The Romance of the ‘Whig Dungeon’

ABSTRACT

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 accompanying 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.

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 mobilisation to fluctuating trade cycles and attendant material hardship.¹Edward Royle, ‘Chartism’ in Anne Digby and C.H. Feinstein, eds, New directions in economic and social history, Basingstoke, 1989, pp. 157–58; Mark Hovell, History of the Chartist movement, Manchester, 1918, pp. 251–52; W.W. Rostow, The British economy of the nineteenth century, London, 1948, ch. 5. See also G. Kitson Clark, ‘Hunger and politics in 1842’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1953, pp. 355–74. Ros­tow’s well-known social tension chart only looked at Chartism in very broad terms that failed to recognise the extent of the repression pursued by the Mel­bourne Whig administration. Cole’s summation, however, illustrated the early consensus: ‘Hun­ger and hatred—these were the forces that that made Chartism a mass movement of the British working class.’²G.D.H. Cole, Chartist Portraits, New York, 1965, p. 1. By the 1970s and 1980s, 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 occasionally challenged by other forms of Char­tist and near Char­tist organisation, the NCA was the backbone of the movement throughout the ‘hungry forties’, somewhat 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,³For a representative selection of work on these themes see David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists, London, 1975; Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist Struggle’, Past and Present, No. 91, 1981, pp. 109–39; various essays in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830–1860, London, 1982; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: popular politics in the industrial revolution, New York, 1984; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist movement, London, 1991. perhaps the most important contribution to our understanding of its historical significance was James Ep­stein’s The lion of freedom (1982), a revisionist inter­pret­ation of Fear­gus O’Con­nor’s leadership of the early Char­tist movement.⁴James Epstein, The lion of freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the early Chartist movement, 1832–42, London, 1982. For O’Connor see also Donald Read and Eric Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor: Irishman and Chartist, London, 1961; Glenn Airey, ‘Feargus O’Connor 1842–1855: a study in Chartist Leadership’, PhD thesis, Staffordshire University, 2003; Paul A. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor: a political life, Monmouth, 2008.

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.⁵Unsympathetic accounts of O’Con­nor’s leadership include R.G. Gammage, History of the Chartist movement, 1837–1854 [1894], New York, 1969 reprint; Hovell, The Chartist movement; Julius West, A history of the Chartist movement, London, 1920; Cole, Chartist portraits, ch. 11; J.T. Ward, Chartism, London, 1973. 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.⁶Royle, ‘Chartism’, p. 158; Dorothy Thompson, ‘Chartism and the historians’, in Outsiders: class, gender and nation, London, 1993, p. 28. Sim­ilarly, until the late twentieth century O’Con­nor’s intriguing but ill-fated Land Plan tended to be interpreted as a hopelessly idealistic and ‘reaction­ary’ 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).⁷See, for example, Hovell, The Chartist movement, pp. 267-84. For more recent scholarship see A.M. Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company, Newton Abbot, 1970; Thompson, The Chartists, ch. 12; Malcolm Chase, ‘“We Wish only to Work for Ourselves”: the Chartist Land Plan’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, eds, Living and learning: essays in honour of J.F.C. Harrison, Aldershot, 1996, pp. 133–48; Malcolm Chase, ‘“Wholesome Object Lessons”: the Chartist Land Plan in retrospect’, English Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 475, 2003, pp. 59–85. 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.⁸For O’Connor’s illness and institutionalisation see L.M. Geary, ‘O’Connorite bedlam: Feargus and his grand-nephew, Arthur’, Medical History, Vol. 34, 1990, pp. 125–43.

Epstein, on the other hand, 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.⁹Epstein, Lion of freedom, especially ch. 6. The son and nephew of prominent Uni­ted Irish revolutionaries,¹⁰Frank MacDermot, ‘Arthur O’Connor’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 15, 1966–67, pp. 48–69. O’Con­nor successfully con­tested the seat of Cork in 1832 campaigning on a Repeal, anti-tithe and radical-democratic platform.¹¹Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, ch. 3; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 1. 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.¹²Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, ch. 4; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 1. Subsequently, O’Con­nor became prominent in English 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.¹³Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, ch. 6; Epstein, Lion of freedom, chs. 1, 3. For Hunt see John Belchem, ‘Orator Hunt’: Henry Hunt and English working-class radicalism, Oxford, 1985.

More than any contemporary, O’Con­nor exploited the rapidly expanding railway net­work to fulfil unprecedented public speaking schedules.¹⁴Philip Howell, ‘“Diffusing the light of liberty”: the geography of political lecturing in the Chartist movement’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 21, 1995, pp. 23–38. O’Conn­or was involved in a railway collision at Mas­borough in March 1843, apparently narrowly escaping serious injury. See Northern Star, 25 March 1843, p. 5. Equally important was his 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.¹⁵James Epstein, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 21, 1976, pp. 51–97; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 2. Note that the Northern Star, named after its United Irish forebear, was published in London from late 1844. Another theme explored by Epstein in The lion of freedom and refined in later work co-authored with John Bel­chem was the apparent paradox at the heart of radical-Chartist political culture—its reliance upon gentleman leaders.¹⁶John Belchem and James Epstein, ‘The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited’, Social History, Vol. 22, 1997, pp. 174–93.

In striking contrast to Char­tist precepts, ‘O’Con­nor was not elected to the platform, he was unpaid and possessed no formal man­date.’¹⁷Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 92. 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.¹⁸On late Char­tist leadership see also Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the romance of Politics, 1819–69, Oxford, 2003. 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. As Epstein explains, 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 speeches and published mis­sives.¹⁹Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 93. 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 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.²⁰Very generally, see Walter Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, London, 1982.

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.²¹Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 4; Thompson, ‘Chartism and the historians’, p. 19. 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 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 the movement’s literature and poetry has been recognised for some time.²²For bibliographic information see J.F.C. Harrison and Dorothy Thompson, eds, Bibliography of the Chartist movement, 1837–1976, Hassocks, 1978; Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, The Chartist movement: a new annotated bibliography, London, 1995. For Chartist poetry see Martha Vicinus, The industrial muse: a study of nineteenth century British working-class literature, London, 1974; Brian Maidment, The poorhouse fugitives: self-taught poets and poetry in mid-Victorian Britain, Manchester, 1987; Anne F. Janowitz, Lyric and labour in the romantic tradition, Cambridge, 1998, chs. 4–6; Timothy Randall, ‘Chartist poetry and song’ in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds, The Chartist legacy, Rendlesham, 1999, especially pp. 177–79. See also various essays published under the heading ‘The Poetics of Chartism’ in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2001. Romantic forms of popular political discourse and identity in Vic­to­rian Eng­land also became key 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.²³Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The language of Chartism’, in Epstein and Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience, ch. 1; this essay was revised and republished as ‘Rethinking Chartism’ in Stedman Jones’s Languages of class: studies in English working class history, 1832–1982, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 90–178. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1848–1914, Cambridge, 1991; James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815–1867, Cambridge, 1993; Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England, Cambridge, 1994, part 3. 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.²⁴Northrop Frye, The secular scripture: a study in the structure of romance, Cambridge MA, 1976, p. 54.

‘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’.²⁵Northrop Frye, Anatomy of criticism: four essays, Princeton, 1957, p. 187. 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’.²⁶Frye, Anatomy of criticism, p. 33 and else­where. This description fits O’Con­nor’s public persona perfectly. R.G. Gam­mage, the Char­tist activist whose pioneering 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’.²⁷Gammage, History, p. 45. O’Con­nor’s booming voice, Gam­mage added, ‘out-Stentor’d even Stentor him­self’.²⁸Gammage, History, p. 45. ‘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.²⁹Cited in Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 34.

