Welsh Journals

Search over 450 titles and 1.2 million pages

essay encourages one to think of further possible comparative themes to explore. This collection of essays should be in the library wherever nineteenth- and twentieth-century British social history is studied. CHRIS WRIGLEY Nottingham THE CHARTIST LEGACY. Edited by Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts. Merlin Press, Woodbridge, 1999. Pp. xvi, 297. £ 12.95 paperback. This collection of essays will not equal the impact made by James Epstein's and Dorothy Thompson's The Chartist Experience in 1982. It is, nevertheless, a very useful addition to the huge and still growing literature on the movement. It will be valuable to scholars and to teachers for the way in which several of the essays draw attention to aspects of the movement only outlined in the general histories. Students who know that there were other newspapers, but know only about the Northern Star, will gain much from Joan Hugman's informative piece on the Northern Liberator. It has been said that the three means by which the movement flourished were organization, publication and oratory. The third has been the hardest to reconstruct, but Owen Ashton, in a lively contribution, provides fascinating glimpses into the styles and aspirations of the movement's working-class orators. The autodidact Robert Lowery, for example, consciously shed his Geordie accent, presumably to good effect for the Convention was able to send him on a mission to west Cornwall in 1839! Wales presented a special problem. Robert Gammage described how Welsh-speaking audiences understood him through changes of emphasis, variations in tone and many gestures. A Merthyr Chartist considered the lack of bi-lingual orators to be the greatest want in his district. For this reason Wales had to rely much more on locals. The rhetorical devices of Chartism's platform speakers have been much discussed in recent years, but Ashton provides, in addition, a much-needed picture of the world in which they operated and the manner in which they prepared themselves for, and adjusted to, it. The Nottingham statue of Feargus O'Connor provides the cover illustration for the book. Fittingly, the contributors for the most part continue the recent rehabilitation of Chartism's controversial leader. Two do so specifically. Paul Pickering provides welcome illumination on O'Connor's Irish mission in 1849-50, after pointing out that the relationship between the Irish and Chartism has hitherto largely been examined in terms of the immigrant Irish. Irish affairs were a major concern of O'Connor as a Member of Parliament