RADICAL FUNERALS, BURIAL CUSTOMS
AND POLITICAL COMMEMORATION:

ANTONY TAYLOR

THE DEATH AND POSTHUMOUS LIFE OF ERNEST JONES

 

olitical movements define themselves in terms of symbolism, memory, and acts of martyrdom.  Banners, uniforms, songs and rituals capture the spirit of a movement, and emphasise the bonding ceremonies that hold platform agitations together.  As Lynn Hunt has demonstrated, these emblems of association, affiliation, and allegiance are often more important than the content of political programmes themselves. [1] In most organized movements the funeral has become an emblem of dedication, sacrifice, and enduring service to the cause. Steadfast unto death, loyal to the end, the deceased political hero is a representation of heroic martyrdom, whose beliefs remain uncompromised even in situations of profound adversity, and despite the most severe testing of his faith.  Moreover, the funerals of those still faithful to the ideals of the movement achieve closure on lives lived in the service of the cause.  The supreme political sacrifice, above and beyond the call of duty, creates a model for action, weaves a narrative of suffering, and inspires a new generation with the call to arms.  With their fervour reaffirmed, the mourners leave the graveside and return renewed to the task in hand.  The SDF newspaper Justice wrote of the funeral of the Salford radical veteran and apostate Gladstonian, George Evans in 1893: ‘The band played the Marseillaise, and we came home — home to carry on the work our comrade loved so well and worked so hard for — the glorious social revolution, the emancipation of the workers from the thraldom of landlordism and capitalism’. [2]  Political funerals then were (and still are) part of a radical counter-culture in which the cycle of birth, life and death is marked by highly symbolic rituals and rites of passage, amongst them the naming of young reformers after martyred heroes, and the laying of the leader to rest following a lifetime of service and dedication.

    Political funerals and the posthumous memorialisation of leaders in political radicalism were a major component of Chartist and radical culture in the United Kingdom during the first half of the nineteenth century.  In 1853 Benjamin Rushton’s funeral in Halifax was a major event, in which national and local leaders lauded the achievements of a dedicated band of survivors from the great days of the agitation.  The Chartist leader Ernest Jones gave a speech on this occasion that was recalled years later by G. J. Holyoake as an exemplary specimen of Chartist oratory.  He declared: ‘We meet today at a burial and a birth — the burial of a noble patriot is the resurrection of a glorious principle.  The foundation stones of liberty are the graves of the just, the lives of the departed are the landmarks of the living, the memories of the past are the beacons of the future.’ [3]  The first histories and fictional accounts of Chartism were written by the generation who remembered the movement, were inspired by its dedication, sat at the feet of the veterans, and experienced their passing. [4]  All the more puzzling then that the process of burying and recalling the tribunes of the movement has received such scant attention.  The subject barely features in the existing historiography of Chartism.  Despite the persistence of memories of Chartism up until the eve of the Great War, there has been little analysis of the role of memory in sustaining the popular record of the agitation, or in preserving the reputation of its leaders.  In older accounts of the movement, radical survivors were simply consigned to oblivion, lived on in poverty, or, seeing the error of their ways, eschewed political activism altogether.  Despite this tendency, recollections of the Chartists as ‘The men of the Charter/The sturdy old guard’ remained a continuous feature of Labour and Liberal histories into the 1920s. [5]

    Kate Tiller, however, has noted that as Chartism declined, funerals of the martyred dead took on a greater significance, allowing the faithful to huddle together in adversity around the memories and physical relics of former days. [6]  Following Tiller’s lead, this article re-examines the posthumous history of the movement through the career of the last Chartist leader, Ernest Jones.  Analysing the arguments both for and against his adherence to Liberalism, it considers the example of his funeral and later memorialisation as providing a pointer to the direction taken by many Chartists in the movement’s final days, and as a symbol of the battle fought over the memory of Chartism by adherents of Labour and Liberalism respectively.  By engaging with recent historiography on continuities within popular radicalism, this article demonstrates that local Liberals in Manchester struggled to amalgamate the survivors, rituals and physical monuments of Chartism into the pantheon of Liberalism.  Chartist memories were never successfully integrated into a harmonious Whiggish vision of the political past.  Rather they proved contentious and divisive, highlighting the fracture-lines dividing the competing radical and Liberal interpretations of the national narrative of liberty and reform.