‘FEARGUS, of high-born patriotic zeal, of fearless gait, and matchless fortitude’, gushed an unknown Chartist poet.³⁰Northern Star, 24 October 1840, p. 3. O’Con­nor’s gentlemanly visage, his mastery of the stagecraft of the mass platform, and the considerable political capital manifest in his family’s close links with the 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 quite 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.³¹George Loveless, The victims of Whiggery … [1837], London 1969 rep.; William Ashton, A lecture on the evil of emigration and transportation, Sheffield, 1838. I am indebted to Dr John Knott for providing me with a copy of this pamphlet. John Frost, The horrors of convict life [1856], Hobart, 1973 rep. See also Andrew Charles Messner, ‘Chartist political culture in Britain and Colonial Australia, c. 1835–60’, PhD thesis, University of New England, 2000, ch. 6. On the other hand, in the mid-to-late 1840s the Land Plan rhetorically was construed as a collective journey of deliverance to the ‘promised land’.³²See, for example, Northern Star, 22 August 1846, p. 8; Chase, ‘“We Wish only to Work for Ourselves”’, pp.  136–37. 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—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.³³Christopher Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 24, 1979, pp. 189–236; Jacqueline Fellague Ariouat, ‘Rethinking Partisanship in the Conduct of the Chartist Trials, 1839–48’, Albion, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1998, pp. 596–621. George White’s political recalcitrance was rewarded with three separate gaol terms in 1840, 1843–44 and 1848–49.³⁴Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, p. 225. 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.³⁵Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, pp. 218–19. 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 1840.³⁶Gammage, History, p. 213; Thompson, The Chartists, pp. 141,  280–81. Holberry appears to have contracted tuberculosis at the Northallerton House of Correction (where initially he was imprisoned). 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 final throes as a mass movement.³⁷See David Williams, John Frost: a study in Chartism, Cardiff, 1939.

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’.³⁸Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 90. ‘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.³⁹Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 212.

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 other 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’.⁴⁰James Epstein, ‘Narrating liberty’s defense: T.J. Wooler and the law’ in Radical expression: political language, ritual and symbol in England, 1790–1850, Oxford, 1994, pp. 29–69. ‘More than occasionally’, Epstein continues, ‘authorities were embarrassed as radicals turned their tables on their accusers’.⁴¹Epstein, ‘Narrating liberty’s defense’, p. 32. Outside the metropolis, however, such victories rarely were won. One of many prosecutions made against Char­tists 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’.⁴²Yorkshireman, 21 March 1840 cited in A.J. Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, York History, Vol. 2, 1975, p. 66. 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.⁴³Leeds Mercury, 21 March 1840 (Supp.), p. 2; Northern Star, 21 March 1840, p. 1; Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, p. 66. 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.⁴⁴Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 211.

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.⁴⁵For the jury list see Leeds Mercury, 21 March 1840 (Supp.), p. 2. Supported by a vocal group of York activists (who Cole­ridge threatened to remove from the courtroom), 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.⁴⁶Northern Star, 21 March 1840, p. 1.

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 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’.⁴⁷Gammage, History, p. 158. For McDouall see Paul A. Pickering and Stephen Roberts, ‘Pills, pamphlets and politics: the career of Peter Murray McDouall’, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. 11, 1997, pp. 34–43. 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.⁴⁸Thomas Dunning, ‘Reminisces of Thomas Dunning’ in David Vincent, ed., Testaments of radicalism: memoirs of working class politicians, 1790–1885, London, 1977, p. 140.

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.⁴⁹See Frye, The secular scripture, pp. 97–104. 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.⁵⁰Northern Star, 23 May 1840, p. 4. 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.⁵¹Times, 26 May 1840, p. 3. 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.⁵²Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, p. 74. For the Minster fire see also Owen Chadwick, ‘From 1822 until 1916’ in G.E. Aylmer and Reginald Cant, eds, A history of York Minster, Oxford, 1977, p. 280. 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’.⁵³Northern Star, 23 May 1840, p. 4. Emphasis in original. ‘No surer mode of attracting the public sympathy towards Mr. O’Con­nor’, noted the Times, ‘could have been devised than this cruel treatment’.⁵⁴Times, 26 May 1840, p. 3. 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.⁵⁵Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 268.

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’.⁵⁶Northern Star, 30 May 1840, p. 1. Indignant protest meetings were held at Car­lisle, Brad­ford, Liver­sedge, Roch­dale, Bir­ming­ham and else­where.⁵⁷Northern Star, 30 May 1840, pp. 1, 8. 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 demanding O’Con­nor’s immediate liber­ation.⁵⁸Leeds Mercury, 6 June 1840, p. 7. 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.⁵⁹Northern Star, 30 May 1840, p. 8.

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 parliamentary radicals including Thomas Dun­combe and Thomas Wak­ley, spoke out on the matter in the Com­mons on 27 May.⁶⁰For the petition text see Northern Star, 30 May 1840, p. 3; see also ‘Treatment of Mr. O’Connor’, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), (House of Commons), Vol. 54, 27 May 1840, cols. 648–56. Home Off­ice Under-Secretary Fox Maule attempted to defuse the situation by deflecting responsibility for O’Con­nor’s treatment on to local authorities.⁶¹Leeds Mercury, 30 May 1840, p. 4; Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 1. Maule made little headway, however, against the popular opinion that the Whig administration was pursuing a malicious course against the Char­tist leader.⁶²See Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 6 for reprints of criticisms made by the Manchester Times, Satirist, Examiner, Spectator, Dublin Freeman’s Journal, Standard, World, Weekly Dispatch, Sun, Weekly Chronicle, Sunday Times, United Services Gazette, Argus and Sheffield Iris.

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.⁶³Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. 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.⁶⁴See Normanby’s statement in the Lords on O’Connor’s prison conditions in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), (House of Lords), Vol. 54, 22 June 1840, cols. 1366–68. See also Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4; Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 91; Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, pp. 70–73; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 218. 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’.⁶⁵W.J. O’Neill Daunt, Eighty-five years of Irish history, London, 1888, p. 159. ‘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’.⁶⁶Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. 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.⁶⁷Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4.

William Hill and Joshua Hob­son, the Star’s publisher who also visited O’Con­nor regularly, were important allies in the rendering of the dungeon romance.⁶⁸Northern Star, 2 January 1841, p. 1. Although Home Sec­re­tary Lord Nor­manby originally decreed that O’Con­nor was not to write political articles from prison, he ultimately had extensive printed contact with the rank and file through the Star’s pages.⁶⁹Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 218. Why this interaction was tolerated is not clear, but O’Con­nor’s experience of incarceration plainly was mild compared to the great majority of Char­tist prisoners.⁷⁰York’s visiting Magistrates seem to have regarded themselves powerless in this respect, and recommended to the Home Office that O’Con­nor be removed to a distant gaol to prevent contact with Hill and Hobson. See Public Records Office, Home Office Papers, Class 52/47, E. Harper to Normanby, 21 June 1840.

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.⁷¹Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. Nor­manby’s view, however, was that none of the representations made on O’Con­nor’s behalf warranted his transfer to another prison.⁷²Times, 26 May 1840, p. 3. 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.⁷³Northern Star, 2 May 1840, pp. 3, 8; 9 May 1840, p. 8. 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’.⁷⁴Antony Taylor, ‘Modes of political expression and working-class radicalism 1848–1874: the London and Manchester examples’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 1992, pp. 162–74; Vernon, Politics and the people, p. 280. One of the characteristics of the dungeon romance, moreover, was contempt for prosaic reality.

Just before he was gaoled at York 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’.⁷⁵Northern Star, 16 May 1840, p. 6. 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).⁷⁶Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 61. Messner, ‘Chartist Political Culture in Britain and Colonial Australia’, ch. 3. In his final pre-imprisonment letter 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.⁷⁷Northern Star, 16 May 1840, p. 6.

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.⁷⁸Frye, Secular scripture, pp. 102–03. 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).⁷⁹Robin Evans, The fabrication of virtue: English prison architecture, 1750–1840, Cambridge, 1982, p. 255. Royal Commission on historical monuments, York Castle: an illustrated history, London, 1973. 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.⁸⁰Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 7.

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.⁸¹Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 7. Emphasis in original.

‘We pledged ourselves it should be so’, wrote Hill in the process of breaking his vow.⁸²Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 7. 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.⁸³Northern Star, 29 August 1840, p. 4.

