at the time of the 1848 revolutions. Exceptionally for a woman, we have her life story from birth to death. As a journalist, McFarlane successfully gained more of a public presence than most women in her time, but like Mary Ann Evans (George Elliot), she was writing in a man’s world and even though she was published in George Julian Harney’s Red Republican, she found it necessary to write under the male pen name of ‘Howard Morton’.
MacFarlane won the praises of Karl Marx and provided the first translation into English of the Communist Manifesto (which appeared over several issues from 9 November 1850).
Rethinking Gender Politics
Listening to Dr Judy Cox, brought to my attention the episodic nature of women’s presence, not only in Chartism, but in historical narratives generally. Important figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft clearly had a large influence on Chartist women of the time, for example, Frances Wright. They were women who fought for the resurgence of feminism and women’s democratic rights. Women activists were faced with the struggle of granting equal time to working outside and inside the home, bringing up children, and finding time for politics – still a juggling act for women today. Cox’s paper sheds light on how women played an enormous role in Chartism alongside the men, who are usually given the limelight in the movement.
Professor Robert Poole, the author of Peterloo: the English Uprising (2019)and an active member of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, went back a generation to focus on the reformer Mary Fildes, who had been on the platform at Peterloo and was sabred and badly injured by a dragoon. Identified as ‘the woman in the white dress’, she has appeared in numerous depictions from contemporary prints to twenty-first century films. Some of these making greater claims to show the real Mary Fildes than others. Now, a formal portrait photograph of Mary Fildes in later life has come to light. Professor Poole is investigating further in the hope that it might be possible to bring the portrait to a wider audience.
Rethinking Disability and Chartism
Personally, I found Dr Matt Roberts’ paper Chartism, Workers’ Bodies and Disability, hugely insightful and interesting. This is important “work in progress”. Disability history is a new theme in historical research. Labour historians have long been concerned with nineteenth century industrial accidents, particularly in the iron and coal mining districts, but Dr Roberts offers a ‘fresh take’. Using this Labour History archive, and extending the range of occupations to builders, tailors, textile workers, etc, Dr Roberts has set out in a different direction, searching for the disabled within the Chartist movement. He has found new ‘testimony of the impaired body’ – from workers themselves and their representatives, such as radical surgeons and doctors who supported the movement.
Robert’s work stood out to me as the highlight of the day. He drew attention to notions which commonly go unnoticed. Disability and chronic illness are two subjects which have hitherto been largely ignored within historical studies, but not English Literature. Throughout my course, I studied poets who used their work as a platform for disability, for example, Raymond Antrobus. However, despite its growth in conversation throughout the media today, more recognition of its social effects is required. First hand witnesses of the factory system provide a body of evidence that indicates disability and/ or chronic ill health were a central part of the Chartist experience. Numbers of disabled people found that the movement provided a platform to talk about disability – they found Chartism worked as ‘a coping mechanism’.
However, there is a darker side of the subject that needs to be explored – men broken by ‘Hard Labour’ and the treadmill; confined in damp conditions, on a diet of gruel. A Home Office Report identified 17 of a group of 93 Chartist prisoners interviewed, arrived with chronic illnesses or physical disabilities. Dr Roberts reckons 50% of prisoners can be classified as ‘disabled’ when released to their homes. Such a figure fits with what Ray Stroud has observed researching the forthcoming ‘Newport Scarecrows’ (Six Points publishers); he is convinced that those gaoled and forgotten following the Newport Rising, suffered far severer physical and psychological damage than the celebrated Frost, Williams and Jones.
All in all, the day was truly fascinating. I now have plenty of notes – a booklist as long as my arm – which will keep me writing articles on Chartism for months to come. Chartism is a fascinating topic – full of many subjects that are often hidden from plain sight. This includes the role which disability and gender politics play within this intriguing historical topic. Articles are yet to come regarding these two topics within Chartism as a movement!
Link to Chartism Day 2024 report: centennial event in honour of Dorothy Thompson’s intellectual legacy
The above link provides summaries to all of the 12 papers that were delivered at Chartist Day 2024 organised by-
