The Romance of the 'Whig Dungeon'

Synopsis

This long essay is an updated chapter from my PhD thesis (University of New England, 2000). It examines the rhetoric and symbolism of the radical propaganda mobilised around Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor at his trial for seditious libel at York in 1840, his imprisonment at York Castle and the extensive celebrations that followed his release from prison (dressed in a fustian suit) in 1841. Chartism’s political fortunes traditionally have been attributed to material deprivation and, more recently, the first revival of the movement in 1841–42 to the organisational innovation that accompanied the formation of the National Charter Association in 1840. I argue that the ‘romance of the “Whig dungeon”’ constructed around O’Connor’s travails was also a significant factor of renewal in this instance.

Introduction

Historians, Chartist Renewal and Feargus O’Connor

Chartism’s resurgence as a mass movement in 1841–42, following its widespread legal repression in 1839–40, generally has been attributed to two factors. As Edward Royle has noted, influential earlier historians such as Mark Hovell, G.D.H. Cole and W.W. Rostow tended to link fluctuations in Chartist or radical political mobilisation to fluctuating trade cycles and attendant material hardship.¹ Rostow’s well-known social tension chart only looked at Chartism in broad terms that failed to recognise the extent of the repression pursued by the Melbourne Whig administration but Cole’s memorable phrase is illustrative of the consensus: ‘Hunger and hatred—these were the forces that that made Chartism a mass movement of the British working class.’²

By the 1970s and 1980s, however, historians had become wary of putting too much weight upon material explanations of politics and increasingly the rejuvenation of Chartism culminating in the 1842 National Petition was linked to organisational innovation and consolidation—particularly the formation of the National Charter Association (nca) at Manchester in 1840. Although sometimes challenged by other forms of Chartist and near Chartist organisation, the nca was the backbone of the movement throughout the ‘hungry forties’, to some extent professionalising radical activism at the local level and surviving (albeit in a marginalised form) into the late 1850s. While the cooperative, religious and social ‘movement culture’ that flowered under nca auspices now has been explored in some depth,³ perhaps the most important contribution to our understanding of its historical significance was James Epstein’s The lion of freedom (1982), a revisionist account of Feargus O’Connor’s leadership of the early Chartist movement.⁴

Portrait of Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor. — Feargus O’Connor, 1837. Source: National Portrait Gallery.

Earlier historians such as Hovell and Cole portrayed O’Connor (c. 1796–1855) as a ‘disastrous leader’ whose ‘autocratic’ or ‘dictatorial’ methods were at odds with the progressive, modernising and democratic character of Chartist organisation.⁵ On this view, O’Connor personified ‘half-starved’ northern mill and outworker anger that teetered upon insurrection which could be contrasted with rational, metropolitan, incremental ‘moral force’ activism personified by William Lovett.⁶ Similarly, until the late twentieth century O’Connor’s intriguing but ill-fated Land Plan tended to be interpreted as a hopelessly idealistic response to the march of industrial capitalism (five villages of cottage smallholdings were built 1846–49, but the cooperative administrative structure binding the 70,000 members was deemed illegal).⁷ Finally, O’Connor’s complete mental breakdown and institutionalisation in pathetic circumstances in 1852 (likely attributable to syphilis) only tended to confirm his character flaws for generations of historians.⁸

Rosedene, a relatively unmodified Chartist Land Plan cottage near Dodford, Worcestershire, now managed by the National Trust. Source: © Paul Shreeve, (cc-by-sa/2.0).

Epstein, on the other hand, painstakingly detailed O’Connor’s considerable organisational abilities and achievements in the first phase of Chartism—particularly the unification of disparate, localised radical associations leading to the formation of the nca.⁹ The son and nephew of prominent United Irish revolutionaries,¹⁰ O’Connor successfully contested the seat of Cork in 1832 campaigning on a Repeal, anti-tithe and radical-democratic platform.¹¹ After falling out with Daniel O’Connell, O’Connor retained and then lost his seat in 1835 for (allegedly) failing to comply with property qualifications.¹² From this point O’Connor threw his energies into extra-parliamentary activism and, by time Chartism emerged in the late 1830s, he had succeeded Henry Hunt (1773–1835) at the head of the radical-democratic mass platform.¹³

More than any contemporary, O’Connor exploited the rapidly expanding railway network to fulfil unprecedented speaking tours and schedules.¹⁴ As Epstein stresses, equally important was O’Connor’s establishment in late 1837 of the Leeds-based Northern Star, a stamped but militantly democratic weekly newspaper which soon achieved a large national circulation and which became the unofficial organ of the nca.¹⁵ The Star was the main conduit of Chartist propaganda and figured prominently in the mediation of O’Connor’s imprisonment. Another relevant theme explored by Epstein in The Lion of freedom and later work¹⁶ was the apparent paradox at the heart of radical-Chartist political culture—its reliance upon gentleman leaders.

As Epstein reminds us, in striking contrast to Chartist precepts, ‘O’Connor was not elected to the platform, he was unpaid and possessed no formal mandate.’¹⁷ Rather, by 1840 O’Connor was the latest incumbent of a time-honoured popular radical leadership tradition most recently cultivated by Hunt, both men forming what might be termed honour-based demagogic contracts with their overwhelmingly working-class supporters. While social or cultural difference was the basis of Hunt and O’Connor’s authority, the demagogic contract was founded upon reciprocal understandings of unflinching loyalty. O’Connor expected unwavering support from the Chartist rank and file and they expected their hero would respond in kind. This is why O’Connor constantly would ‘rehearse his achievements, his steadfastness, his sufferings, his intention to continue undaunted by persecution, danger, pecuniary loss and regardless of the apathy, desertion or betrayal of others’ in both speeches and published missives.¹⁸ These themes certainly litter the romance of the Whig dungeon—and, undeniably, they can seem rather melodramatic when taken out of their cultural context. However, the almost institutionalised public avowals of loyalty and sacrifice effectively supplanted the robustly democratic formal processes that governed most other aspects of Chartist organisation. Finally, when examining language, rhetoric or propaganda in this context we should remember that Chartism was a partly literate, partly oral political culture where leader-heroes had to present as larger than life to convincingly embody popular will.¹⁹

While Epstein’s biography did much to reclaim O’Connor’s place in the radical-democratic leadership pantheon, he largely avoided the ‘more problematic’ last decade of the Irishman’s career (the Land Plan’s travails and O’Connor’s descent into insanity would seem to loom large here). However, The lion of freedom remains the best and most detailed account of O’Connor’s central role in establishing the nca which despite considerable legal, economic and political impediments, amounted to probably the first independent working-class political party in the world.²⁰ So obvious now is the nca’s historical significance that it has perhaps obscured another important element of the first major Chartist revival—a remarkably rich and coherent quest narrative or romance cultivated around O’Connor’s trial at York in 1840 for seditious libel, his conviction and fifteen-month imprisonment in York Castle County Gaol in 1840–41, his staged ‘liberation’ from prison dressed in a fustian suit in late August 1841, and the re-mobilisation of the Chartist mass-platform inherent in the extensive celebratory speaking tours O’Connor undertook in late 1841 and early 1842. This neo-Gothic romance of the ‘Whig dungeon’, which cast O’Connor as the popular hero in a protracted battle with a tyrannical state, was a concerted political campaign that played a significant role in the rejuvenation of Chartism as a mass movement.

Sentimental Romance

Chartism now boasts a very large and mature historiography and the romantic tenor of much of the movement’s literature and poetry has been recognised for some time.²¹ Romantic forms of popular political discourse and identity in Victorian England also became central concerns of the postmodern ‘new political history’ that emerged in the wake of Gareth Stedman Jones’s influential 1982–83 argument upon the origins and limitations of Chartist language or rhetoric.²² In this essay, however, I am interested primarily in the political utility of the simple and ubiquitous narrative form Northrop Frye has termed ‘sentimental romance’.

The essence of this ancient popular genre is the journey of a hero between two imaginative worlds set apart from ordinary existence: one is an idyllic world associated with happiness, security and peace; the other is a night world associated with loneliness, separation and pain. As Frye stressed in The secular scripture, fixed identities have no place in the story:

It is existence before ‘Once upon a time’, and subsequent to ‘and they lived happily ever after’ … Most romances end happily, with a return to the state of identity, and begin with a departure from it. Even in the most realistic stories there is usually some trace of a plunge downward at the beginning, and a bounce upward at the end. This means that most romances exhibit a cyclical movement of descent into a night world and a return to the idyllic world, or to some symbol of it like marriage.²³

‘The complete form of the romance’, adds Frye, ‘is clearly the successful quest’. This genre has three main elements: ‘the agon, or conflict, the pathos or death struggle, and the anagnorisis, or discovery, the recognition of the hero’.²⁴ Formally speaking, symbolic metamorphoses often denote the hero’s entry into the contrived and polarised imaginative worlds of sentimental romance. But how might an understanding of the framework and characteristic motifs of this story telling formula illuminate the neglected subject of Chartist propaganda?

