The Literature of Struggle

At its height, during the 1830s and 40s, Chartism inspired a prodigious literary output, based on its own newspapers and journals. While some Chartist political writings have been reprinted, the fiction of the movement has been largely neglected. Chartist stories represent a unique moment in literary history, when the radical political energies of a mass movement were fused with popular narrative forms. The result was a vital, accessible and popular fiction, informed by an awareness that Chartis