Welsh Journals

from 1847 to 1852. Stephen Roberts has a measure of success in rehabilitating that late stage in his career, but nothing can really brighten the sadness and madness of its ending. In the Commons, O'Connor always sat opposite the Whigs. For Chartists they were the most important 'other'. Qualifying the recent near-orthodoxy which emphasizes Chartism's place within an existing radical tradition, Miles Taylor reviews the six points and argues that the novelty of their radicalism lay in their relationship to a critical scrutiny of the activities of the reformed House of Commons and in the revolutionary changes it sought in the machinery of elections. Whig historians were another form of the 'other'. Reviewed in the People's Paper, Macaulay's great history was set aside as 'only the apology and defence of a party and a system'. Robert Hall, working from announcements and reports of lectures, particularly of a series given by Thomas Cooper in 1845, reconstructs a 'People's History'. Its breadth of inclusion in both chronological and geographical terms is surprising, but, Hall notes, it still left out women and Africans. Chartist poetry and song have often been quarried for the light their words and images throw on the understandings and meanings of the Chartists. Timothy Randall goes a significant step further in analysing as well the role of mass singing as a social event within the popular political culture of Chartism. In the other essay, Kelly Mays offers her expertise as a professor of English in the reading of Chartist autobiography. If few present-day historians will be surprised by her arguments, that is perhaps a measure of the distance social history has moved in recent years. Jamie Bronstein explains the growing Chartist disillusionment with the United States after the 1840s. By then the land of political inclusion had come to be viewed as one in which slavery persisted and capitalism tyrannized, suggesting that economics perhaps should come before politics. Robert Fyson looks at the ultimately tragic life of the transported Staffordshire Chartist, William Ellis. He rightly points out that apart from the leaders of the Newport rising of 1839, little attention has been paid to the more than a hundred men who between 1839 and 1848 were despatched to Tasmania for offences associated with Chartism. In the final contribution, David Taylor confronts the interpretation of the famous Chartist Re-union in Halifax in 1885 which historians have seen as confirming that Liberalism had successfully absorbed and overarched the Chartist past and can in itself be seen as a later manifestation of the popular radical tradition. JOHN RULE Southampton