‘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.⁸⁴For Normanby see R. Davenport-Hines, ‘Phipps, Constantine Henry, first marquess of Normanby (1797–1863)’ in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford, 2004, Vol. 40, pp. 176–78. He ‘aimed a dagger at my heart’ claimed Fear­gus of his aristocratic foe, ‘and having failed to murder me, he then assaulted my honour’.⁸⁵Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7. See also 18 July 1840, pp. 6–7; 1 August 1840, p. 4; 8 August 1840, p. 1. 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 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.⁸⁶Hovell, The Chartist movement, pp. 70–73; H. Treble, ‘O’Connor, O’Connell and the attitudes of Irish immigrants towards Chartism in the north of England, 1838–48’ in J. Butt and I.F. Clarke, eds, The Victorians and social protest: a symposium, Newton Abbot, 1973, especially pp. 34–43; Epstein, Lion of freedom, pp. 126–28. 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).⁸⁷Stephen Roberts, ‘Who wrote to the Northern Star?’ in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts, eds, The duty of discontent: essays for Dorothy Thompson, London, 1995, p. 57. In Sep­tem­ber 1840 Wat­kins abused his neighbour as a ‘four-eyed, haggard, tyrant’ who had won ‘Dan’s broad, brazen smile’.⁸⁸Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 7. 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’.⁸⁹Northern Star, 4 July 1840, p. 4. Normanby’s novels included Matilda: a tale of the day, London, 1825, Yes and no: a tale of the day, London, 1828 and The contrast, London, 1832. ‘Vile tyrant-boss! Hot­spur’s scorn’d fop art thou’, spat Wat­kins rather more vehemently.⁹⁰Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 7.

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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.⁹¹William Lovett, Life and struggles of William Lovett in his pursuit of bread, knowledge and freedom, London, 1920 rep., Vol. 2, p. 252; Paul A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 168, 170. 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’.⁹²Northern Star, 4 April 1840, p. 6; 18 April 1840, p. 3; 25 April 1840, p. 2; 2 May 1840, p. 3; 9 May 1840, p. 3. For ‘SCRIPTURAL CHARTISM’ see Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 7; 19 September 1840, p. 7; 3 October 1840, p. 6; 31 October 1840, p. 7. For ‘CHARTISM FROM SHAKESPEARE’ see Northern Star, 25 April 1840, p. 7; 2 May 1840, p. 7; 9 May 1840, p. 7; 23 May 1840, p. 7; 6 June 1840, p. 7. 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’.⁹³John Watkins, John Watkins to the people in answer of Feargus O’Connor … [1844] New York, 1986 rep. For ‘MAN WORSHIP’ see Northern Star, 7 January 1843, p. 7; 14 January 1843, p. 4; 21 January 1843, p. 7; 28 January 1843, p. 7; 11 February 1844, p. 7.

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.⁹⁴Watkins, John Watkins to the people, p. 4.

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.⁹⁵Watkins, John Watkins to the people, p. 4.

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’.⁹⁶Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 7. ‘This piece of petty vexation’, of course, ‘annoyed the noble O’Con­nor’.⁹⁷Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 7. Watkins visited O’Connor again in early 1841. See Northern Star, 20 February 1841, p. 4. Not to be denied, Wat­kins rapidly composed a fawning sonnet to ‘that man of men!’ which Wil­liam Hill duly published in October 1840.⁹⁸Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 3.

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’.⁹⁹Paul A. Pickering, ‘Chartism and the “Trade of Agitation” in early Victorian Britain’, History, 76, 1991, pp. 221–37. 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 1839.¹⁰⁰Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 86. 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.¹⁰¹Northern Star, 16 January 1841, p. 5; 6 March 1841, p. 5. Later, medals celebrating the O’Con­nor liberation ceremony were distributed with the paper (see image below).¹⁰²Northern Star, 20 November 1841, p. 5; 11 December 1841, p. 4. 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.¹⁰³See the advertisement in Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 6. For similar literature upon the Newport leaders’ trial for treason see John Warner and W.A. Gunn, John Frost and the Chartist movement in Monmouthshire, Newport, 1939, pp. 19–20. 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.¹⁰⁴Northern Star, 31 October 1840, p. 5. 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.

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 more than 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’.¹⁰⁵Northern Star, 27 June 1840, p. 7. 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.¹⁰⁶Northern Star, 27 June 1840, p. 7.

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 Frye calls the ‘special knowledge’ embedded in the romance form.¹⁰⁷Frye, The secular scripture, pp. 6–7.

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.¹⁰⁸Compare Gammage, History, pp. 195–96; Hovell, The Chartist movement, ch. 15; Ward, Chartism, ch. 6; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 7; Thompson, The Chartists, ch. 10. 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).¹⁰⁹Parliamentary Debates, 22 June 1840, cols. 1365–68; Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 4; 11 July 1840, pp. 6–8. 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.¹¹⁰Northern Star, 18 July 1840, p. 6. This proposal was rejected by delegates, although O’Connor later established the short-lived Chartist daily, the Evening Star, in 1842. See Epstein, Lion of freedom, pp. 80–81; Thompson, The Chartists, p. 54. 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.¹¹¹Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7.

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.¹¹²Iorwerth Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past and Present, No. 44, 1969, p. 98; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 260. For Hill’s criticisms of O’Connor see Northern Star, 16 January 1841, p. 5; 3 April 1841, p. 4. 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.¹¹³Northern Star, 3 April 1841, p. 7; 24 April 1841, p. 7. 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’.¹¹⁴Northern Star, 1 May 1841, p. 1. 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’.¹¹⁵Northern Star, 1 May 1841, pp. 1–2. See also 8 May 1841, pp. 1–2.

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.¹¹⁶Northern Star, 16 January 1841, p. 1; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 268. 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’.¹¹⁷Northern Star, 23 January 1841, pp. 1, 5, 8. See also Times, 23 January 1841, p. 5. As James Epstein notes, this manoeuvre effectively ‘marked the end of the LPRA’.¹¹⁸Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 270.

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.¹¹⁹For typical demonstrations see Northern Star, 1 August 1840, pp. 8, 1; 12 September 1840, pp. 1, 6; 19 September 1840, p. 1; 26 September 1840, pp. 7–8; 3 October 1840, pp. 7–8; 10 October 1840, p. 3; 24 October 1840, p. 1; 11 November 1840, p. 1. 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.¹²⁰Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. Marching back to Carpen­ters’ Hall in Man­ches­ter, ‘considerable groaning’ and ‘loud cheers’ were given as the throng passed the Man­ches­ter Guard­ian and Adver­tiser offices respec­tively.¹²¹Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. At the Ex­change, ‘the “nobs” came running out to witness the sight’.¹²²Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. 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’.¹²³Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7.

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’.¹²⁴Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. Clearly, ‘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.¹²⁵Northern Star, 29 May 1841, p. 4. 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’.¹²⁶Northern Star, 29 May 1841, p. 1. 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.¹²⁷‘Political Offenders’, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), (House of Commons), 25 May 1841, cols. 741–64. 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.¹²⁸Northern Star, 5 June 1841, p. 3.

Daniel O’Connell, who supported Dun­combe’s motion in debate, managed to infuriate Cha­rtists again by leaving the house before the division took place.¹²⁹Northern Star, 5 June 1841, p. 7.

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).¹³⁰An anonymous correspondent was assured that O’Con­nor received the paper regularly. See Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 5. 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 1841.¹³¹Northern Star, 3 April 1841, p. 3. For Chartist organisation and activity see A.J. Peacock, ‘Chartism in York’, York History, Vol. 3, n.d., pp. 118–46. 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.¹³²Times, 31 August 1841, p. 5; Leeds Mercury, 28 August 1841, pp. 4, 7. ‘MR. O’CON­NOR has broken loose sooner than we wished, or than he had originally intended’, a curious note in the Star subsequently revealed.¹³³Northern Star, 11 September 1841, p. 5. 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’.¹³⁴Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6.

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.¹³⁵Paul A. Pickering, ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present, No. 112, 1986, pp. 144–62. This 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.¹³⁶Pickering, ‘Class without words’, p. 162.

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.¹³⁷E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class, Harmondsworth, 1991, ch. 16 and elsewhere. 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’.¹³⁸Pickering, ‘Class without words’, pp. 159–60.

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’.¹³⁹Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. 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.¹⁴⁰Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 8. 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.¹⁴¹Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. Each delegate 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”’.¹⁴²Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6.

