Paul Pickering

'Songs for the Millions': Chartist Music and Popular Aural Tradition

Songs and singing, and music making more generally, are a neglected aspect of the social culture of Chartism. Many of the Chartist musings that have been treated as poetry by scholars were, in fact, lyrics for songs with identifiable melodies which drew on a rich aural tradition in popular culture. Chartist rituals almost invariably involved music as well as speech; the ranks of the movement were filled with musicians. The music they made, in its many and varied forms, has not received full attention. This article forms part of a larger joint project examining the music — lyrics and melody — of popular politics in the long nineteenth century. It argues that music was a central part of the social culture of radicalism and an important, if neglected, element in the repertoire of politics.

Ripe for a Republic: British Radical Responses to the Eureka Stockade

From the moment that the news arrived in Melbourne, the Eureka stockade has been repeatedly described, analysed and contested. Surprisingly there has been little attempt to explore reactions to the rebellion in the wider British world of which the young colony of Victoria was a part. By examining the response of British radicals to the events in Ballarat this article illustrates how they sought to contribute to and learn from the actions of their antipodean counterparts. In turn, this reveals an aspect of Eureka—its Britishness—that has often been obscured by the shadow of the Southern Cross.

A new terror to death: Public memory and the disappearance of John Dunmore Lang

John Dunmore Lang was one the most prominent figures in Australian colonial politics. As the founder of the Scots Church in Sydney, a long-serving member of the New South Wales Legislative Council, the editor of his own newspapers and the author of hundreds of books and pamphlets, Lang had an enormous platform to express his views. Despite his prominence in life, Lang’s legacy has been distorted by public memory and his passionate support for an Australian republic has been largely muted. This article examines Lang’s works and his treatment by public memory. This article has been peer-reviewed.

From Realism to the Affective Turn: An Agenda

Ever since the late eighteenth century when new forms of visual entertainment claimed to be able to use technology to replicate or simulate the literal details of nature, scholars, poets and intellectuals have bemoaned the increasing dominance of the realist aesthetic. Classicists such as Sir Joshua Reynolds and Romantics such as Samuel Coleridge found the practice of literalist simulation to be debased and disgusting. It demanded merely mechanical competence, eliminated the vital creative role of the artist’s idealising imagination, and appealed to uncultivated tastes attracted by the sensational wonders of the technical facsimile. Art lost its age-old raison d’etre if it became indistinguishable from literal nature.

The Hearts of the Millions: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s

Despite the emergence of an abrasive sense of class-consciousness during the 1830s, an investigation into the Chartists’ attitudes to monarchy highlights the limits of their challenge. For most Chartists the queen was not the problem. While some Chartists saw a positive role for the ‘pre-Bagehot monarchy’ in attaining the Charter, others had discovered Bagehots circumscribed monarchy long before he had. This recognition of the queens supra-political status did not necessarily lead to republican conclusions. For many Chartists, Britains ‘mild monarchy’ was the exception to the republican rule precisely because of its limitations. Either way, many Chartists were prepared to build their campaign for democracy around the monarchy.

Working-Class Self-Help

Only a few of those who went in quest of the ‘new moral world’ got mud on their hoots in the treacherous marshes of Chat Moss. Beneath the ‘inky canopy’ of smoke in Manchester and Salford the millennium was under construction in a multitude of venues. Beginning with what E. P. Thompson has called the ‘simple cellular structure’1 of the friendly society and proceeding to grander designs involving temperance and education, this chapter will examine working-class self-help among the Chartist population of the ‘shock city’ of the age. A discussion of this theme has often been clouded by the divisions within the national Chartist leadership. During 1840 a tract by William Lovett, former Secretary of the London WMA where the People’s Charter had originated, and John Collins of Birmingham, entitled Chartism: A New Organisation of the People, outlined a comprehensive proposal for a National Association for ‘Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People’ through a system of national education. The tract was well received; in Manchester Abel Heywood urged ‘every man to get a copy’.2

“In the Thickest of the Fight”: The Reverend James Scholefield (1790-1855) and the Bible Christians of Manchester and Salford

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle , who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.

'No Witnesses. No Leads, No Problems': The Reenactment of Crime and Rebellion

Opened in 1841, the foreboding buildings which comprised Melbourne’s first penitentiary were extended several times until the completion of the bluestone walls and turrets in 1864. Although its design was inspired by the fashionable reformist ideas in penology of the day, the prison regime practiced within the heavy walls also incorporated a stark reminder of the lingering ‘bloody code’ that had characterised the British justice for centuries. Before it was closed in 1929 the prison had been the site of 136 executions. Among a grim list of offenders, the most notorious individual to die in the prison was Edward (Ned) Kelly. At 10:00 am on 11 November 1880, Kelly, his arms pinioned with a heavy leather strap, a white cloth bag folded back on his forehead, was led from a holding cell adjacent to the gallows. Outside a crowd estimated at between 4000 and 8000 had gathered. Although it had been over three years since an execution in Old Melbourne Gaol, it was not morbid curiosity which drew them there. These were Kelly’s supporters (and opponents of capital punishment) who had hastily collected a petition bearing 30,000 signatures seeking a commutation of the sentence of death in the short interregnum between the court case and the day of execution. The numbers (neither crowd nor petition), however, could not disguise the fact that many Victorians supported the punishment of Kelly to the full extent of the law.

Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 17, 1981-1990, A-K

Review(s) of: Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 17, 1981-1990, A-K, by D. Langmore (Ed.), Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 2007, Pp. Xxxii + 645.

Review of Robert Aldrich’s Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories

100 Cloth.