The Chartist Imaginary

Can a work of imaginative writing alter the political and social course of a class or a country? Margaret Loose takes up this question through the Chartist Movement, the first large-scale political organisation of British workers, active during the 1830s and 1840s. Drawing on the writing of movement members, she contends that literature did shape that history.

Loose shows how Chartist texts helped workers notice the gap between the ideals their society professed and the conditions they actually lived under. These writings also strengthened workers' capacity for abstract and literary thought, and fed a hunger for learning, mental force, self-respect, and control over their own lives, all in service of a utopian future. Loose names the source of this self-assured, transformative energy the "Chartist imaginary." Her study sets the anxious portrayals of Chartism by well-known Victorian authors against the ways working people themselves depicted the movement's goals and methods.

The book offers close readings of poems and novels by male Chartist writers, including Ernest Jones, Thomas Cooper, W. J. Linton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and Gerald Massey. It also uses extensive archival research to bring into focus three working-class women poets of the movement, Mary Hutton, E. L. E., and Elizabeth La Mont, whom it examines for the first time. Throughout, Loose concentrates on the literary form of these works and argues strongly for the political force of aesthetics in working-class writing.