    The career of Ernest Jones is indissolubly linked with the fate of the Chartist movement.  A young entrant to the movement in 1846, he achieved a pre-eminent position within the agitation in its declining years.  As Chartism’s last leader of note, Jones came to symbolize an intractable position of no compromise with liberalism.  Popular, charismatic, and utterly ruthless, Jones was the figure most usually recalled by the generation who grew up with memories of the movement as a representative Chartist hero.  In the towns and mill villages around Manchester in the 1840s the old tradition of naming children after radical heroes ended with Jones.  The investigative journalist Angus Bethune Reach wrote about the Middleton weaving villages in 1849: ‘A curious indication of the prevailing shade of radical politics in the village is afforded by the parish register, the people having a fancy for christening their children after the hero of the minute.  Thus, a generation or so back, Henry Hunts were as common as blackberries — a crop of Feargus O’Connor’s replaced them — and latterly they have a few green sprouts labelled Ernest Jones’. [7]  As the movement declined in the 1850s, Jones carved out a post-Chartist career for himself as a barrister, reform radical in the suffrage campaign of 1866–67, and campaigner on Irish issues.  In the parliamentary reform agitation of 1866–67 he distinguished himself in a debate with the classical scholar Professor John Stuart Blackie in defence of the principles of democracy that set the tone for the campaign. [8]  In 1868 he stood unsuccessfully for Manchester on a liberal platform, but died prematurely the following year at the age of just 50. [9]

    Ernest Jones’ funeral in January 1869 was in a long tradition in Manchester.  Chartist veterans like Lawrence Pitkethley, George Lomax, and William Henry Chadwick, the self-styled ‘last of the Manchester Chartists’ also received lavish and emotional send-offs.  Their deaths provided the opportunities for generous tributes paid to the ‘Old Guardsmen’. [10]  Jones’ funeral, however, was a landmark affair.  The scale of the arrangements, the genuine displays of grief on the part of the mourners, and the vast numbers who attended were testimony to the popularity of Ernest Jones and the pull of the Chartist past.  Accounts of the demonstration emphasise the spontaneity of the street demonstrations that lined the route.  The Manchester Courier remarked:

    That section of the working-class who were connected with the Reform League, being solicitous of rendering their tribute to Mr. Jones’ memory were invited to take part in the funeral procession, and large numbers availed themselves of the opportunity. Shortly after mid-day the deceased’s house was crowded by persons anxious to take part in the procession, and but for the very admirable arrangements that had been made, the greatest confusion must have prevailed. [11]

    Moreover, as the cortege passed, many thousands of people, for the most part of the working-class, crowded the street … and shopkeepers along the line of route closed their places of business’. [12]  Contemporary accounts suggest that the funeral cortege was one of the largest in the civic history of Manchester.  Estimates of the numbers present vary.  There were a thousand in the funeral procession marching six abreast before a crowd of spectators numbering between 30,000, and 80–100,000. [13]  It took two hours before the first elements reached the gates of Ardwick Cemetery.  Knots of mourners provided the appearance of separate demonstrations at Strangeways, the Assizes, and Manchester Royal Infirmary in Piccadilly.  Sixty carriages and conveyances followed the procession. Present were Elkanah Armitage, the mayor of Manchester, and the two sitting MPs, Jacob Bright and Thomas Bayley Potter.  The funeral was especially noteworthy for the large number of veteran radicals it attracted.  Representatives from reform groups in all the major northern towns attended, and the Executive Committee of the Northern Branch of the Reform League preceded the hearse.  George Howell, Edmond Beales, and George Odger represented the national committee of the Reform League.

