When the teenage Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, only about one in five men over 21 had the vote – those who owned a certain amount of property – and, ironically in view of the sex of the monarch, no women at all. That denied the vote to most working people – those labouring in factories twelve hours a day for low wages in horrible conditions; farm-workers out in all weathers from dawn to dusk for a pittance; and individual workers like shoemakers, tailors or London weavers. They had more freedom, but their livelihoods depended on the vagaries of a volatile market. To make matters worse the government cracked down severely on attempts to form unions, as the deportation in 1834 of the ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’ from Dorset, convicted simply of swearing an illegal oath. And in the same year a new hated Poor Law came into force to reduce the cost of feeding the unemployed, which led to the dread Victorian spectre of the workhouse.
In 1838, the year after Victoria ascended the throne for the first of her 64 years, a movement sprang up that gave voice to the need for change. It was called the Charter. It had six major demands, five of which we take for granted now, though they weren’t finally achieved until 1918, nearly a hundred years ago. These ‘Chartists’ wanted every adult man to have the vote, a secret ballot at election time, equal-sized constituencies, payment for MPs, and the end of the law that said MPs had to own property. The other demand was for annual general elections, to remove MPs who proved corrupt, but that was soon dropped. In 1839 and 1842 the Chartist leaders presented petitions to Parliament with over one million and two million signatures respectively. The MPs rejected them with little debate, and by overwhelming majorities, which caused unrest, strikes, some violence, and prison or transportation for the leaders, usually convicted by juries composed entirely of their opponents.
One Chartist leader, the editor of the popular Chartist newspaper The Northern Star, a charismatic Irishman named Feargus O’Connor, came up with a plan to buy plots of land on which he would build cottages for poor working people, thus enabling them to have a vote. In instalments they would contribute £2 10 shillings, about £250 today, to buy a share in the Chartist Land Company, which gave them a ticket in a lottery. O’Connor bought up parcels of land which he subdivided into two, three and four acre plots on which to build a simple cottage. He’d often also build a school and an inn. By 1848 he’d bought and built on five estates in Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, the remnants of which are still lived in today.
People who had won in the lottery began to move in, though many quickly sold up when they realised how much effort was involved. But in April 1848 the last Chartist petition to Parliament failed after the collapse of an assembly on Kennington Common in London, vigorously opposed by the military and police, and the Chartist movement, heavily infiltrated by government spies, fell apart. Sadly, so did the Land Company, as O’Connor’s mental health failed, and the company was wound up in 1851 because of failures in its constitution. So the first major attempt to give everyone the vote came to nothing. But it sowed the seeds of later efforts, and the Chartists’ five remaining demands were eventually met in 1858, 1872, 1881, 1911 and 1918, eighty years after the Charter was first published. In that last year the final third of men over 21 received the vote, as did the first women, those who were over 30 and married. The rest of Britain’s women made it in 1928.
A team of five from North London U3A has transcribed every Londoner and every woman subscriber from the original share registers, containing 43,000 names, and these will soon be available on this website, together with a look at the lives of some of the London subscribers, such as William Cuffay, the black leader of the London tailors, who in 1848 was convicted of treason and sentenced to transportation to Tasmania.
London subscribers are being currently added to the interactive map below (borough by borough).
By Peter Cox
Peter is a North London U3A researcher, heading up the team transcribing the Chartist Land Plan share registers.