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.¹⁴³Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 8. See generally Malcolm Chase, ‘“Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist Challenges at the Parliamentary Polls, 1839–1860’, Labour History Review, Vol. 74, No. 1, April 2009, pp. 64–89. 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’.¹⁴⁴Leeds Mercury, 28 March 1840, p. 7; Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners’, p. 216. At Northallerton, however, the Irish­man found himself working a treadmill and subjected to the ‘silent system’.¹⁴⁵Northern Star, 6 March 1841, p. 7. Mar­tin had unsuccessfully petitioned Nor­manby to be transferred from Northallerton to York Castle, although he was later removed to Lan­cas­ter Gaol. See Northern Star, 13 June 1840, p. 1; 25 July 1840, p. 2; 19 December 1840, p. 5. 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’.¹⁴⁶Times, 24 October 1840, p. 6; Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English radicalism before 1850’ in Epstein and Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience, p. 134.

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.¹⁴⁷Compare Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 85; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 173. Hovell, The Chartist movement, p. 222 confuses the first and second trial. A.J. Peacock does not mention the first prosecution in either of his articles on O’Connor’s imprisonment and York Chartism. For the proceedings see Northern Star, 27 July 1839, p. 6; Charter, 27 July 1839, p. 418; Leeds Mercury, 20 July 1839, p. 5. The case was brought by the Guardians of the Warminster Union over a reprinted report which claimed that a child inmate had eaten his own flesh before starving to death. See Northern Star, 22 December 1838, p. 7. 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.¹⁴⁸Leeds Mercury, 21 March 1840 (Supp.), p. 2. 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.¹⁴⁹For assize cavalcade and ceremonial procedures see J.M. Beattie, Crime and the courts in England, 1660–1800, Oxford, 1986, pp. 314–18. 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’.¹⁵⁰Leeds Mercury, 13 July 1839, p. 5. 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’.¹⁵¹Leeds Mercury, 7 March 1840, p. 5. 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 1839.¹⁵²Times, 6 August 1839, p. 6; Gammage, History, p. 149; Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle’, p. 131. 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.¹⁵³Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. 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 approximately eight-kilometre 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’.¹⁵⁴Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 4. As can be seen from the map above, the two-hour 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.¹⁵⁵Peacock, ‘Chartism in York’, pp. 119–20. Nonetheless, the contestatory tendencies implicit in the geography of the liberation procession also extended to some of its most striking visual features.

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’.¹⁵⁶Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6; Peacock, ‘Chartism in York’, p. 130. 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—¹⁵⁷Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 3.

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.¹⁵⁸Jonathon Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of mediæval religion, London, 1975, p. 174 and elsewhere. Wat­kins also probably alluded to the opening lines of Walter Raleigh’s ‘The Pas­sion­ate Man’s Pil­grim­age’, a meditation possibly written while Raleigh was held 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’.¹⁵⁹See A.M.C. Latham, ed., The poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, London, 1951, pp. 140–42. The image of a condemned hero certainly accords with O’Con­nor’s carefully cultivated prison persona in 1840–41.

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).¹⁶⁰Times, 6 September 1844, pp. 5–6; O. MacDonagh, The emancipist: Daniel O’Connell, 1830-47, London, 1989, pp. 247–52; see also G. Owens, ‘Constructing the image of Daniel O’Connell’, History Ireland, accessed 2 December 2020. 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.¹⁶¹A. de Vries, ed., Dictionary of symbols and imagery, Amsterdam, 1974, pp. 110, 419.

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]); Feargus may also have been romantically involved with the renowned actress Louisa Nis­bett (1812–58).¹⁶²James Epstein, ‘O’Connor, Feargus Edward (1796?-1855)’ in Matthew and Harrison, eds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 41, p. 463; James Dunkerley, Americana: the Americas in the World, around 1850, London, 2000, p. 460. 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’.¹⁶³W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a social atom [1903], New York, 1967 rep., p. 208. James Epstein and John Belchem, ‘The Gentleman Leader Revisited’ in James Epstein, In practice: studies in the language and culture of popular politics in modern Britain, Stanford, 2003, p. 132. 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’.¹⁶⁴Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. 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’.¹⁶⁵Vernon, Politics and the people, p. 114. 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’.¹⁶⁶Northern Star, 3 July 1841, p. 8; Fitton was born c. 1788 and in 1841 lived in Great Mount Street, Manchester (very close to the site of the Peter­loo Massacre). His wife Sarah and three elder daughters residing at the same address were also fustian cutters. Digitised Image (Ancestry.com), Household of George Fitton, 1841 Census, England, Civil Parish of Deansgate, Manchester, Class HO107, Piece 570, Book 13, Folio 31, Page 11, GSU roll 438722. For Fitton’s trade activity see also Northern Star, 20 April 1839, p. 6; 31 October 1846, p. 2. 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.¹⁶⁷Northern Star, 28 August 1841, p. 1.

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 his first public speech 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.¹⁶⁸Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6.

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’.¹⁶⁹Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6.

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’.¹⁷⁰Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. 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’.¹⁷¹Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. 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’.¹⁷²Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. 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’.¹⁷³Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. 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’.¹⁷⁴Northern Star, 11 September 1841, p. 5.

Historians have noted the spate of political christenings that occurred in the early 1840s, and their place within a broader radical-Chartist tradition.¹⁷⁵ Jones, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 24; Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist movement, p. 124; Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, pp. 40–42. 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’.¹⁷⁶Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7. Within weeks an infant was christened Charles Fear­gus O’Connor at York’s Roman Catho­lic chapel.¹⁷⁷Northern Star, 1 August 1840, p. 6. 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’.¹⁷⁸Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 4. ‘If our governors were wise’, wrote another, ‘they would learn something from these slight things’.¹⁷⁹Northern Star, 29 August 1840, p. 5.

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.¹⁸⁰Northern Star, 1 May 1841, p. 6. 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.¹⁸¹Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. 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 1840.¹⁸²Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7.

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).

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”’.¹⁸³Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. 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.¹⁸⁴Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1.

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.¹⁸⁵O’Neill Daunt, Eighty-five years, p. 165; Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 9–10. For the pageantry of royal entries generally see Robert Withington, English pageantry: an historical outline, 2 vols, New York, 1963 rep. and D.M. Bergeron, English civic pageantry, 1558–1642, London, 1971. This deficiency of all the synchronised celebrations, however, was soon 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’.¹⁸⁶Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. 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.¹⁸⁷Posters promoting O’Connor’s public entries into Birmingham and Halifax can be found in Public Record Office, Home Office Disturbance Papers, Classes 45/52 and 45/43. The following year further speaking tours were undertaken and the sum of these large urban rallies was the reinvigoration of the Char­tist mass platform.¹⁸⁸See Public Record Office, Home Office Disturbance Papers, Class 45/254 for similar demonstrations at Nottingham in February 1842.

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.¹⁸⁹Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. Despite ‘a bad sore throat and violent inflammation of the chest’, O’Con­nor also made a point of addressing masons at the Craven’s Head Tavern, Drury Lane, on 11 September 1841.¹⁹⁰Northern Star, 18 September 1841, p. 1. 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.¹⁹¹David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848, Cambridge, 1982, p. 180. 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.¹⁹²Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 1. ‘It was not a procession’, boasted a Northern Star correspondent, ‘it was a town full of people’.¹⁹³Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 5. 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’.¹⁹⁴Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 1. Emphasis in original. At Hol­lo­way Head, however, a slightly chaotic scene ensued when part of the hustings suddenly collapsed and had to be hastily repaired.¹⁹⁵Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 5; Birmingham Journal, 25 September 1841, p. 5. 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 activist, Henry Candy, appeared on the platform attired in ‘his working dress’.¹⁹⁶Birmingham Journal, 25 September 1841, p. 5.