    Ernest Jones’ death became the representative iconic death of ageing British and transatlantic radicals.  Former Chartist, George Julian Harney, portrayed reformers exhausted by their exertions, and the pressures of the platform as almost literally consumed by the movements that they promoted.  Recalling Jones’ death in 1897 at the time of the funeral of the land reformer, Henry George he wrote: ‘There is nothing wonderful about such deaths — the wonder is that they do not happen more frequently.  Impassioned appeals, unceasing excitement, may be borne with at least for a time while men are under forty.  But the Fate with the “abhorred shears” is apt not to allow the like immunity to men of more advanced years.’   For his followers ‘the Manchester Radical Reformers and Old Chartists’ it was ‘a blow . . . . from which they never recovered’, but bore all the hallmarks of martyrdom. [14]  Such deaths showed the commitment, dedication, passion, and zeal of men dedicated to a noble cause who burned themselves up in its propagation.  Surrounded by letters from committees and well-wishers that signalled his future commitment to the cause, Jones expired the day after his fiftieth birthday, with the light of liberty shining in his eyes. [15]

    The symbolism surrounding the event provided an uneasy mix of Liberal and Chartist tropes.  The demonstration recalled the mythologies of Manchester radicalism, and the monopoly of public space that had characterized the Chartist agitation in its hey-day.  Traditionally, Chartist congregations commanded the open spaces of the city, mustering in large numbers at New Cross and in Stevenson Square.  These were areas whose proximity to the manufacturing district and the slum quarter made them susceptible to the invasive public presence of Chartism. [16]   The cortege skirted these spaces, and conferred recognition of their importance on them.  The lore surrounding the funeral was interwoven with Chartist mythology and immediately recognizable radical terms of reference.  Edmond Beales in his funeral oration, compared Jones to the parliamentarian Sir John Elliott, martyred by Charles I ‘and dying by inches in the cell to which the tyrant Charles I had consigned him’ but nevertheless still unflinchingly steadfast in his devotion to the cause of parliament. [17]   Jones’ own period in solitary confinement for inflammatory speeches made in 1848, the year of revolutions, made this a particularly apposite comparison.  Moreover, the reference back to the 1640s placed Beales’ rhetoric in a long-standing tradition in popular politics that exalted the role of those who struggled against executive tyranny in pursuit of the freedom of parliamentary institutions, freed from the heavy hand of  royal despotism. [18]  The emblems used at the funeral were consonant with traditional Chartist practices.  Four Peterloo veterans led the procession, and the coffin was born on the shoulders of pall-bearers who had all been involved in the Chartist campaign of 1848.  In an oblique tribute to Jones’ own imprisonment, one pallbearer, Thomas Topping, had also been incarcerated for physical force activity in 1848.  References back to physical-force and especially to Peterloo were inflammatory for a Manchester audience, recalling the unjustified action of the local magistracy against a legitimately constituted demonstration in 1819.  Throughout the nineteenth century Peterloo remained the touchstone of Manchester’s radical history, a yardstick of aristocratic misgovernment, and a totem of dedication and sacrifice.  Meetings with Peterloo veterans were almost religious experiences for some reformers. [19]  The fact that Jones himself was born in the year of Peterloo cemented his association with the mainstream of the radical movement, and transported him into a pantheon of the elect, canonized by exposure to moments of seismic radical change. [20]