The typical romance hero, writes Frye, ‘moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, un-natural to us are natural to him’.²⁵ This description fits O’Connor’s public persona perfectly. R.G. Gammage, the Chartist activist whose pioneering narrative history of the movement prefigured later scholarly antagonism toward O’Connor, considered that the ‘sight of his person was calculated to inspire the masses with a solemn awe’.²⁶ O’Connor’s booming voice, Gammage added, ‘out-Stentor’d even Stentor himself’.²⁷ ‘His figure was tall and well proportioned, and his bearing decidedly aristocratic’, recalled the Barnsley Chartist John Vallance, of the first time he saw O’Connor in the mid-1830s:

He wore a blue frock coat and buff waistcoat and had rings on the fingers of each hand. In a graceful manner, and in emphatic language, he told the Radicals of Barnsley that he had sold off his horses and dogs, had greatly reduced his establishment, and come weal or woe, he would henceforth devote his whole life to promote the well-being of the working classes.²⁸

‘Feargus, of high-born patriotic zeal, of fearless gait, and matchless fortitude’, gushed an unknown Chartist poet.²⁹ O’Connor’s gentlemanly visage, his mastery of the stagecraft of the mass platform, and the considerable political capital bound up in his family’s close links with the revolutionary leadership of the United Irishmen certainly made him a good choice to build a narrative of renewal around.

It should be noted that quest motifs were common elements of radical-Chartist rhetoric in the 1830s and 1840s. On one hand, the Antipodean ordeals of the Dorchester labourers, the Newport Rising leaders and other Chartist transportees were presented (particularly in autobiographical narratives) as descents into an inhuman and tyrannical netherworld.³⁰ On the other hand, in the mid-to-late 1840s the Chartist Land Plan rhetorically was construed as a collective journey of deliverance to the ‘promised land’.³¹ The story cultivated around O’Connor’s imprisonment and liberation, however, was perhaps unmatched in its creative usage of the formula. Intriguingly, both the ‘descent’ phase of the narrative (O’Connor’s trial, sentencing and incarceration) and the return (his release and the liberation tours of 1841–42) involved highly publicised metamorphic episodes. These carefully fabricated transformations of identity—whether rhetorically cultivated in print, or visually mobilised in Chartist counter pageantry—lent the dungeon odyssey much of its distinction.

The Fall

O’Connor’s Trial At York, 1840

Among the thousands of Chartists who were arrested and prosecuted for political activities between 1838 and 1848, many hundreds were imprisoned or transported for significant periods.³² George White’s political recalcitrance was rewarded with three separate gaol terms in 1840, 1843–44 and 1848–49.³³ Many ‘victims’ experienced considerable privation during their incarceration, often being treated as felons and forced to endure the rigours of early Victorian prison discipline including the ‘silent system’, picking oakum (recycling rope) and treadmill labour.³⁴ Perhaps the most prominent of a number of Chartist ‘martyrs’ who died in prison was Samuel Holberry, who succumbed to tuberculosis at York Castle in 1842, having been sentenced to four years’ imprisonment after leading the abortive Sheffield insurrection in early 1840.³⁵ John Frost, originally sentenced to death for high treason in 1840 with two other Newport Rising leaders Zephaniah Williams and William Jones, ultimately was exiled to Van Diemens Land (Tasmania from 1856) for sixteen years (Williams and Jones remained in Tasmania until their deaths). Although Chartism’s decline usually is dated from 1848, the public celebrations marking Frost’s return to Britain in 1856 perhaps represented its last throes as a mass movement.³⁶

Historians long have recognised how O’Connor managed to cement his leadership of Chartism while imprisoned at York in 1840–41. ‘From his first day in gaol’, wrote Donald Read and Eric Glasgow, ‘Feargus began through the Northern Star to surround himself with an aura of martyrdom’.³⁷ ‘Trial and imprisonment provided the acid test of Chartist leadership and commitment’, adds James Epstein:

in contrast to the history of earlier working-class movements, the removal of Chartism’s national leadership and many of its local militants did not precipitate the collapse of radicalism. When the ‘People’s Champion’ emerged from York Castle in September 1841, he was greeted by a mass movement … which during his imprisonment had laid the foundations of the first working-class political party in world history.³⁸

But how was failure undone, allegiance cemented, and hope raised once again? We need to look beyond the formation of the nca, significant as it was, to properly understand the invention of Chartist rebirth in 1841–42.

In later work on early nineteenth-century radical culture Epstein stresses the importance of the courtroom as a political forum. Often defendants could ‘draw on historical and legal precedents that seemed to ensure certain key rights and liberties’.³⁹ ‘More than occasionally’, Epstein continues, ‘authorities were embarrassed as radicals turned their tables on their accusers’.⁴⁰ Outside the metropolis, however, such victories rarely were won. One of many prosecutions launched against Chartist activists in 1840 following the Newport insurgency of November 1839 and instances of drilling and rioting in Yorkshire, an ex officio information was laid against O’Connor for publishing seditious libels in the Northern Star, the case commencing before Justice Coleridge at the York Lent Assizes on 17 March 1840. According to the Yorkshireman, ‘a greater degree of excitement was probably never before witnessed in the Nisi Prius court’.⁴¹ The Attorney-General, Sir John (later Lord) Campbell prosecuted O’Connor in person, assisted by three councillors. O’Connor, a barrister by profession, appeared for himself although it was noted in the Star that he was accompanied by a London solicitor.⁴² Despite regaling the court with a marathon defence speech lasting almost five hours, O’Connor was found guilty and bound over for sentence in London.⁴³

Given the sense of inevitability about the verdict, it is no surprise that the themes of persecution and injustice ran through O’Connor’s defence. In fact, his courtroom rhetoric seems to have been aimed at the national Chartist body rather than the special jury of local gentry and merchants.⁴⁴ Supported by a vocal group of York activists (who were threatened with removal from the courtroom by Coleridge), O’Connor remonstrated with the jury from the outset:

Gentlemen, I have already learned, from your countenances, that you have attached to me the odium and guilt of every word contained in the many speeches of others which are set forth in this boundless information … in the outset let us understand each other. We are of different politics. I neither court your sympathy, desire your pity, or ask for your compassion. I am a Chartist—a democrat to the fullest sense of the word; and if my life hung upon the abandonment of those principles, I would scorn to hold it upon so base a tenure.⁴⁵

Other prominent Chartists were expected to make similar stands. The second (1894) edition of Gammage’s History of the Chartist movement contains a portrait (originally distributed with the Northern Star) of a Byronic looking Peter Murray McDouall in a courtroom setting (see below), perhaps in the midst of the four-hour defence speech Gammage suggested was his undoing, ‘for the Attorney General alluded to it as a proof of the danger in allowing men of such talent to be at large’.⁴⁶ Thomas Dunning, who witnessed McDouall’s 1839 trial at Chester, compared his defence speech with that of Robert Emmet, the tragic Irish revolutionary many active Chartists held in particular awe.⁴⁷

Peter Murray McDouall at trial. Source: National Portrait Gallery.

At the beginnings of the typical sentimental romance, Frye notes, there is often a ‘sharp descent in social status, from riches to poverty’, particularly after the hero has suffered some kind of false accusation.⁴⁸ O’Connor’s journey began in precisely these terms. However, the Home Office and the York magistracy may have inadvertently enriched the tale waiting to be told when O’Connor entered York Castle County Gaol on the evening of 19 May 1840, having been sentenced by Coleridge at the Queen’s Bench to eighteen months’ imprisonment.⁴⁹ Upon being escorted by rail from London to York, O’Connor’s captors indulged him with a sight-seeing tour of York Minster and the city.⁵⁰ As A.J. Peacock has noted, the day after Feargus’s somewhat unusual excursion the Minster was engulfed in a spectacular conflagration, the second such disaster in little more than a decade.⁵¹ Despite the obvious concessions made to O’Connor’s fame and status in transit, upon classification he was denied the traditional indulgences made to political prisoners of gentlemanly rank and was placed in a tiny cell on the ‘Felons’ side’ of the gaol (a relatively new radial-wing penitentiary demolished in 1935). Immediately, O’Connor’s employees on the Northern Star set about exposing the scandal of Chartism’s gentleman leader ‘herding and feeding with convicted felons’.⁵² ‘No surer mode of attracting the public sympathy towards Mr. O’Connor’, noted the Times, ‘could have been devised than this cruel treatment’.⁵³ As James Epstein emphasises, ‘O’Connor rarely failed to exploit the full potential of any pretext for agitation’ and Chartist propagandists could hardly have hoped for better ammunition.⁵⁴

Francis Bedford view of York Castle Precinct looking north c. 1840. The Assize courts are at left, Clifford’s Tower in the centre distance and the Felons’ prison gatehouse at right. Source: York Castle Museum.

