Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: the Case of Samuel Bamford

Abstract

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.

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