    These references to Peterloo, and Jones’ imprisonment in 1848, were uncomfortable ones for many Liberals.  Allegations of hypocrisy by Manchester’s Liberal elite were much in evidence at the time of the funeral.  For radical reformers the refusal by Manchester’s United Liberal Party political machine to endorse Jones in a forthcoming by-election demonstrated their untrustworthiness, and rekindled memories of the perfidity of ‘the Newall’s Buildings clique’. [21]  Jones himself had written to G. J. Holyoake a few weeks before his death: ‘A certain part of the Manchester middle-class liberals are behaving very hard to me.  Armitage, Ashton, Taylor etc are, I believe, acting truly as themselves, but apart of the Reform Union is totally the opposite way’. [22]  Middle-class Liberalism annexed the outward trappings of reform history, but disavowed the connection with traditions of violence, both within Chartism, and emerging from the post-Napoleonic War Jacobin movement.  Prior to the general election of 1874 in Manchester, references back to Peterloo proved especially divisive.  An article by ‘An Old Hand-Loom Weaver’ entitled ‘A Peep into the Good Old Tory Days’ published in the Manchester Examiner and Times that referred to ‘that state of more than Egyptian bondage to which the Tories reduced you, and in which they left you’ caused disquiet at the paper, and led Benjamin Brierley to flatly deny that he had written it. [23]  Moreover, the memory of Jones was jealously guarded, and remained the preserve of many of the working-class followers and reformers who had campaigned for him in the election of 1868.  The continuing association between Jones and the republic of the streets is confirmed by the large posthumous circulation of editions of his poetry and the sale of memorabilia relating to his life in the alleys and thoroughfares of Manchester.  Richard Pankhurst recalled buying quantities of Jones’ private papers and other items of ‘Jonesiana’ from ‘a hawker in the gutter’ in the days after his death. [24]  These placards, flyers, ballads and other street ephemera that traditionally circulated in the poorer districts of large industrial towns where memories of events like Peterloo were preserved, provide evidence of the initial attempts to memorialise Jones.  In these crude poems and songs, Jones’ career was reprised as that of a foe of tyrants, and a hammer of unjust rule, who posthumously exhorted his followers to keep the faith, and whose message was passed on to a future generation of reformers by the faithful: ‘Ernest Jones shall be recorded in the annals of true fame/And the child thats [sic.] yet unborn, shall lisp his patriot name’. [25]

    A Liberal presence was also very pronounced in the proceedings.  The Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL) veteran Thomas Thomasson from Rochdale, and the Bright name represented by Jacob Bright, were icons of the ACLL inheritance.  This middle-class presence and the administrative apparatus of the fabled ‘Newall’s Buildings clique’ it represented was undoubtedly responsible for the smooth running of the proceedings, and the immaculate order of the procession.  For reformers who treasured the ACLL legacy, this was testimony to the degree to which Jones’ personal past had been amalgamated into the Liberal tradition.  Moreover, Manchester’s Liberal press successfully translated his career into a Liberal success story, in which the ‘excesses’ of his youth had been discarded in favour of the values of moderation, measured political debate, and Gladstonian state reformism.  The Manchester Courier complained that there was almost too much unanimity about his career amongst former allies, and no mention at all of his colourful Chartist past. [26]  The presence of Elkanah Armitage, mayor and ACLL veteran, at the funeral posthumously bestowed the benediction of Manchester’s municipal missionaries on Jones.  To emphasise the link, local Liberals stressed the proximity of his grave to civic worthies like John Dalton, father of atomic theory, and Sir Thomas Potter, municipal incorporater, Cobdenite, and first mayor of Manchester.  A year later at George Wilson’s funeral in January 1871, Jones had already become a pivot of this posthumous Liberal tradition.  The closeness of his body to that of Wilson provided an almost literal co-mingling of the ashes of Chartism and the ACLL, that bridged the fractures within the radical community dating back to the free trade debates of the 1840s. [27]  Moreover, the respectability of Ardwick as one of the new breed of company cemeteries, later worthy home to such illustrious dead as Robert Hawthorne, a veteran who won the VC during the storming of the Kashmir Gate in Delhi in the Indian Mutiny, repudiated allegations of Jones’ subversive instincts, and cemented his posthumous links with civic interests and patriotic values. [28]   Similar Liberal attempts to appropriate the radical dead were a frequent feature of Manchester politics.  As late as 1908 the funeral of William Henry Chadwick, reported under the banner headline ‘Last of the Chartists’, became an occasion for meditations on his radical career, and a truce between Chartist and Liberal memories.  A wreath from the Cobden Club bearing the words ‘In memory of an old warrior in the cause of cheap food’ implied a commitment to free trade, but avoided the issue of his imprisonment during the Chartist campaign of 1848 for inflammatory speeches made in Stevenson Square.  The presence of delegates from the Land Nationalisation Society and from the radical debating club, the County Forum, at Chadwick’s funeral sat uneasily with this benign vision of his past political trajectory. [29]