The Struggle

Mediating O’Connor’s Imprisonment

The sensational news of Feargus’s fallen state certainly provoked an outcry in Chartist strongholds. As soon as the Star arrived in Manchester ‘the news spread all over the town with the rapidity of lightning’.⁵⁵ Indignant protest meetings were held at Carlisle, Bradford, Rochdale, Birmingham and elsewhere.⁵⁶ At a gathering of ‘Socialists, Chartists and Radicals’ in Leeds, William Hick ‘threw himself into a theatrical attitude, and quoted the oration of Mark Antony lamenting over the body of Julius Cæsar’ [‘O mighty Cæsar! dost thou lie so low?’] while moving for the adoption of a petition calling for O’Connor’s immediate liberation.⁵⁷ Bradford Chartists avowed their belief

that Mr. O’Connor was subjected … to the same treatment as burglars, felons, and reputed murderers. They stated that he is obliged to lie on an iron bed, without any sheets to cover him, or a pillow to repose on. That he is obliged to undergo many menial offices, such as cleansing his own utensils—that he is not allowed to receive any visitors, and that while suffering severely from rheumatism he … was obliged to sit on a cold stone. The petitioners believed that this harsh treatment would tend to destroy his life.⁵⁸

Soon after his incarceration O’Connor forwarded a letter and then a petition outlining his travails to Thomas Talfourd, a member for Reading who, with Daniel O’Connell and other parliamentary radicals such as Thomas Duncombe and Thomas Wakley, spoke out on the matter in the Commons on 27 May.⁵⁹ Home Office Under-Secretary Fox Maule attempted to defuse the situation by deflecting responsibility for O’Connor’s treatment on to local authorities.⁶⁰ Maule made little headway, however, against the popular opinion that the Whig administration was pursuing a malicious course against the Chartist leader.⁶¹

Under some pressure, the government appears to have decided to neutralise the issue and on 3 June O’Connor stated that he had been moved to a room in the prison hospital.⁶² He wore his own clothes, paid to have his food (and furniture) brought in from outside the Castle, and was given access to books, newspapers and visitors.⁶³ According to William O’Neill Daunt, O’Connor also was excused from chapel attendance after he ‘scandalized the parson by bellowing the responses in stentorian tones’.⁶⁴ ‘It is a large vaulted stone cell at the very extremity of the building’, O’Connor wrote to William Hill, then editor of the Northern Star, ‘quite out of earshot, and shut out from human observation, or communication’.⁶⁵ In this letter O’Connor also mentioned that his new accommodation was located directly above the condemned cell, a morbid image he later appropriated (thoroughly licentiously) for political purposes.⁶⁶

The precise locations O’Connor was held at York Castle Gaol are difficult to clarify due to the fragmentary nature of extant evidence (not to mention the difficulty in taking some of O’Connor’s published claims at face value!). Ostensibly, his references to the close proximity of the condemned cell and prison cemetery in his letter of 3 June 1840 suggest that after being moved from his first cell in the Felons’ penitentiary he was held in the western wing of the Debtors’ prison (where the gaol’s condemned cells appear to have been situated at that time). However, an Inspectors’ Report return of prisoners held on the ‘Felons’ side’ made on 19 December 1840 shows that O’Connor then was the solitary occupant of ‘Ward 1’ of that section (prisoners were not named but offences were and O’Connor can be identified as the only inmate convicted of seditious libel).⁶⁷ The same return contains the only references in the Report to a prison hospital. Further, it noted that ‘The Misdemeanant [O’Connor] is at present classed with the felons for trial: the state of the gaol not allowing for a separate ward for one prisoner’.⁶⁸ It would thus seem that in late 1840 O’Connor was again held in the Felons’ penitentiary—albeit in a relatively large and comfortable room/cell. Whatever the case, the main features of the York Castle precinct are indicated in the map below.

J.H. Lee view of the Castle yard looking south, 1841. The Felons’ prison entrance is at near left, the Female prison at far left, the Debtors’ prison in the middle distance and the Assize courts at right. Source: York Castle Museum.

William Hill and Joshua Hobson, the Star’s publisher who also visited O’Connor on a regular basis, were important allies in the rendering of the dungeon romance.⁶⁹ Although the Home Secretary Lord Normanby originally decreed that O’Connor should not write political articles from prison, he ultimately had extensive printed contact with the Chartist rank and file through the Star’s pages.⁷⁰ Why this interaction was tolerated is not clear, but O’Connor’s experience of incarceration plainly was mild when compared to the great majority of Chartist prisoners.⁷¹

The complaints made about O’Connor’s treatment were motivated not only by the assault on his gentlemanly status, but also the perils of his ‘living tomb’. Soon after arriving at York O’Connor complained of rheumatism in his legs and back, chest pains and a cough. His physicians made depositions stating that confinement in the Castle would probably shorten his life.⁷² Normanby’s view, however, was that none of the representations made on O’Connor’s behalf warranted his transfer to another prison.⁷³ The true state of O’Connor’s health at this time is also difficult to determine. As his sentencing hearing at the Queen’s Bench court in London was adjourned twice for medical reasons, there seems little reason to doubt that he was in some distress at that time.⁷⁴ Yet illness could also be fashioned into a political tool—even respectable parliamentary radicals such as Thomas Duncombe and John Bright portrayed their broken constitutions and mental break-downs as part of the sacrifice they endured on behalf of ‘the People’.⁷⁵ One of the characteristics of the dungeon romance, moreover, was contempt for prosaic reality.

Just before he was incarcerated at York Castle O’Connor penned an open letter to the Chartist body who, on this occasion, he addressed as ‘THE MEN WITH FUSTIAN JACKETS, UNHORN CHINS, AND BLISTERED HANDS, THEIR WIVES, AND CHILDREN’.⁷⁶ O’Connor’s open letters were published in the Star on an increasing basis in the 1840s, and by the middle of the decade regularly were read aloud at Chartist meetings and social gatherings (note that the Star, which cost four pence halfpenny, was a comparatively expensive radical newspaper).⁷⁷ In his final pre-imprisonment letter in 1840 O’Connor informed his followers that physicians had cupped, blooded and drugged him at prodigious levels—enough to have killed a lesser man. This routine communication, however, then took a strange twist. Deploying a singular rhetorical tactic, O’Connor recounted a nightmare he said he had suffered while ill and awaiting sentence:

For four nights I raved incessantly … I thought I was forced out of bed to go to the Queen’s Bench; and in trudging through highways and byeways, across the fields, I was pursued by a hedgehog. At last I turned on my pursuer, who, in his turn, retreated. At length I ran it down; and in endeavouring to catch it, its bristles stuck to the palm of my hand … and in that situation I made my way to the Queen’s Bench, where I saw the Attorney General without his wig, and who, the moment I entered, claimed the hedgehog as his wig, charged me with the theft … and there I remained with my handful during the whole of a long trial, after which I was found guilty of being a physical force Chartist … Now, that is true as the gospel.⁷⁸

This passage makes strange reading at first—even by O’Connor’s idiosyncratic standards. But in the evolving context of the romance of the Whig dungeon, the dream and the false accusation make some sense. Many of those who read (or heard O’Connor’s letter read aloud) would have recognised the apparent function of the similitude: it was a narrative beacon, drawing upon symbolic conventions found in the allegorical literature working people knew best such as the Bible and The pilgrim’s progress. As Northrop Frye stresses, dreams often mark the transformations of identity so important to the narrative movement of the romance form.⁷⁹ We can only speculate whether O’Connor had any inkling of the impolitic decision to place him on the ‘felons’ side’ at York Castle; in any event, this challenge to his status, honour and well-being was exploited most effectively.

York Castle County Gaol had a predominantly neo-classical character in 1840–41. The Castle yard consisted of the thirteenth-century Clifford’s Tower, the renowned English Baroque Debtors’ prison dating from the early eighteenth century, the later Palladian Female prison and Assize courts and the radial Felons’ prison. The latter had a central castellated Gatehouse near Clifford’s Tower and this section of the Castle was surrounded by stone walls (including a gatehouse in the north western corner of the Castle precinct also demolished c. 1935).⁸⁰ Despite the architectural complexity of the precinct, the pathos phase of the dungeon romance was littered with overtly Gothic images of dank, smoke-filled cells, labyrinthine stone corridors, echoing irons and tormented felons. Even the mighty O’Connor was not safe from creeping death. In June 1840 William Hill proclaimed:

We saw him on the 9th; but he was wonderfully changed. In the presence of the Under-Governor, who waited on our visit, he held up his limb and said: ‘the villains say I’m better; look here’. It was not like O’Connor’s limb —it was a poor, shrunken, emaciated thing which we could not have recognised for his.⁸¹

Recounting O’Connor’s avowed belief that he would indeed perish in his ‘stone coffin’, Hill continued:

He then told me a tale which might have made the stones to mutiny, and when we said the people should be roused about it, he seized our hand and said, ‘The people must not know it. It is imposed upon me not even to publish even the state of my health … if I do, all visits will be stopped … FROM ME NOT A WORD MUST APPEAR.⁸²

‘We pledged ourselves it should be so’ wrote Hill in the process of breaking his vow.⁸³ In the absence of the physical hardships endured by working-class Chartist prisoners, some ‘refined cruelties’ directed at O’Connor were documented in the Star. On one occasion Joshua Hobson’s elderly mother journeyed from Leeds to visit the ‘caged lion’, only to be denied admittance. ‘O’Connor stormed furiously on being informed’, the Star dutifully informed its readers.⁸⁴