Paul Pickering suggests that O’Con­nor wore a fustian suit a number of times after the York liberation.¹⁹⁷Pickering, ‘Class without words’, p. 156. 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.¹⁹⁸For liberation demonstrations O’Connor attended in England and Scotland in 1841 see Northern Star, 11 September 1841, pp. 1,p. 5, 8; 18 September 1841, p. 1; 25 September 1841, pp. 1, 4–5; 2 October 1841, pp. 4, 6, 8; 9 October 1841, pp. 1, 5; 16 October 1841, pp. 4–5; 23 October 1841, pp. 3–4; 30 October 1841, p. 3; 6 November 1841, pp. 1, 7; 13 November 1841, p. 7; 20 November 1841, p. 3; 27 November 1841, p. 5; 4 December 1841, pp. 4, 6; 11 December 1841, pp. 4, 6; 24 December 1841, p. 1. 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.¹⁹⁹Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. The united celebration at Sal­ford Cres­cent, opined the Star correspondent, ‘was almost without parallel in the history of Manchester’.²⁰⁰Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. 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.²⁰¹Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. O’Connor did not publicly reveal the name of his foe. John Belchem has noted that both Hunt and O’Connor deployed supposed assassination threats for rhetorical purposes. See Belchem, ‘1848: Feargus O’Connor and the collapse of the mass platform’ in Epstein and Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience, p. 282. For O’Brien see Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: a political biography of Bronterre O’Brien, London, 1971; for Benbow see Iorwerth Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the concept of the general strike’, Past and Present, No. 63, 1974, pp. 132–71. Recently released Man­ches­ter Cha­rtist activists Wil­liam Jack­son, John Live­sey and Wil­liam Bar­ker were also formally honoured during the festivities. ‘I am here; where is the assassin?,’ O’Con­nor boasted to great approbation.²⁰²Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. 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”’.²⁰³Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6.

‘I don’t lead; I am driven by the people,’ O’Con­nor once remarked to Wil­liam Lov­ett.²⁰⁴A. Briggs, ‘The local background of Chartism’ in Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist studies, London, 1974, p. 10; Pickering, ‘Class without words’, pp. 150–51; M. Vicinus, ‘“To live free or die”: the relationship between strategy and style in Chartist speeches, 1838-39’, Style, 10, 1976, pp. 487–88. This particular portrait had been commissioned in mid-1841 by some Man­cunian Char­tist women.²⁰⁵Northern Star, 10 July 1841, p. 1. 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.²⁰⁶Northern Star, 10 July 1841 p. 1. According to this account, mottoes had yet to be inscribed on the portrait. Finding that the women had ‘stolen a march upon them’, Manchester’s fustian jackets hastily commissioned the same artist to execute a similar sized portrait of James Bron­terre O’Brien for the liberation demonstration. See Northern Star, 17 July 1841, p. 1; 2 October 1841, p. 6.

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’).²⁰⁷Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. 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.²⁰⁸Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. 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’.²⁰⁹Manchester Guardian reprinted in the Examiner, 2 October 1841. A banner bearing the same motto was used at the York liberation demonstration. Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6.

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’.²¹⁰Leeds Mercury, 2 October 1841, p. 7. Emphasis in original. 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’.²¹¹Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 4. 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’.²¹²Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 4. 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’.²¹³Times, 14 October 1841, p. 5. The report estimated the crowd at 10,000.

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’.²¹⁴Times, 14 October 1841, p. 5. 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.²¹⁵Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 5. 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.²¹⁶McFarlane, who hailed from Condorrat, was presented with a ‘handsome ebony staff, silver mounted, and a sovereign for travelling expenses’. He appears to have been Thomas McFarlane, one of the insurgent Stirlingshire weavers transported to New South Wales in late 1820. See Margaret Macfarlane and Alastair Macfarlane, The Scottish radicals tried and transported to Australia for treason in 1820, Sydney, 1975, pp. 38–40. 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).²¹⁷Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 5.

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.²¹⁸The issue of presenting O’Con­nor with an undisclosed ‘testimonial of esteem’ had been discussed at a public meeting convened by Chartist women at Glasgow in late September 1841. An opinion was voiced that ‘O’Connor would not accept any present; but the ladies present declared their determination of compelling him to accept a present from the lasses of the Queen of Chartism’ (Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. ⁠1). Note that Peter Murray McDouall and his wife had been given ‘massive’ and ‘splendid’ gold rings by members of the Aberdeen Female Union during their visit there in late 1840. See Northern Star, 19 December 1840, p. 2. 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’.²¹⁹J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The age of the Chartists, 1832–1854: a study of discontent, London, 1930, p. 276. 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.

© 2018, Andrew Messner. All rights reserved.