    Ernest Jones’ funeral warrants comparison with that of George Wilson the following year.  In line with a liberalism that inhabited the indoor civic spaces of Manchester, and eschewed outdoor places of assembly at New Cross and Stevenson Square, George Wilson’s funeral in 1871 was a much more restrained affair that reflected an overwhelmingly institutional and establishment bias.  Working-men attended as employees of his place of business at the Lancashire and Yorkshire railway, but there was little public ceremonial, and the bulk of the mourners comprised ‘deputations from public bodies with which Mr. Wilson was associated.’  Delegates were present from the City Council, the National Reform Union, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire railway. [30]  Newspaper reports emphasized that this was an orderly and restrained funeral service, honouring a worthy political elder for his civic and local contributions to the City of Manchester, and for his role in the machine politics of the Anti-Corn Law League.  In stark contrast to Jones, Wilson’s funeral convincingly elevated the virtues of organization, political restraint, free trade, and industry.  The Manchester Courier pronounced the demise of the Reform League the day before Jones’ funeral. [31]  For opponents of the politics espoused by the League, Ernest Jones’ death meant the literal and figurative end to the model of platform agitation pioneered by the Chartist movement.  For many radicals, however, the memory of Jones was a point of contact with the radical tradition that elevated the celebration of his memory into a recurring point of commemoration.  Commemorative galas, in which Jones featured prominently, became an established part of British radicalism in the years after 1869.  Opponents of radicalism were suspicious of these events.  The Times newspaper cast doubt on the integrity of those involved, suggesting that in London, East End branches of the League used his death to artificially prolong their existence following the formal dissolution of the organization: ‘Banners inscribed with well-known names and familiar party cries make it appear as if the bearers were more anxious to remind the public that certain ardent reformers were still alive than that Mr. Ernest Jones was dead.’ [32]  For those hostile to reform, the posthumous memory of Jones was overwhelmingly a threatening one, that recalled the apogee of the Chartist movement, and the confrontational aspects of the agitation.  The Ernest Jones evoked on these occasions was an embodiment of Chartist radicalism, whose career was recalled in terms of the internationalism, democratic values, and pro-Irish separatist stance that featured heavily on the Chartist agenda in the 1840s when Jones first joined the movement.  At a commemorative Trafalgar Square demonstration in March 1869 red flags draped with caps of liberty featured prominently, recalling the French revolutions of 1830 and 1848, whilst the Labourers’ Society, ‘mainlycomposed of Irishmen’, was conspicuous in the procession. [33]  A few weeks later George Odger, an avowed republican, and a target of contemporary anti-reform opinion, recalled Jones as a martyr, who ‘instead of being a guest of the wealthy. . . . .tendered his assistance to the working-classes’. [34]

    The initial activity surrounding Jones’ memorialisation had the object of assisting his family.  In 1869, funds were set up in Manchester and in the Lancashire and Yorkshire mill-towns to provide for his widow, and to pay school fees for the two youngest of his three children.  Elderly Chartists and reformers, cementing the appeal to core radical values, were much in evidence at these events, and portraits, images, souvenir addresses, and recitations of his poetry became established parts of the proceedings. [35]   Until the turn of the century, Jones’ widow and daughter by his second marriage remained dependant on such collections.  [36]  As late as the 1880s and 1890s the Jones family connection was an evocative one, guaranteeing adulation, sympathy, and sometimes persecution. [37]  Unsurprisingly pretenders emerged, amongst them aspiring radicals, who sought to further their careers on the back of the Jones name.  The obituary of George Jutsum, librarian to the Bermondsay Branch of the SDF, recorded that he claimed to be a relation (possibly illegitimate) of Ernest Jones. [38]