‘Sentimental’ romance pits honourable heroes against evil villains, and O’Connor invariably presented his struggle as a personal duel with the Home Secretary, Lord Normanby.⁸⁵ He ‘aimed a dagger at my heart’ claimed Feargus of his aristocratic foe, ‘and having failed to murder me, he then assaulted my honour’.⁸⁶ Previously Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Normanby had developed a close working relationship with Daniel O’Connell. Although O’Connell and O’Connor initially had co-operated in the Repeal cause, and although O’Connell had actively supported the programme of parliamentary reform encapsulated in the People’s Charter, he had also alienated many Chartists due to his pro-Whig stance upon a succession of radical grievances.⁸⁷ The links between Normanby and the Liberator were not lost on the Whitby Chartist activist, preacher, and poet John Watkins, a gentleman whose home (Aislaby Hall) was located near Normanby’s Yorkshire seat (Mulgrave estate).⁸⁸ In September 1840 Watkins denounced his neighbour as a ‘four-eyed, haggard, tyrant’ who had won ‘Dan’s broad, brazen smile’.⁸⁹ Somewhat ironically, Normanby had published a number of romance novels in the 1820s and 1830s, leading to William Hill’s denigration of the ‘namby pamby Lord—the novel writer’.⁹⁰ ‘Vile tyrant-boss! Hotspur’s scorn’d fop art thou’, spat Watkins rather more vehemently.⁹¹

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Among the wider Chartist leadership there were a number of critics of O’Connor’s theatrical yet militant leadership style. William Lovett’s espousal of ‘moral force’ Chartism, his disdain for O’Connor’s often illiterate support base (‘unwashed faces, unshorn chins and dirty habits’), and his rationalist objections to the spectacle and menace of the radical-Chartist mass platform are well known.⁹² Despite Lovett’s reputation as the respectable face of metropolitan radicalism, he was one of the first Chartist leaders to be imprisoned (for twelve months in 1839–40, for seditious libel). After also being arrested, but escaping conviction and imprisonment, during 1840 John Watkins made regular contributions to the Star on subjects such as ‘SCRIPTURAL CHARTISM’ and ‘CHARTISM FROM SHAKESPEARE’.⁹³ In 1841 he became a vociferous critic of William Lovett, but within a few years Watkins too was warning of the perils of ‘MAN WORSHIP’, and in 1844 he attempted to ‘impeach’ O’Connor for ‘treason to the people’.⁹⁴

Watkins’s criticisms of O’Connor give us a rare insight into the cleavage between the latter’s prison experiences in 1840–41 and their rendering for public consumption. ‘I thought O’Connor all that he seemed’, Watkins recalled, ‘a self-denying, disinterested, devoted friend of freedom and virtue’:

Indeed, I regarded him as a personification of the Cause … With a view to raising his spirits, which seemed very low, I conceived the romantic idea of performing a pilgrimage to his cell, as to the shrine of a martyred patriot.⁹⁵

Having then changed his mind, Watkins only decided to proceed after his literary efforts suddenly began to be passed over by the Star. He eventually found O’Connor in a spacious room ‘with many singing birds to cheer his captivity’:

He showed me his portrait [see below], which had just come from the engraver’s … it was just the crying look which he wore in prison. He had many books and papers to beguile his time, with a sofa and easy chair to comfort him, and he was constantly cheered by congratulatory addresses from all parts of the country. His dinners were brought to him hot from a tavern in the city. The place looked more like a parlour than a prison.⁹⁶

According to Watkins’s contemporaneous account of his pilgrimage, he was prevented by the Under-Governor from delivering to his hero an address from the ‘best workmen of Whitby’.⁹⁷ ‘This piece of petty vexation’, of course, ‘annoyed the noble O’Connor’.⁹⁸ Not to be denied, Watkins rapidly composed a fawning sonnet to ‘that man of men!’ which William Hill duly published in October 1840.⁹⁹

Portrait of Feargus O’Connor at York Castle County Gaol, 1840. Source: National Portrait Gallery.

Watkins’s apparent financial reliance upon the Northern Star (and thus O’Connor) in the early 1840s was shared by other local activists engaged in the ‘Trade of Agitation’.¹⁰⁰ Nor should commercial aspects of the dungeon romance be overlooked. The Star sold more copies in 1840–41 than at any other period apart from the millenarian year of 1839.¹⁰¹ The prison portrait Watkins viewed subsequently was distributed to Star subscribers in April 1841, after O’Connor had reduced the original supplementary price from eight pence to sixpence-halfpenny.¹⁰² Later, medals celebrating the O’Connor liberation ceremony were distributed with the paper (see image below).¹⁰³ Other entrepreneurs also saw opportunities in O’Connor’s torment. His trial (like that of the Newport leaders, Frost, Williams and Jones) was included in popular chronicles of sensational cases and infamous miscarriages of justice such as Wilson’s remarkable trials.¹⁰⁴ In late October 1840 the Star was forced to parry a scurrilous pamphlet circulating in Manchester which alleged that O’Connor had been poisoned and found dead in his cell.¹⁰⁵ Chartist identity and pride, ultimately, were closely tied up with O’Connor’s virile demagogic persona. Despite the pervasive images of persecution, illness, lethargy and death mobilised around his imprisonment, it was also emphasised (without any sense of contradiction) that O’Connor’s spirit remained undiminished, that he would conquer adversity, and that hope remained for the faithful.

Feargus O’Connor Liberation Medal, 1841. Source: Whyte’s, Dublin.

The basic romance elements of alienation, struggle and return had a number of advantages as political propaganda. First, everyone knew how the story was supposed to end; second, a sense of hope was inherent in the form. Consider some verse ‘composed on the miserable and noisy loom’ by Samuel Whitelocke of Glasgow over a year before O’Connor’s release. This ode not only reflects the ‘night-world’ themes of alienation O’Connor and his conspirators were busily propagating, but also pre-empts O’Connor’s eventual ascension from his ‘dungeon’. After some ritualised flattery (‘All hail O’CONNOR! Freedom’s hero, hail!’) Whitelocke conceded the fall of his champion: ‘And thou art from thine own bright lofty sphere/ Flung down at once, amid earth’s vilest things’.¹⁰⁶ In sentimental romance, however, what goes down must come up:

Yet from the darkness of the present hour,
Thou shall emerge still more sublimely bright,
Clothed with fresh lustre, and terrific might …
For hope, even now, in whispers sweet reveals
The morn that comes on gold careering wheels …
Garlands and triumphs await thy advent day,
When sorrow’s clouds shall part and flee away.¹⁰⁷

With these lines an otherwise anonymous Glasgow weaver actively contributed to the narrative of hope being cultivated by O’Connor, Hill, Hobson, Watkins and company. The almost oracular quality of Whitelocke’s verse (see below) also evokes what Northrop Frye has called the ‘special knowledge’ embedded in the romance form.¹⁰⁸

The ‘Lion Of Freedom’ Awakes

In 1840 Chartists began to reorganise. The subsequent battle between the O’Connorite nca and the alternative, neo-Owenite plan of national association authored by William Lovett and John Collins (the ‘New Move’), has long been a staple of the movement’s historiography.¹⁰⁹ O’Connor’s victory in the test of leadership which eventuated in 1841 was all the more remarkable given his circumstances. From about the time of the formative Manchester Chartist conference of July 1840, in fact, a distinct change in the tone of some of his dungeon correspondence is discernible. In a long series of letters supposedly smuggled out of York Castle in a mirror carried by a released prisoner, O’Connor detailed his criticisms of a Home Office investigation of his treatment (apparently undertaken by William Crawford, the influential advocate largely responsible for the re-introduction of penal solitude in the 1830s).¹¹⁰ These ostensibly illicit ‘LOOKING GLASS’ letters also carried O’Connor’s ideas about political re-organisation, including the establishment of a metropolitan daily Chartist paper.¹¹¹ But perhaps the most interesting feature of the letters is not so much their content, but rather the triumphant tone which surrounded their publication. ‘My voice has burst the dungeon walls; once more you shall hear it’, O’Connor proclaimed at this important juncture.¹¹²

Iorwerth Prothero and James Epstein have pointed out that the Star was not particularly critical of Lovett and Collins’s ideas when they were first published in 1840, and William Hill (a Swedenborgian minister) freely dissented from O’Connor’s strictures on ‘CHURCH CHARTISM’ the following year.¹¹³ After somewhat clandestine moves to sound out support for the alternative plan of National Association, however, an intense attack upon ‘CHURCH CHARTISM, TEETOTAL CHARTISM, KNOWLEDGE CHARTISM, AND HOUSEHOLD SUFFRAGE CHARTISM’ was launched in the Star.¹¹⁴ The ‘New Move’ was denounced as an affront to Chartist unity, a form of appeasement to attract middle-class liberal support, and a ploy designed to remove O’Connor from the head of the movement. Eventually, Daniel O’Connell was implicated as the malign architect behind the challenge and the O’Connorite rank and file groped for words with which to execrate ‘the arch-traitor Dan, his dupes, slaves and hungry tools’.¹¹⁵ The attack upon the New Move was soon reflected in the public addresses of the O’Connorite faithful: ‘Let it be known to the world, that there is not one man in the parish of Ripponden’, wrote a correspondent, ‘who cares one straw for the “New Move”. Feargus O’Connor is our star pilot, and shall and will be ours’.¹¹⁶