Endnotes

• 1
  Edward Royle, ‘Chartism’ in Anne Digby and C.H. Feinstein, eds, New directions in economic and social history, Basingstoke, 1989, pp. 157–58; Mark Hovell, History of the Chartist movement, Manchester, 1918, pp. 251–52; W.W. Rostow, The British economy of the nineteenth century, London, 1948, ch. 5. See also G. Kitson Clark, ‘Hunger and politics in 1842’, Journal of Modern History, Vol. 25, No. 4, 1953, pp. 355–74. ↩︎
• 2
  G.D.H. Cole, Chartist Portraits, New York, 1965, p. 1. ↩︎
• 3
  For a representative selection of work on these themes see David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists, London, 1975; Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist Struggle’, Past and Present, No. 91, 1981, pp. 109–39; various essays in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830–1860, London, 1982; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: popular politics in the industrial revolution, New York, 1984; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist movement, London, 1991. ↩︎
• 4
  James Epstein, The lion of freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the early Chartist movement, 1832–42, London, 1982. For O’Connor see also Donald Read and Eric Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor: Irishman and Chartist, London, 1961; Glenn Airey, ‘Feargus O’Connor 1842–1855: a study in Chartist Leadership’, PhD thesis, Staffordshire University, 2003; Paul A. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor: a political life, Monmouth, 2008. ↩︎
• 5
  Unsympathetic accounts of O’Con­nor’s leadership include R.G. Gammage, History of the Chartist movement, 1837–1854 [1894], New York, 1969 reprint; Hovell, The Chartist movement; Julius West, A history of the Chartist movement, London, 1920; Cole, Chartist portraits, ch. 11; J.T. Ward, Chartism, London, 1973. ↩︎
• 6
  Royle, ‘Chartism’, p. 158; Dorothy Thompson, ‘Chartism and the historians’, in Outsiders: class, gender and nation, London, 1993, p. 28. ↩︎
• 7
  See, for example, Hovell, The Chartist movement, pp. 267-84. For more recent scholarship see A.M. Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company, Newton Abbot, 1970; Thompson, The Chartists, ch. 12; Malcolm Chase, ‘“We Wish only to Work for Ourselves”: the Chartist Land Plan’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, eds, Living and learning: essays in honour of J.F.C. Harrison, Aldershot, 1996, pp. 133–48; Malcolm Chase, ‘“Wholesome Object Lessons”: the Chartist Land Plan in retrospect’, English Historical Review, Vol. 118, No. 475, 2003, pp. 59–85. ↩︎
• 8
  For O’Connor’s illness and institutionalisation see L.M. Geary, ‘O’Connorite bedlam: Feargus and his grand-nephew, Arthur’, Medical History, Vol. 34, 1990, pp. 125–43. ↩︎
• 9
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, especially ch. 6. ↩︎
• 10
  Frank MacDermot, ‘Arthur O’Connor’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 15, 1966–67, pp. 48–69. ↩︎
• 11
  Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, ch. 3; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 1. ↩︎
• 12
  Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, ch. 4; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 1. ↩︎
• 13
  Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, ch. 6; Epstein, Lion of freedom, chs. 1, 3. For Hunt see John Belchem, ‘Orator Hunt’: Henry Hunt and English working-class radicalism, Oxford, 1985. ↩︎
• 14
  Philip Howell, ‘“Diffusing the light of liberty”: the geography of political lecturing in the Chartist movement’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 21, 1995, pp. 23–38. O’Conn­or was involved in a railway collision at Mas­borough in March 1843, apparently narrowly escaping serious injury. See Northern Star, 25 March 1843, p. 5. ↩︎
• 15
  James Epstein, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 21, 1976, pp. 51–97; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 2. Note that the Northern Star, named after its United Irish forebear, was published in London from late 1844. ↩︎
• 16
  John Belchem and James Epstein, ‘The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited’, Social History, Vol. 22, 1997, pp. 174–93. ↩︎
• 17
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 92. ↩︎
• 18
  On late Char­tist leadership see also Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the romance of Politics, 1819–69, Oxford, 2003. ↩︎
• 19
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 93. ↩︎
• 20
  Very generally, see Walter Ong, Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, London, 1982. ↩︎
• 21
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 4; Thompson, ‘Chartism and the historians’, p. 19. ↩︎
• 22
  For bibliographic information see J.F.C. Harrison and Dorothy Thompson, eds, Bibliography of the Chartist movement, 1837–1976, Hassocks, 1978; Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, The Chartist movement: a new annotated bibliography, London, 1995. For Chartist poetry see Martha Vicinus, The industrial muse: a study of nineteenth century British working-class literature, London, 1974; Brian Maidment, The poorhouse fugitives: self-taught poets and poetry in mid-Victorian Britain, Manchester, 1987; Anne F. Janowitz, Lyric and labour in the romantic tradition, Cambridge, 1998, chs. 4–6; Timothy Randall, ‘Chartist poetry and song’ in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds, The Chartist legacy, Rendlesham, 1999, especially pp. 177–79. See also various essays published under the heading ‘The Poetics of Chartism’ in Victorian Poetry, Vol. 39, No. 2, 2001. ↩︎
• 23
  Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The language of Chartism’, in Epstein and Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience, ch. 1; this essay was revised and republished as ‘Rethinking Chartism’ in Stedman Jones’s Languages of class: studies in English working class history, 1832–1982, Cambridge, 1983, pp. 90–178. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1848–1914, Cambridge, 1991; James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815–1867, Cambridge, 1993; Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England, Cambridge, 1994, part 3. ↩︎
• 24
  Northrop Frye, The secular scripture: a study in the structure of romance, Cambridge MA, 1976, p. 54. ↩︎
• 25
  Northrop Frye, Anatomy of criticism: four essays, Princeton, 1957, p. 187. ↩︎
• 26
  Frye, Anatomy of criticism, p. 33 and else­where. ↩︎
• 27
  Gammage, History, p. 45. ↩︎
• 28
  Gammage, History, p. 45. ↩︎
• 29
  Cited in Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 34. ↩︎
• 30
  Northern Star, 24 October 1840, p. 3. ↩︎
• 31
  George Loveless, The victims of Whiggery … [1837], London 1969 rep.; William Ashton, A lecture on the evil of emigration and transportation, Sheffield, 1838. I am indebted to Dr John Knott for providing me with a copy of this pamphlet. John Frost, The horrors of convict life [1856], Hobart, 1973 rep. See also Andrew Charles Messner, ‘Chartist political culture in Britain and Colonial Australia, c. 1835–60’, PhD thesis, University of New England, 2000, ch. 6. ↩︎
• 32
  See, for example, Northern Star, 22 August 1846, p. 8; Chase, ‘“We Wish only to Work for Ourselves”’, pp.  136–37. ↩︎
• 33
  Christopher Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 24, 1979, pp. 189–236; Jacqueline Fellague Ariouat, ‘Rethinking Partisanship in the Conduct of the Chartist Trials, 1839–48’, Albion, Vol. 29, No. 4, 1998, pp. 596–621. ↩︎
• 34
  Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, p. 225. ↩︎
• 35
  Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, pp. 218–19. ↩︎
• 36
  Gammage, History, p. 213; Thompson, The Chartists, pp. 141,  280–81. Holberry appears to have contracted tuberculosis at the Northallerton House of Correction (where initially he was imprisoned). ↩︎
• 37
  See David Williams, John Frost: a study in Chartism, Cardiff, 1939. ↩︎
• 38
  Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 90. ↩︎
• 39
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 212. ↩︎
• 40
  James Epstein, ‘Narrating liberty’s defense: T.J. Wooler and the law’ in Radical expression: political language, ritual and symbol in England, 1790–1850, Oxford, 1994, pp. 29–69. ↩︎
• 41
  Epstein, ‘Narrating liberty’s defense’, p. 32. ↩︎
• 42
  Yorkshireman, 21 March 1840 cited in A.J. Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, York History, Vol. 2, 1975, p. 66. ↩︎
• 43
  Leeds Mercury, 21 March 1840 (Supp.), p. 2; Northern Star, 21 March 1840, p. 1; Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, p. 66. ↩︎
• 44
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 211. ↩︎
• 45
  For the jury list see Leeds Mercury, 21 March 1840 (Supp.), p. 2. ↩︎
• 46
  Northern Star, 21 March 1840, p. 1. ↩︎
• 47
  Gammage, History, p. 158. For McDouall see Paul A. Pickering and Stephen Roberts, ‘Pills, pamphlets and politics: the career of Peter Murray McDouall’, Manchester Region History Review, Vol. 11, 1997, pp. 34–43. ↩︎
• 48
  Thomas Dunning, ‘Reminisces of Thomas Dunning’ in David Vincent, ed., Testaments of radicalism: memoirs of working class politicians, 1790–1885, London, 1977, p. 140. ↩︎
• 49
  See Frye, The secular scripture, pp. 97–104. ↩︎
• 50
  Northern Star, 23 May 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 51
  Times, 26 May 1840, p. 3. ↩︎
• 52
  Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, p. 74. For the Minster fire see also Owen Chadwick, ‘From 1822 until 1916’ in G.E. Aylmer and Reginald Cant, eds, A history of York Minster, Oxford, 1977, p. 280. ↩︎
• 53
  Northern Star, 23 May 1840, p. 4. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
• 54
  Times, 26 May 1840, p. 3. ↩︎
• 55
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 268. ↩︎
• 56
  Northern Star, 30 May 1840, p. 1. ↩︎
• 57
  Northern Star, 30 May 1840, pp. 1, 8. ↩︎
• 58
  Leeds Mercury, 6 June 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 59
  Northern Star, 30 May 1840, p. 8. ↩︎
• 60
  For the petition text see Northern Star, 30 May 1840, p. 3; see also ‘Treatment of Mr. O’Connor’, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), (House of Commons), Vol. 54, 27 May 1840, cols. 648–56. ↩︎
• 61
  Leeds Mercury, 30 May 1840, p. 4; Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 1. ↩︎
• 62
