After Chartism

Description

This book charts the course of working- and middle-class radical politics in England from the continental revolutions of 1848 to the fall of Gladstone's Liberal government in 1874. Exploring the ways in which radicals used indigenous and continental nationalist sentiments to uphold class arguments, the author emphasizes the persistence of radical agitation after the fall of the Chartist mass platform and before the rise of organized socialism in the 1880s. After Chartism traces the genealogy of English radicalism from its roots in Protestant Dissent and the seventeenth-century revolutions, a lineage acknowledged by middle- and working-class radicals alike in the nineteenth century. But it also underlines the extent to which this shared radical tradition was problematized by middle-class radicals' acceptance of classical liberal economics. The author traces the lineaments of this divide by contrasting middle- and working-class responses to the French, German, Italian, and Hungarian revolutions of 1848-9, to the Polish and Italian nationalism of the 1860s, and to the rise and fall of the Paris Commune in 1871. She argues that these years witnessed not the relentless liberalization of working-class radical protest in England, but rather a significant diminution of middle-class radicals' commitment to liberal economics. This accommodation contributed to the emergence of the 'new liberalism' of the 1880s, and helped to shape middle- and working-class responses to the early socialist movement.

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