This mobilisation of opinion against the New Move was actually the second successful tactical assault O’Connor had initiated through his prison letters. Early in 1841 the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association (LPRA), a potential competitor to Chartism which had been founded in May 1840 by a number of wealthy industrialists and parliamentary liberals, invited O’Connell to speak at a large meeting to be held at J.G. Marshall’s enormous factory premises in Leeds. From his cell O’Connor exhorted Yorkshire Chartists to hold a ‘Welcome to Dan’ counter-demonstration on Holbeck Moor, before attending the LPRA festival in force.¹¹⁷ In the end O’Connell failed to attend the meeting, where other prominent liberals sympathetic to Chartism such as J.A. Roebuck, Sharman Crawford and Thomas Perronet Thompson were joined on the platform by a number of comparatively obscure working-class radicals. In triumph, and at ‘enormous expense’, the first page of the Star was emblazoned with a large satire depicting ‘THE GOOSE SHOW’.¹¹⁸ As James Epstein notes, this manoeuvre effectively ‘marked the end of the LPRA’.¹¹⁹

Well before these controversies over political collaboration and direction gained momentum, however, O’Connor’s hardships began to be overshadowed in the Star by accounts of celebratory mass demonstrations in England and Scotland following the release of a number of prominent Chartist prisoners.¹²⁰ One of the biggest public shows of support was the triumphal entry held at Manchester for Peter Murray McDouall and John Collins in August 1840. Large bodies of radicals from local towns first marched to the traditional central meeting place of Stevenson Square, before proceeding westwards to Salford Crescent where the liberated patriots were met en masse. McDouall, who ‘bore evident marks of the shameful treatment he had received from the merciless Whigs’, was presented with a ‘splendid green scarf’ (green being the traditional colour of radicalism) and a satin rosette by a deputation of the Hulme Female Radical Association.¹²¹ On the return march to the Carpenters’ Hall in Manchester, ‘considerable groaning’ and ‘loud cheers’ were given as the throng passed the Manchester Guardian and Advertiser offices respectively.¹²² At the Exchange ‘the “nobs” came running out to witness the sight’.¹²³ And as the marchers passed the Mosley Arms Hotel (Piccadilly) ‘three cheers were given for Feargus O’Connor, that being the house where he stops on his visits to Manchester’.¹²⁴

These aural manifestations of opprobrium and approval mingled with the visual symbols which demarcated Chartist incursions upon public streets and other civic spaces—the ubiquitous green sashes and ribbons, the flags and banners inscribed with radical slogans, menacing threats and Biblical quotations. Often these visual symbols had rich historical resonances. For example, when McDouall was given his green scarf he first had to remove a white top hat presented to him earlier in the day by ‘the men of Audenshaw’.¹²⁵ Clearly, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s famed visual signature still had a meaningful currency for the children of Peterloo. Nonetheless, by 1841 the term ‘fustian jacket’ had also became a byword for militant Chartist allegiance—primarily through O’Connor’s cultivation of the appellation at the head of his open letters penned from the ‘condemned cell’. In mid-1841 a now comparatively forgotten Chartist National Petition was borne to the Commons by a delegation of 18 stonemasons exclusively dressed in fustian.¹²⁶ This plain and hard wearing material predominantly was utilised in working men’s apparel, and was produced in areas where Chartist activity and allegiance was marked. Requesting the release of all political offenders and a free pardon for the transported Newport rising leaders, the 1841 memorial (said to be signed by 1,300,000 people) demanded the adoption of the People’s Charter ‘without any alteration’.¹²⁷ When the Commons divided the numbers appeared 58 apiece, and Thomas Duncombe’s supporting motion (which he limited to the release of political prisoners for expedience) was only lost by the speaker’s casting vote.¹²⁸ William Hick, the Leeds radical, put the unexpectedly close finish to verse:

But joy to the ‘fustians’ who sign’d!
And joy to the glorious ‘eighteen’!
And joy be to him in whose heart were enshrin’d
Though a barrier of bolts is between.¹²⁹

Daniel O’Connell, who supported Duncombe’s motion in debate, managed to infuriate Chartists again by leaving the house before the division took place.¹³⁰

As he read and heard of these demonstrations O’Connor must have begun to think very carefully about the creative possibilities of his release (scheduled for November 1841).¹³¹ Yet one of the most striking features of the unfolding dungeon romance was its participatory character. A ‘Demonstration Committee’ had been formed by local democrats at York, for example, as early as March 1841.¹³² This body was responsible for planning and implementing local celebrations accompanying O’Connor’s November release. However, following a sudden decision to remit the remainder of his sentence due to additional medical evidence, O’Connor was freed with comparatively little fanfare on Thursday, 26 August 1841—or just as Robert Peel’s new Tory administration was about to assume office.

This unexpected turn of events appears to have thrown the Demonstration Committee’s plans into disarray. Some reports even claimed that O’Connor bluntly refused to quit York Castle when first informed of his release.¹³³ ‘MR. O’CONNOR has broken loose sooner than we wished, or than he had originally intended’, a curious note in the Star subsequently revealed.¹³⁴ On Monday the 30th, however, O’Connor took leave of his apartment at Etridge’s Royal Hotel in Blake Street, and at one o’clock in the afternoon re-appeared before a large body of Chartists assembled at one of the Castle gates (the O’Connor liberation medal depicts the Felons’ prison gatehouse). According to the Star, the fustian suit he wore that day ‘had been manufactured expressly for the occasion, and was presented by those who had not only his welfare at heart, but were imbued with his principles, and with his spirit—the blistered hands and fustian jackets of Manchester’.¹³⁵

Ascension

The York Liberation Demonstration, 1841

In 1986 Paul Pickering published an innovative article upon Chartist symbolic communication which included a fascinating vignette on the meaning of O’Connor’s liberation suit.¹³⁶ This essay was one of the earlier critical responses to Gareth Stedman Jones’s assessment of Chartist rhetoric which, undeniably, conceived of ‘language’ in fairly literal terms. O’Connor’s choice of fustian, Pickering argued, amounted to a momentous historical gesture:

Fustian represented a new-found working-class consciousness in popular radicalism that had been forged in the bitter experiences of the 1830s … The appearance of Feargus O’Connor, the most popular leader of Chartism, dressed as a working man was one of the most significant public declarations of the early 1840s: it was a statement of class without words.¹³⁷

This argument, of course, owed much to Edward Thompson’s classic thesis charting the development of a working-class consciousness by the early Chartist period.¹³⁸ Tellingly, O’Connor’s fustian suit could be contrasted with Henry Hunt’s white top hat. Whereas Hunt’s hat befitted his gentlemanly status, O’Connor’s ‘dressing down’ to fustian ‘encapsulated the development of an exclusively working-class radicalism during the 1830s’.¹³⁹

York was by no means a Chartist stronghold, and much of the visual paraphernalia used at the O’Connor liberation demonstration had to be requisitioned from other localities. Nevertheless, a carnival-like atmosphere seems to have been imposed upon the ancient city: ‘nearly all the shops were closed in’, claimed the Star. ‘In fact, the day was an entire holiday’.¹⁴⁰ Apart from the considerable numbers of supporters who travelled from various communities in the West Riding—and despite the short notice necessitated by O’Connor’s early release—approximately 100 delegates from various Chartist localities made the pilgrimage to witness his return. London sent one of the stonemasons who had helped carry the 1841 National Petition.¹⁴¹ Some visitors followed the example of O’Connor’s barnstorming speaking tours, making the journey to York by rail. Joseph Linney, on the other hand, walked all the way from Manchester.¹⁴² Each of the delegates carried a flag denoting their place of origin, adding to the array of colour. ‘Mr. William Martin, of Bradford, was particularly conspicuous: he had a large green flag, on which was inscribed— “William Martin, M.P., formerly an inhabitant of Northallerton Hell-hole, delegate for Bradford”’.¹⁴³

This inscription recorded Martin’s contestation of the recent general election where he won the show of hands but, like nearly all Chartist parliamentary candidates, failed at the poll.¹⁴⁴ Before his imprisonment at the Northallerton House of Correction, Martin had also spent six months in York Castle, having been arrested in Sheffield just prior to the tumultuous ‘silent protests’ of 1839. At the conclusion of his trial in March 1840, Martin facetiously beseeched the judge to let him remain at York, where he had been ‘very comfortable’.¹⁴⁵ At Northallerton, however, the Irish Chartist found himself placed upon a treadmill and subjected to the ‘silent system’.¹⁴⁶ Described by a prison inspector as a ‘most dangerous, violent and unprincipled man’, in October 1840 the Times fleetingly portrayed Martin ‘unlike his lucky friend Feargus O’Connor … seated on his stool picking oakum and preserving a total silence’.¹⁴⁷

O’Connor himself had been tried twice at York. The first prosecution of July 1839, for publishing a criminal libel in the Star, largely has been passed over by historians.¹⁴⁸ This neglect is not surprising, because the case commenced just as potentially momentous ‘ulterior measures’ such as the ‘Sacred Month’ (or a general strike) were being debated following the rejection of the original 1839 Chartist National Petition. At his first appearance O’Connor was also found guilty, although he was never called up for sentence.¹⁴⁹ Nonetheless, in the context of the creative possibilities drawn upon in the romance of the Whig dungeon, it is important to remember that Feargus had contested two legal battles with the state at York.