  See Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 6 for reprints of criticisms made by the Manchester Times, Satirist, Examiner, Spectator, Dublin Freeman’s Journal, Standard, World, Weekly Dispatch, Sun, Weekly Chronicle, Sunday Times, United Services Gazette, Argus and Sheffield Iris. ↩︎
• 63
  Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 64
  See Normanby’s statement in the Lords on O’Connor’s prison conditions in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), (House of Lords), Vol. 54, 22 June 1840, cols. 1366–68. See also Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4; Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 91; Peacock, ‘Feargus O’Connor at York’, pp. 70–73; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 218. ↩︎
• 65
  W.J. O’Neill Daunt, Eighty-five years of Irish history, London, 1888, p. 159. ↩︎
• 66
  Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 67
  Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 68
  Northern Star, 2 January 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 69
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 218. ↩︎
• 70
  York’s visiting Magistrates seem to have regarded themselves powerless in this respect, and recommended to the Home Office that O’Con­nor be removed to a distant gaol to prevent contact with Hill and Hobson. See Public Records Office, Home Office Papers, Class 52/47, E. Harper to Normanby, 21 June 1840. ↩︎
• 71
  Northern Star, 6 June 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 72
  Times, 26 May 1840, p. 3. ↩︎
• 73
  Northern Star, 2 May 1840, pp. 3, 8; 9 May 1840, p. 8. ↩︎
• 74
  Antony Taylor, ‘Modes of political expression and working-class radicalism 1848–1874: the London and Manchester examples’, PhD thesis, University of Manchester, 1992, pp. 162–74; Vernon, Politics and the people, p. 280. ↩︎
• 75
  Northern Star, 16 May 1840, p. 6. ↩︎
• 76
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 61. Messner, ‘Chartist Political Culture in Britain and Colonial Australia’, ch. 3. ↩︎
• 77
  Northern Star, 16 May 1840, p. 6. ↩︎
• 78
  Frye, Secular scripture, pp. 102–03. ↩︎
• 79
  Robin Evans, The fabrication of virtue: English prison architecture, 1750–1840, Cambridge, 1982, p. 255. Royal Commission on historical monuments, York Castle: an illustrated history, London, 1973. ↩︎
• 80
  Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 81
  Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 7. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
• 82
  Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 83
  Northern Star, 29 August 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 84
  For Normanby see R. Davenport-Hines, ‘Phipps, Constantine Henry, first marquess of Normanby (1797–1863)’ in H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, eds, Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford, 2004, Vol. 40, pp. 176–78. ↩︎
• 85
  Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7. See also 18 July 1840, pp. 6–7; 1 August 1840, p. 4; 8 August 1840, p. 1. ↩︎
• 86
  Hovell, The Chartist movement, pp. 70–73; H. Treble, ‘O’Connor, O’Connell and the attitudes of Irish immigrants towards Chartism in the north of England, 1838–48’ in J. Butt and I.F. Clarke, eds, The Victorians and social protest: a symposium, Newton Abbot, 1973, especially pp. 34–43; Epstein, Lion of freedom, pp. 126–28. ↩︎
• 87
  Stephen Roberts, ‘Who wrote to the Northern Star?’ in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts, eds, The duty of discontent: essays for Dorothy Thompson, London, 1995, p. 57. ↩︎
• 88
  Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 89
  Northern Star, 4 July 1840, p. 4. Normanby’s novels included Matilda: a tale of the day, London, 1825, Yes and no: a tale of the day, London, 1828 and The contrast, London, 1832. ↩︎
• 90
  Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 91
  William Lovett, Life and struggles of William Lovett in his pursuit of bread, knowledge and freedom, London, 1920 rep., Vol. 2, p. 252; Paul A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 168, 170. ↩︎
• 92
  Northern Star, 4 April 1840, p. 6; 18 April 1840, p. 3; 25 April 1840, p. 2; 2 May 1840, p. 3; 9 May 1840, p. 3. For ‘SCRIPTURAL CHARTISM’ see Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 7; 19 September 1840, p. 7; 3 October 1840, p. 6; 31 October 1840, p. 7. For ‘CHARTISM FROM SHAKESPEARE’ see Northern Star, 25 April 1840, p. 7; 2 May 1840, p. 7; 9 May 1840, p. 7; 23 May 1840, p. 7; 6 June 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 93
  John Watkins, John Watkins to the people in answer of Feargus O’Connor … [1844] New York, 1986 rep. For ‘MAN WORSHIP’ see Northern Star, 7 January 1843, p. 7; 14 January 1843, p. 4; 21 January 1843, p. 7; 28 January 1843, p. 7; 11 February 1844, p. 7. ↩︎
• 94
  Watkins, John Watkins to the people, p. 4. ↩︎
• 95
  Watkins, John Watkins to the people, p. 4. ↩︎
• 96
  Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 97
  Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 7. Watkins visited O’Connor again in early 1841. See Northern Star, 20 February 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 98
  Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 3. ↩︎
• 99
  Paul A. Pickering, ‘Chartism and the “Trade of Agitation” in early Victorian Britain’, History, 76, 1991, pp. 221–37. ↩︎
• 100
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 86. ↩︎
• 101
  Northern Star, 16 January 1841, p. 5; 6 March 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 102
  Northern Star, 20 November 1841, p. 5; 11 December 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 103
  See the advertisement in Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 6. For similar literature upon the Newport leaders’ trial for treason see John Warner and W.A. Gunn, John Frost and the Chartist movement in Monmouthshire, Newport, 1939, pp. 19–20. ↩︎
• 104
  Northern Star, 31 October 1840, p. 5. ↩︎
• 105
  Northern Star, 27 June 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 106
  Northern Star, 27 June 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 107
  Frye, The secular scripture, pp. 6–7. ↩︎
• 108
  Compare Gammage, History, pp. 195–96; Hovell, The Chartist movement, ch. 15; Ward, Chartism, ch. 6; Epstein, Lion of freedom, ch. 7; Thompson, The Chartists, ch. 10. ↩︎
• 109
  Parliamentary Debates, 22 June 1840, cols. 1365–68; Northern Star, 20 June 1840, p. 4; 11 July 1840, pp. 6–8. ↩︎
• 110
  Northern Star, 18 July 1840, p. 6. This proposal was rejected by delegates, although O’Connor later established the short-lived Chartist daily, the Evening Star, in 1842. See Epstein, Lion of freedom, pp. 80–81; Thompson, The Chartists, p. 54. ↩︎
• 111
  Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 112
  Iorwerth Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past and Present, No. 44, 1969, p. 98; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 260. For Hill’s criticisms of O’Connor see Northern Star, 16 January 1841, p. 5; 3 April 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 113
  Northern Star, 3 April 1841, p. 7; 24 April 1841, p. 7. ↩︎
• 114
  Northern Star, 1 May 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 115
  Northern Star, 1 May 1841, pp. 1–2. See also 8 May 1841, pp. 1–2. ↩︎
• 116
  Northern Star, 16 January 1841, p. 1; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 268. ↩︎
• 117
  Northern Star, 23 January 1841, pp. 1, 5, 8. See also Times, 23 January 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 118
  Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 270. ↩︎
• 119
  For typical demonstrations see Northern Star, 1 August 1840, pp. 8, 1; 12 September 1840, pp. 1, 6; 19 September 1840, p. 1; 26 September 1840, pp. 7–8; 3 October 1840, pp. 7–8; 10 October 1840, p. 3; 24 October 1840, p. 1; 11 November 1840, p. 1. ↩︎
• 120
  Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 121
  Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 122
  Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 123
  Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 124
  Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 125
  Northern Star, 29 May 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 126
  Northern Star, 29 May 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 127
  ‘Political Offenders’, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), (House of Commons), 25 May 1841, cols. 741–64. ↩︎
• 128
  Northern Star, 5 June 1841, p. 3. ↩︎
• 129
  Northern Star, 5 June 1841, p. 7. ↩︎
• 130
  An anonymous correspondent was assured that O’Con­nor received the paper regularly. See Northern Star, 12 September 1840, p. 5. ↩︎
• 131
  Northern Star, 3 April 1841, p. 3. For Chartist organisation and activity see A.J. Peacock, ‘Chartism in York’, York History, Vol. 3, n.d., pp. 118–46. ↩︎
• 132
  Times, 31 August 1841, p. 5; Leeds Mercury, 28 August 1841, pp. 4, 7. ↩︎
• 133
  Northern Star, 11 September 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 134
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 135
  Paul A. Pickering, ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present, No. 112, 1986, pp. 144–62. ↩︎
• 136
  Pickering, ‘Class without words’, p. 162. ↩︎
• 137
  E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class, Harmondsworth, 1991, ch. 16 and elsewhere. ↩︎
• 138
  Pickering, ‘Class without words’, pp. 159–60. ↩︎
• 139
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 140
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 8. ↩︎
• 141
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 142
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 143
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 8. See generally Malcolm Chase, ‘“Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist Challenges at the Parliamentary Polls, 1839–1860’, Labour History Review, Vol. 74, No. 1, April 2009, pp. 64–89. ↩︎
• 144
  Leeds Mercury, 28 March 1840, p. 7; Godfrey, ‘The Chartist prisoners’, p. 216. ↩︎
• 145
  Northern Star, 6 March 1841, p. 7. Mar­tin had unsuccessfully petitioned Nor­manby to be transferred from Northallerton to York Castle, although he was later removed to Lan­cas­ter Gaol. See Northern Star, 13 June 1840, p. 1; 25 July 1840, p. 2; 19 December 1840, p. 5. ↩︎
• 146