Assize sittings traditionally were complemented by a considerable degree of pageantry, and at York these customs had survived relatively intact.¹⁵⁰ Visiting judges dressed in their professional attire of scarlet, ermine and periwig were generally met by local dignitaries just south of the city walls at Dringhouses, before proceeding via Micklegate Bar to the Castle complex where the Assize was formally opened. This mobile display of the majesty of the law was a substantial visual and aural spectacle involving bailiffs armed with javelins, liveried attendants, trumpeters and pealing bells. Prior to O’Connor’s first trial in 1839, for example, the judges were met by the High Sheriff ‘in his state carriage with trumpeters, halberdiers, and tradesmen, the City Sheriff … in his state carriage, with his friends and tradesman on horseback, the Lord Mayor’s carriage, and several private carriages’.¹⁵¹ Prior to his second trial in March 1840 a similar display took place, the High Sheriff being attended by 100 of his tenantry, ‘all well mounted, and their bridles trimmed with blue and yellow favours’.¹⁵² The geography of this tradition at York is also arguably quite significant, because the O’Connor liberation demonstration almost seems to have been designed as a radical contestation of the local Assize cavalcade.

While radical-Chartist processions in industrial cities and towns with strong radical traditions usually took well-worn (and thus meaningful) routes, few precedents existed at York. An oppositional display had to be manufactured from scratch—and what better model to appropriate and usurp than the Assize, the forum of repeated Chartist persecution? Provocative symbolic confrontations with this arm of the law were not unknown: ‘God save the People!’ exclaimed a Chartist billposter calling upon Newcastle radicals to invade (peaceably) an Assize sermon graced by visiting judges in July 1839.¹⁵³ The route of the York liberation procession, claimed by the Northern Star to have comprised 20,000–30,000 people (possibly an inflated figure), was clearly described in the paper, and can be traced quite accurately.¹⁵⁴ Intriguingly, the O’Connor demonstration commenced approximately where Assize cavalcade traditionally ended—and vice-versa.

The Chartist starting point of the Castle gates, of course, primarily was governed by the visual pretence of O’Connor’s fustian-clad ‘liberation’. Upon greeting O’Connor, the 8–9 km procession route then traversed the four principal walled entry points to York (Walmgate, Monk, Bootham and Micklegate Bars), as if the demonstrators were symbolically taking possession of the ‘the most benighted and corrupt city in the empire’.¹⁵⁵ As can be seen from the map above, the route also took the rough form of a cross. The destination of the Knavesmire racecourse grand stand south of the City walls, it must be said, may have been determined by entirely practical imperatives. A large meeting place evidently was required, and Chartists often had great problems obtaining suitable accommodation for their political activities, particularly in a ‘priest-ridden’ city like York.¹⁵⁶ Nonetheless, the contestatory tendencies implicit in the geography of the liberation procession also extended to some of its most striking visual features.

An eighteenth-century engraving of John Carr’s grand stand at the York racecourse at Knavesmire. The ground floor façade survives. Source: York Castle Museum.

Consider O’Connor’s triumphal carriage, specially built for the occasion by York Chartists. Highly decorated, it was ‘composed of green velvet, on a pink velvet ground work’, was drawn by six horses, and was attended by postilions in green and white livery. The Star described the car as being in ‘the form of a conch-shell’, while another newspaper report said that it was in ‘the form of a cornucopia’.¹⁵⁷ Note again the use of the traditional colour of liberty and radicalism, as opposed to the livery of the local aristocracy. The conch-shell design is more interesting, as there is no obvious precedent in the radical-Chartist symbolic repertoire. However, John Watkins’s reverie written after his first visit to O’Connor’s cell did include a similar metaphor:

O’CONNOR! I have made my pilgrimage
Across the lonely mountain moor to thee;
Thoughts, hallow’d as my steps, did me engage
As onward where, enshrin’d with liberty,
Hope’s path I paced and won my scallop shell.
Oh holier than the ‘House of Houses’ far Is now the Castle with its altar cell.¹⁵⁸

The scallop shell reference would appear to allude to the tokens traditionally worn by pilgrims who journeyed to a supposed tomb of James the disciple at Compostela in Galicia.¹⁵⁹ Watkins also probably alluded to the opening lines of Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Passionate Man’s Pilgrimage’, a meditation possibly written while Raleigh was under the sentence of death in 1603, but commonly ascribed to his last hours in 1618: ‘Give me my scallop-shell of quiet,/ My staff of faith to walk upon’.¹⁶⁰ The image of a condemned hero certainly accords with O’Connor’s carefully cultivated prison persona in 1840–41.

The ornate triumphal car used by Daniel O’Connell in his release demonstration procession from Richmond Bridewell, Dublin, in 1844. Source: National Museum of Ireland.

Unfortunately, no visual representation of O’Connor’s triumphal carriage appears extant. However, we can get an idea of its general ornate form from the surviving triumphal car used by Daniel O’Connell upon his release (also staged) from Richmond Bridewell prison in Dublin in September 1844 (pictured above and below).¹⁶¹ In O’Connor’s case, the cornucopia description does suggests a spiral or horn-like design which would seem to have differed somewhat from O’Connell’s chariot (but note the scroll-like features of the latter). Perhaps O’Connor’s car was intended as a visual summons, calling the faithful to bear witness to his return? Traditional symbolic associations of the cornucopia with prosperity and fecundity and the conch with rebirth may appear tenuous in isolation, but they were not inconsistent with the return phase of the dungeon romance.¹⁶²

Daniel O’Connor’s 1844 liberation demonstration in Dublin. Source: *Illustrated London News*, 14 September 1844, p. 165.

Like a number of radical demagogues before him, O’Connor’s private life was unconventional: never married, he nonetheless is said to have fathered a number of children to different women (including the prominent actor Edward O’Connor Terry [1844–1912]); he may also have been romantically involved with the renowned actress Louisa Nisbett (1812–58).¹⁶³ According to W.E. Adams, there ‘was as much gossip in Chartist circles about the two as there were in Irish circles forty or fifty years later about Mr. Parnell and Mrs. O’Shea’.¹⁶⁴ But if O’Connor’s exotic chariot of deliverance invoked the libertine—the ‘Lion of Freedom’ roused for battle, his frugal attire seemed to imply a stoic, solitary and celibate incarceration. These paradoxical associations were further juxtaposed by fleeting ceremonies that had religious overtones. Piety played little part in O’Connor’s demagogic persona but when he appeared at the Castle gates he raised his arms and thanked god for his release; later in the day, when the liberation procession arrived at the racecourse, ‘several carrier pigeons, charged with important news of his appearance amongst the people, were let off’.¹⁶⁵ Given that this assignment was virtually redundant, the release of the birds must have implied the idea of resurrection to those present.

We should thus remember, as James Vernon has emphasised, that symbolic political meanings are ‘invariably ambiguous or diffuse’.¹⁶⁶ The plain cloth of labour no doubt worn by many at York in harmony with O’Connor might be seen as another radical inversion of the lavish costumes associated with civic pageantry. The potentially contradictory meanings latent in O’Connor’s suit and his triumphal carriage are also interesting in that they perhaps point to competing claims about what he personified to Chartists hailing from different locations. Too often the rank and file are treated as an impossibly homogenous body. The exotic triumphal car, manufactured by a small band of activists at one of Chartism’s English outposts, arguably accentuated the cultural divide between the gentleman leader and his radical constituency. Alternatively, the Mancunian gift of fustian not only temporarily undercut O’Connor’s gentlemanly identity, but fused the formative industrial and class connotations of that city to his person.

In symbolic terms, O’Connor’s appearance in fustian also had an obviously metamorphic quality that (once again) aligned with the basic narrative mechanics of the sentimental romance form. But was the costume his idea? There doesn’t seem to be any positive evidence on this point although an intriguing snippet buried in the Northern Star’s correspondents’ column in early July 1841 hints that it may have been suggested to O’Connor by a Manchester fustian cutter: ‘GEORGE FITTON.–His hint about the “fustian” shall be sent to Mr. O’Connor’.¹⁶⁷ In any event, O’Connor wrote about another kind of transformation of identity in his last prison letter. This contained a number of familiar ‘night-world’ motifs: exile, tyranny, solitude, the ever-present spectre of death. An incipient return to a superhuman demagogic identity, nonetheless, was also intimated:

TO THE
FUSTIAN JACKETS, BLISTERED
HANDS, & UNSHORN CHINS
MY BELOVED FRIENDS,

On the 11th of May I was snatched from you by the ruthless arm of tyranny; on Monday next I shall be restored to you by the hand of Providence, and upon that day you will judge for yourselves whether nearly sixteen months of solitary—mind, solitary—confinement in a condemned cell, in a felon’s prison, and treated brutally and in violation of every rule by which prison discipline is administered to the worst of felons, has damped my ardour, or slackened my zeal. On Monday you shall judge whether oppression has broken O’Connor’s heart, or O’Connor has broken oppression’s head. Till then, farewell. On leaving you, my motto was Universal Suffrage and no Surrender. On joining you once more, the same words will be upon my banner. O! Monday next will be a great and glorious day for Chartism and right. I shall, with God’s help, aided by the people’s prayers, gain a giant’s strength, ‘twixt this and the hour for which I pant.

Ever your fond and devoted friend,
To the death,
FEARGUS O’CONNOR
York Castle, 25th of the 16th month of con[-]
finement in the Condemned Cell.¹⁶⁸

While O’Connor found it convenient to continue the mock-fiction of his ‘Condemned Cell’, the images of bodily degeneration so important in the early phase of the dungeon romance are no longer apparent. Given the return to a virile demagogic identity hinted at the end of his letter, this element of the narrative had simply lost its relevance.

As might be expected, O’Connor spoke of the meaning of his extraordinary attire during the first public speech he made outside the Castle gates. His words at this point surely were carefully chosen, and primarily signalled his allegiance and loyalty to the Chartist body:

I have appeared, Brother Chartists and working men, amongst you in fustian, the emblem of your order, in order to convince you, at a single glance, that what I was when I left you, the same I do return to you.¹⁶⁹

O’Connor then re-deployed the metaphor of a dream, another significant rhetorical tactic in the cyclical progress of the dungeon romance:

I pass over what has occurred as a dream; I turn my back on York Castle; I forget the past, and shall devote my mind to the future … ‘Onward we conquer, backward and we fall’.¹⁷⁰

The nightmare had passed. Not only had O’Connor survived his life-sapping journey into the bowels of Whiggery; he had returned the same man, proudly dressed in a badge of militant Chartist allegiance. Unity, constancy, rebirth and a revitalised sense of political agency and momentum: these were the main political themes of the York liberation demonstration.

Synchronised Celebrations And Chartist Christenings

Throughout Britain Chartists replicated the festivities at York. A number of these local demonstrations were rather aggressive displays of political will: at Bromsgrove, the morning ‘was ushered in by the firing of cannons, which continued at intervals during the day’.¹⁷¹ Another martial tribute comprising ‘fourteen small cannon’ rent the air at Winlaton, where participants pledged themselves to the nca and unceasing agitation. The exact timing of the counter-pageantry at York was crucial to the authenticity of some of the local celebrations. At precisely one o’clock in the afternoon of 30 August, for example, a large crowd which had taken hold of Leicester’s marketplace ‘burst into a spontaneous shout, which was repeated three times three’.¹⁷² In Nottingham, at the same moment, a group of Chartists assembled in the King George on Horseback Hotel ‘commenced firing a fue de joie of small arms from the window looking into King Square, and kept this constantly up for an hour’.¹⁷³ The ‘college youths of Ashton’ also decided upon a boisterous gesture of solidarity when some scholars invaded the parish church and rang ‘a true and complete order in beautiful style, consisting of as many changes as Mr. O’Connor had been confined days and nights in the Whig Bastile—954’.¹⁷⁴ And at Boston, just as the clock struck one, a Chartist ‘backboner’ had his daughter, ‘aged fourteen years, christened Emma O’Connor O’Brien Frost’.¹⁷⁵

Historians have noted the spate of political christenings that occurred in the early 1840s, and their place within a broader radical-Chartist tradition.¹⁷⁶ Yet little comment has been made upon the specific historical context in which these political rites of passage were performed. In July 1840 O’Connor concluded one of his ‘LOOKING GLASS’ letters with the exhortation: ‘Let every man sing my Charter song, and call every child, whether boy or girl, that shall be born to you this year, Feargus, that we may keep a record of Whig villainy’.¹⁷⁷ Within weeks an infant was christened Charles Feargus O’Connor at York’s Roman Catholic chapel.¹⁷⁸ A few weeks later Ayrshire Chartists informed their brethren that they had also christened a young Feargus, ‘in order that ‘the patriot’s name may be transmitted, unimpaired, to posterity’.¹⁷⁹ ‘If our governors were wise’, wrote another, ‘they would learn something from these slight things’.¹⁸⁰

The ‘Young Patriots’ column which soon appeared in the Star duly recorded hundreds of political christenings—and some conflicts over the choice of name. ‘I think if you refer to the Bible you would not have named this child Feargus O’Connor’, two parents were admonished by a curate at Sprowston, near Norwich.¹⁸¹ Determined to ‘perpetuate his Chartist faith’ but not ‘prostrate his conscience to the hireling of the state’, a radical at Johnshaven on the Scottish coast ‘reserved his “two bairnies” for baptism’ until a Chartist missionary could perform the service about the time of O’Connor’s release.¹⁸² Volunteer transcriptions of Public Record Office birth registration indexes provide a way to systematically identify and map children named after Chartist leaders in the early 1840s and I’ve examined the phenomenon in much more detail in another essay. As can be seen in the chart below, the birth registration data I’ve gathered for 1840–42 demonstrates how the political christening phenomenon bloomed after O’Connor exhorted his followers to honour his struggle in this manner in July 1840.¹⁸³

Chart showing increase in children named after Chartist leaders in the early 1840s — Number of ‘Chartist’ birth registrations per quarter, England and Wales, 1840-42.

While O’Connor clearly was the most popular choice, hundreds of children also were named for John Frost in the 1840s (and Frost was, it should be recalled, a convicted traitor). The registration data for 1840–42 also shows that a significant number of parents took heed of O’Connor’s exhortation to commemorate his struggle regardless of the sex of their child—over 30% were girls. As the heatmap below shows, the christening phenomenon was most marked in Chartist heartlands in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Interestingly, birth registration records show that children continued to be named for O’Connor well after his death in 1855 (although some later nineteenth-century examples likely were named for parents or relatives originally christened after O’Connor).

Heatmap of Chartist Children, England and Wales, 1840-42

Fire, an emotive symbolic tool, was deployed in various ways on the evening of the York demonstration: at Kinross a torch lit procession was held, echoing the menacing and proscribed Chartist parades by night of late 1838. At Macclesfield, Hebden Bridge, Diss and Parkhead, Chartist meeting rooms were illuminated. So too was the Leicester activist Thomas Cooper’s shop window, which was further decorated with ‘arches of flowers, O’Connor portraits and inscriptions such as ‘“O’Connor our pride and glory”’.¹⁸⁴ Macclesfield radicals held a typical ‘grand festival’:

The rooms were decorated with evergreens, flowers and appropriate devices; the walls were hung with portraits of O’Connor, O’Brien, Emmet, and other illustrious patriots. In the evening the rooms were most brilliantly illuminated in every part. Dancing, patriotic speeches, and singing and recitations, were continued to a late hour.¹⁸⁵

Of Anglo-Irish heritage, Feargus Nonetheless claimed descent from ancient Irish royalty, and these adornments did have something of the trappings of a royal entry, despite the absence of the regal democrat himself.¹⁸⁶ This deficiency of all the synchronised celebrations, however, was soon to be remedied.

O’Connor’s Liberation Tours

In spite of his stated ill-health, in late 1841 O’Connor embarked upon one of the busiest speaking tours of his entire career. ‘I have plunged’, he declared, ‘into the agitation ocean’.¹⁸⁷ First he addressed a number of meetings in and around London, and then was given tremendous public welcomes in Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield. As 1841 drew to a close, O’Connor made his way through Chartist strongholds in Scotland before returning to industrial centres in northern England.¹⁸⁸ The following year further speaking tours were undertaken and the sum of these large urban rallies was the reinvigoration of the Chartist mass platform.¹⁸⁹

One of the initial public celebrations was held at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in London, where John Watkins moved the first resolution (he now lived in the capital). Other speakers included two of the stonemasons who had borne the National Petition in May, Armstrong Walton and Alexander Wilson.¹⁹⁰ Despite ‘a bad sore throat and violent inflammation of the chest’, O’Connor also made a point of addressing the masons at the Craven’s Head Tavern, Drury Lane, on 11 September 1841.¹⁹¹ In that month nearly 400 builders employed on the new Houses of Parliament commenced a long strike over the manner of the timing of their work and the conduct of a despised foreman.¹⁹² This particular industrial protest by a trade now closely associated with Chartism had obvious symbolic overtones. It should also be remembered that the 1842 Chartist National Petition, the most militant document of its kind and signed by well over three million Britons, was mobilised in the wake of the O’Connor liberation tours of 1841–42.

At the Birmingham mass rally in September 1841 the York ceremonial carriage was again used to ferry O’Connor through the city, this time to a hustings built near Holloway Head.¹⁹³ ‘It was not a procession’, boasted a Northern Star correspondent, ‘it was a town full of people’.¹⁹⁴ A palpable sense of triumph was bound up in O’Connor’s appearance in his liberation carriage: ‘The fiat has gone forth, and the assembled thousands at Birmingham have decided the question. CHARTISM IS OMNIPOTENT’.¹⁹⁵ A slightly chaotic scene ensued at Holloway Head, however, when part of the hustings suddenly collapsed and had to be hastily repaired.¹⁹⁶ Significantly, neither the Birmingham Journal or the Northern Star made any mention of O’Connor’s dress on this occasion although the Journal did note that the Wolverhampton stonemason and Chartist, Henry Candy, appeared on the platform attired in ‘his working dress’.¹⁹⁷

Paul Pickering suggests that O’Connor wore a fustian suit a number of times after the York liberation.¹⁹⁸ Yet in all the many Chartist mass rallies, indoor meetings, political dinners, tea-parties and balls that O’Connor attended in England and Scotland during the liberation tours of 1841–42, only one of the lengthy accounts of proceedings invariably published in the Star actually makes any mention of his attire.¹⁹⁹ This exception was the great demonstration held at Manchester approximately one month after O’Connor’s release from prison.