  Times, 24 October 1840, p. 6; Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English radicalism before 1850’ in Epstein and Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience, p. 134. ↩︎
• 147
  Compare Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, p. 85; Epstein, Lion of freedom, p. 173. Hovell, The Chartist movement, p. 222 confuses the first and second trial. A.J. Peacock does not mention the first prosecution in either of his articles on O’Connor’s imprisonment and York Chartism. For the proceedings see Northern Star, 27 July 1839, p. 6; Charter, 27 July 1839, p. 418; Leeds Mercury, 20 July 1839, p. 5. The case was brought by the Guardians of the Warminster Union over a reprinted report which claimed that a child inmate had eaten his own flesh before starving to death. See Northern Star, 22 December 1838, p. 7. ↩︎
• 148
  Leeds Mercury, 21 March 1840 (Supp.), p. 2. ↩︎
• 149
  For assize cavalcade and ceremonial procedures see J.M. Beattie, Crime and the courts in England, 1660–1800, Oxford, 1986, pp. 314–18. ↩︎
• 150
  Leeds Mercury, 13 July 1839, p. 5. ↩︎
• 151
  Leeds Mercury, 7 March 1840, p. 5. ↩︎
• 152
  Times, 6 August 1839, p. 6; Gammage, History, p. 149; Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle’, p. 131. ↩︎
• 153
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 154
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 155
  Peacock, ‘Chartism in York’, pp. 119–20. ↩︎
• 156
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6; Peacock, ‘Chartism in York’, p. 130. ↩︎
• 157
  Northern Star, 17 October 1840, p. 3. ↩︎
• 158
  Jonathon Sumption, Pilgrimage: an image of mediæval religion, London, 1975, p. 174 and elsewhere. ↩︎
• 159
  See A.M.C. Latham, ed., The poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, London, 1951, pp. 140–42. ↩︎
• 160
  Times, 6 September 1844, pp. 5–6; O. MacDonagh, The emancipist: Daniel O’Connell, 1830-47, London, 1989, pp. 247–52; see also G. Owens, ‘Constructing the image of Daniel O’Connell’, History Ireland, accessed 2 December 2020. ↩︎
• 161
  A. de Vries, ed., Dictionary of symbols and imagery, Amsterdam, 1974, pp. 110, 419. ↩︎
• 162
  James Epstein, ‘O’Connor, Feargus Edward (1796?-1855)’ in Matthew and Harrison, eds, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 41, p. 463; James Dunkerley, Americana: the Americas in the World, around 1850, London, 2000, p. 460. ↩︎
• 163
  W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a social atom [1903], New York, 1967 rep., p. 208. James Epstein and John Belchem, ‘The Gentleman Leader Revisited’ in James Epstein, In practice: studies in the language and culture of popular politics in modern Britain, Stanford, 2003, p. 132. ↩︎
• 164
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 165
  Vernon, Politics and the people, p. 114. ↩︎
• 166
  Northern Star, 3 July 1841, p. 8; Fitton was born c. 1788 and in 1841 lived in Great Mount Street, Manchester (very close to the site of the Peter­loo Massacre). His wife Sarah and three elder daughters residing at the same address were also fustian cutters. Digitised Image (Ancestry.com), Household of George Fitton, 1841 Census, England, Civil Parish of Deansgate, Manchester, Class HO107, Piece 570, Book 13, Folio 31, Page 11, GSU roll 438722. For Fitton’s trade activity see also Northern Star, 20 April 1839, p. 6; 31 October 1846, p. 2. ↩︎
• 167
  Northern Star, 28 August 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 168
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 169
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 170
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 171
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 172
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 173
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 174
  Northern Star, 11 September 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 175
  Jones, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 24; Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist movement, p. 124; Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, pp. 40–42. ↩︎
• 176
  Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 177
  Northern Star, 1 August 1840, p. 6. ↩︎
• 178
  Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 4. ↩︎
• 179
  Northern Star, 29 August 1840, p. 5. ↩︎
• 180
  Northern Star, 1 May 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 181
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 182
  Northern Star, 11 July 1840, p. 7. ↩︎
• 183
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 184
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 185
  O’Neill Daunt, Eighty-five years, p. 165; Read and Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 9–10. For the pageantry of royal entries generally see Robert Withington, English pageantry: an historical outline, 2 vols, New York, 1963 rep. and D.M. Bergeron, English civic pageantry, 1558–1642, London, 1971. ↩︎
• 186
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 187
  Posters promoting O’Connor’s public entries into Birmingham and Halifax can be found in Public Record Office, Home Office Disturbance Papers, Classes 45/52 and 45/43. ↩︎
• 188
  See Public Record Office, Home Office Disturbance Papers, Class 45/254 for similar demonstrations at Nottingham in February 1842. ↩︎
• 189
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 190
  Northern Star, 18 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 191
  David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848, Cambridge, 1982, p. 180. ↩︎
• 192
  Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 193
  Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 194
  Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 1. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
• 195
  Northern Star, 25 September 1841, p. 5; Birmingham Journal, 25 September 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 196
  Birmingham Journal, 25 September 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 197
  Pickering, ‘Class without words’, p. 156. ↩︎
• 198
  For liberation demonstrations O’Connor attended in England and Scotland in 1841 see Northern Star, 11 September 1841, pp. 1,p. 5, 8; 18 September 1841, p. 1; 25 September 1841, pp. 1, 4–5; 2 October 1841, pp. 4, 6, 8; 9 October 1841, pp. 1, 5; 16 October 1841, pp. 4–5; 23 October 1841, pp. 3–4; 30 October 1841, p. 3; 6 November 1841, pp. 1, 7; 13 November 1841, p. 7; 20 November 1841, p. 3; 27 November 1841, p. 5; 4 December 1841, pp. 4, 6; 11 December 1841, pp. 4, 6; 24 December 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 199
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 200
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 201
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. O’Connor did not publicly reveal the name of his foe. John Belchem has noted that both Hunt and O’Connor deployed supposed assassination threats for rhetorical purposes. See Belchem, ‘1848: Feargus O’Connor and the collapse of the mass platform’ in Epstein and Thompson, eds, The Chartist experience, p. 282. For O’Brien see Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: a political biography of Bronterre O’Brien, London, 1971; for Benbow see Iorwerth Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the concept of the general strike’, Past and Present, No. 63, 1974, pp. 132–71. Recently released Man­ches­ter Cha­rtist activists Wil­liam Jack­son, John Live­sey and Wil­liam Bar­ker were also formally honoured during the festivities. ↩︎
• 202
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 203
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 204
  A. Briggs, ‘The local background of Chartism’ in Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist studies, London, 1974, p. 10; Pickering, ‘Class without words’, pp. 150–51; M. Vicinus, ‘“To live free or die”: the relationship between strategy and style in Chartist speeches, 1838-39’, Style, 10, 1976, pp. 487–88. ↩︎
• 205
  Northern Star, 10 July 1841, p. 1. ↩︎
• 206
  Northern Star, 10 July 1841 p. 1. According to this account, mottoes had yet to be inscribed on the portrait. Finding that the women had ‘stolen a march upon them’, Manchester’s fustian jackets hastily commissioned the same artist to execute a similar sized portrait of James Bron­terre O’Brien for the liberation demonstration. See Northern Star, 17 July 1841, p. 1; 2 October 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 207
  Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 208
  Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 209
  Manchester Guardian reprinted in the Examiner, 2 October 1841. A banner bearing the same motto was used at the York liberation demonstration. Northern Star, 4 September 1841, p. 6. ↩︎
• 210
  Leeds Mercury, 2 October 1841, p. 7. Emphasis in original. ↩︎
• 211
  Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 212
  Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 4. ↩︎
• 213
  Times, 14 October 1841, p. 5. The report estimated the crowd at 10,000. ↩︎
• 214
  Times, 14 October 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 215
  Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 216
  McFarlane, who hailed from Condorrat, was presented with a ‘handsome ebony staff, silver mounted, and a sovereign for travelling expenses’. He appears to have been Thomas McFarlane, one of the insurgent Stirlingshire weavers transported to New South Wales in late 1820. See Margaret Macfarlane and Alastair Macfarlane, The Scottish radicals tried and transported to Australia for treason in 1820, Sydney, 1975, pp. 38–40. ↩︎
• 217
  Northern Star, 16 October 1841, p. 5. ↩︎
• 218
  The issue of presenting O’Con­nor with an undisclosed ‘testimonial of esteem’ had been discussed at a public meeting convened by Chartist women at Glasgow in late September 1841. An opinion was voiced that ‘O’Connor would not accept any present; but the ladies present declared their determination of compelling him to accept a present from the lasses of the Queen of Chartism’ (Northern Star, 2 October 1841, p. ⁠1). Note that Peter Murray McDouall and his wife had been given ‘massive’ and ‘splendid’ gold rings by members of the Aberdeen Female Union during their visit there in late 1840. See Northern Star, 19 December 1840, p. 2. ↩︎
• 219
  J.L. and Barbara Hammond, The age of the Chartists, 1832–1854: a study of discontent, London, 1930, p. 276. ↩︎