After preliminary celebrations at Eccles, O’Connor was escorted by a large crowd to Salford Crescent; a second procession originating at Stevenson Square took a route westwards similar to the McDouall-Collins liberation demonstration held the year before.²⁰⁰ The united celebration at Salford Crescent, opined the Star correspondent, ‘was almost without parallel in the history of Manchester’.²⁰¹ James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien and William Benbow, both also recently released from prison, took part in proceedings but O’Connor was the main attraction—despite purportedly having received a signed death threat from an Irish compatriot.²⁰² ‘I am here; where is the assassin?’, O’Connor boasted to great approbation.²⁰³ Five bands ultimately enlivened proceedings and banners and other visual devices abounded, including a large oil painting of ‘Feargus O’Connor, with Henry Hunt pointing from the clouds, and giving him the following charge—“Welcome Feargus! thou has been found faithful; now lead my people on to victory”’.²⁰⁴

‘I don’t lead; I am driven by the people’, O’Connor once remarked to William Lovett.²⁰⁵ This particular portrait had been commissioned in mid-1841 by some Mancunian Chartist women.²⁰⁶ In early July the Star noted:

They have been subscribing liberally themselves, and collecting from their friends, in order to raise a fund to enable them to do their share in due honour to Feargus O’Connor, Esq., at the coming demonstration. They have purchased a piece of canvas which measures eight feet by seven, and engaged a first-rate portrait painter to paint a full-length portrait of that gentleman, dressed in fustian, with the People’s Charter in his hand. At a short distance from him appears a large assemblage of people, the males dressed in fustian; and to his right there is an imitation of a castle; and at the corner of the picture there is a large figure representing Henry Hunt, the departed, coming through the clouds, and speaking to O’Connor.²⁰⁷

This account was published in the Star soon after George Fitton’s mysterious note to O’Connor about fustian was mentioned in its columns (and may have reflected a general understanding among Manchester Chartists in late June 1841 that O’Connor would appear in fustian upon the occasion of his release). It is not clear, however, whether the portrait was carried in procession at York as well as the later Manchester demonstration (the Manchester Female Union participated at York under a banner somewhat blandly inscribed ‘McDouall is our friend’).²⁰⁸ But note how O’Connor was expected to appear in fustian at York, like his supporters, and how the liberation scene was accurately imagined some time prior to the event. Once again, we see a glimpse of the ‘special knowledge’ embedded in the romance form.

Having seemingly pre-empted a central element of the festivities at York, Chartist women no doubt encouraged O’Connor to publicly acknowledge the children who had been christened in his honour. At Manchester he was presented with several infants bearing his name and at least one took part in the procession.²⁰⁹ The Manchester Guardian, no friend of Chartism, reported that

a child, not more than two years of age, called ‘the young patriot’ was carried in the procession, not like other patriots, in portraits, but in person, surrounded by garlands of flowers, and his name given as follows, in conspicuous characters:—‘Feargus O’Connor Frost O’Brien McDouall Hunt Taylor.’ The young patriot did not, however, enjoy the distinction forced upon him, and the restraint it involved, for he cried bitterly, and seemed to feel as much impatience as if he had read and understood the motto on one of the banners near him, namely, ‘Patience under undeserved suffering is a crime’.²¹⁰

Interestingly, the conch-shell carriage used at York and Birmingham was not to be seen at Manchester. And, According to the Leeds Mercury, the fustian suit O’Connor wore on this occasion was presented to him by ‘the Chartist ladies of Manchester’.²¹¹ Ritualised forms of flattery were significant elements of the demagogic leadership style O’Connor had inherited from Hunt, and O’Connor’s sole recorded appearance in fustian may simply have been a chivalrous act of demagogic diplomacy, rather than a concerted feature of the liberation tour. The final movement of the dungeon romance, moreover, was saved for O’Connor’s entry into Scotland.

The Finale: A Glasgow Wedding

Like McDouall and Collins before him, Feargus voyaged north from Liverpool by sea, arriving at Greenock on Saturday, 9 October 1841. On the following Monday Glasgow Chartists rose before dawn, and bands were sent crashing their way around the streets of Gorbals, Calton and Bridgeton to stir the populace into action. Later in the morning a large procession left Greenock for Port Glasgow. Veteran radicals chose to meet there ‘in consequence of many of them having witnessed the departure of Mr. O’Connor’s father and uncle from that port, when, forty-three years ago, they were consigned for seventeen months to Fort St. George’.²¹² Back at Greenock, Feargus was presented with another collection of infant namesakes (who were all ‘kissed very affectionately in rotation’) before he was taken to Glasgow on the Royal Tar, a steamer manned by a hand-picked Chartist crew, and bedecked with ever-greens, laurel, ‘branches of birch and Royal Oak’.²¹³ Note the use of laurel to distinguish the vessel, and its traditional associations with conquest, peace and rebirth.

While O’Connor spoke of his ‘changed appearance’—as opposed to his unchanged principles—the extensive Star reports of the meetings, processions and social festivities held about Glasgow again reveal nothing about his attire. However, another report of the outdoor mass-meeting held on Glasgow Green was published in the Glasgow Courier and subsequently reprinted in the Times. Although also hostile to O’Connor and Chartism, this account does reveal something of the fair-like atmosphere typical of larger Chartist gatherings:

The road to the hustings was lined on either side with standings and barrow-loads of apples, speldings, soda-water, gingerbread, and sundry bonbons; and there was not wanting the charms of minstrelsy to cheer on the knights of tomfoolery, for at the four entrances to the green were ballad-singers, with lusty lungs, singing—

‘Come away, come away’,
‘This is O’Connor’s day’;
‘We’ll give him a great demonstration’.²¹⁴

Revealingly, this account stated that O’Connor ‘appeared not, as many expected, in the fustian dress in which he has been meeting the English Chartists of late, but dressed like a gentleman—blue surtout, with velvet collar, and yellow vest’.²¹⁵ Evidently, Feargus had re-assumed his native demagogic identity—despite his earlier ceremonial use of fustian at York and Manchester.

Later that evening O’Connor consummated his pact with the people. At an indoor soirée attended by about 3,000 Chartists at Glasgow’s newly opened Bazaar Hall (now City Halls), three young women ascended the stage and addressed the liberated hero. After inevitable comparisons with William Wallace were relayed, Feargus was presented with a ‘truly massive and valuable’ diamond ring.²¹⁶ While a Mr. McFarlane, ‘for twenty years an exile for the advocacy of their principles’ was also rewarded for his constancy, O’Connor briefly retreated from centre-stage.²¹⁷ Then, after ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was sung by the assembly, he returned to thank his audience:

It requires a man to calm himself for a moment when he receives an impulse in the cause of liberty such as this. When the name of Wallace is made use of by female lips, and when the sons of Scotia are asked if they would not rather fight for their liberty than pine in slavery, what arguments have I to use to impress upon this large assembly the necessity of working out their political salvation? (Loud Cheers) As I have not words to express my feelings, I shall pass from this point, simply returning my heartfelt thanks to those ladies who have done me the honour to present me with these tokens of regard. I would say, that if before I was engaged to the people, now I am wedded to their cause. (Renewed cheering).²¹⁸

The romance of the Whig dungeon was thus resolved with the classic symbol of unity. Once again, the creative inspiration behind the fleeting ‘wedding’ ceremony is unclear.²¹⁹ But perhaps this question is immaterial: for here we are touching upon one of the most expressive moments of a long struggle.

Conclusion: Imagination In Action

Many years ago John and Barbara Hammond wrote that the ‘Chartist movement, like Owen’s movement, was imagination in action’.²²⁰ The romance of the Whig dungeon was a vulgar and often mendacious fantasy cultivated for an often illiterate and potentially insurrectionary audience. Yet the Chartist quest—like any romance—spoke an enticing language of purpose and hope. Despite the litany of failure synonymous with Chartism, the cyclical nature of this politicised narrative form helped manufacture a sense of triumph over repression in 1841, and then played an important role in Chartism’s first major revival in 1841–42. While there is little evidence that O’Connor or his staff on the Northern Star planned various threads of the dungeon romance, there is much evidence of the reflexive use of formulaic motifs in response to circumstance—and not only by O’Connor and his lieutenants, but also by the Chartist rank and file.

The question of whether Chartism exhibited a working-class consciousness in the early 1840s goes beyond this essay. It is clear, however, that O’Connor did not don fustian regularly in public in 1841–42—or thereafter. This absence appears to hold for the most propitious of junctures. Newspaper accounts of the demonstration accompanying the delivery of the 1842 National Petition to the House of Commons, for example, make no mention of O’Connor’s attire—despite the reprised role of trade delegates in bearing this famously gigantic document through the streets of London. Nor does O’Connor appear to have worn fustian during the mass Chartist trial at Lancaster in 1843—despite many of his co-defendants being relatively obscure working-class activists from Manchester and surrounding towns. O’Connor’s somewhat unexpected election to the Commons as a member for Nottingham in 1847 offered another apparently spurned chance to don the plain cloth of labour—this time in parliament itself. Finally, none of the detailed press reports of the momentous Chartist demonstration at Kennington Common on 10 April 1848, in the wake of revolutionary tumult in Europe and fears of the same in London, suggest that O’Connor’s dress was unconventional. Had he worn fustian on any of these occasions, it almost certainly would have been reported: the York and Manchester liberation demonstrations in 1841, after all, were purely Chartist counter-cultural assemblies. Like Henry Hunt before him—and Ernest Jones after—Feargus O’Connor retained a gentlemanly leadership persona until the end.