    Impromptu commemorations of Ernest Jones abounded in the clubs and gathering places of mid-Victorian radicalism.  Memories of him were in evidence at the Durham miners’ gala of 1874, where on one banner his image featured prominently in a radical triptych of Henry Hunt, Jones and Fergus O’Connor. [39]  In the notorious republican Patriotic Club, Clerkenwell Green, Jones’ ‘incisive features’ adorned the walls next to Sir Charles Dilke, Joseph Arch, Daniel O’Connell and G. J. Harney. [40]  As the years passed gatherings to commemorate Jones’ memory became commemorative moments in their own right, allowing veterans to take stock, and providing the opportunity to consider the achievements of the popular reform agitation.  As with other radical heroes like Paine and Richard Carlile, Jones’ birthday was frequently celebrated.  In 1879 there were also a number of landmark events to mark the decade since his death.  At a gathering in Manchester, Richard Pankhurst announced that ‘He now lies in an humble tomb, and there are men, who ought to know better, who think little of his work, and are sometimes disposed to think scorn of his memory.  But all that will ere long be righted.  Democracy was in his day, and is to some extent in ours, belligerent.  But the time arrives when democracy will be no longer belligerent, but triumphant’. [41]  Increasingly, however, the posthumous Jones cult answered calls for an appropriate shrine to honour his achievements.  From an early stage, radicals saw Jones’ career as an inspirational one that deserved a monumental celebration.  In the secularist National Reformer there were suggestions that in the absence of a memorial to Jones and others of ‘freedom’s heroes’ in London, radical clubs could be decorated with elaborate friezes that recorded different episodes in his life. [42]

    The various funds that provided for Jones’ family, finally amassed sufficient money for an imposing tomb in Ardwick Cemetery in 1871.  The unveiling of the monument reinforced the sense of Jones’ memory as a vessel for radical energies, and emphasised his position as a political ‘outsider’ for many Liberals.  Attended by many of his old friends and allies, the ceremony took place in silence ‘only broken once and again by the sobbing of many of the old political fellow workers of the deceased’. [43]  Twelve feet high, and constructed from blocks of grey and red granite, the memorial was inscribed with lines from ‘Democracy Vindicated’, his answer to Professor Blackie’s speech on democracy at the height of the reform agitation in 1867: ‘We say to you “whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” — when you realize this you have democracy, for democracy is but Christianity applied to the politics of our worldly life’.  A further valediction to his life read: ‘Full of warm sympathies and generous desires he freely toiled and suffered on behalf of the wronged and oppressed and made himself a name honoured and beloved by the people whose welfare he sought through life and in whose service he met an untimely death’.

    The memorial service brought together many of the tropes associated with Jones’ radicalism, the majority of them outside the Liberal tradition.  The address was to have been given by Elijah Dixon, the noted Peterloo veteran, confirming the traditional link with the post-1815 Jacobin tradition, but he arrived late and the Reverend S. A. Steinthal officiated instead.  Moreover the inscription on the tomb asserted the claim to be repeated in much Jonesiana, without a great deal of supporting evidence, that his work in the service of the people had led to his premature death.  Noting contemporary events in France, sympathy for the suffering French people was further expressed by Steinthal.  Something of Chartist internationalism remained in his defence of French republicanism, and disparagement of Bonapartist imperialism.  At a rally in the evening, Elijah Dixon encouraged the Liberal Party to reform the land laws, embrace temperance, and introduce the secret ballot, an unlegislated point of the People’s Charter.

    In subsequent years, Jones’ grave became a sacred place of pilgrimage.  His friend and colleague, Edward Hooson, who apparently died in emulation of the ‘great chief’ after contracting bronchitis whilst speaking at open-air meetings to collect subscriptions for Jones’ tomb, had a plot very close by. [44]  Like the tombs of other radical saints, Jones’ grave became both an inspiration, and place of meditation.  Sir Richard Coppock, later General Secretary of the National Federation of Building Trades, discovered socialism there as a teenager in a moment of pensive rumination. [45]  In addition, the tomb was tended and maintained by the TUC from 1913 onwards. [46]  Despite public protest, it was uprooted and demolished with other graves in Ardwick Cemetery in 1961 in a shady land deal organized by Sir Philip Pringle.  Had he still been alive, Jones might have sensed a whiff of revived ‘OldCorruption’ in municipal guise about this.

    Recently Miles Taylor’s new biography of Ernest Jones has brilliantly recaptured the spirit of his life and times.  Edward Pearce has, however, criticised the degree to which Taylor dissects the prevailing myths about Jones, whilst failing to explain the affection for him that resulted in a burgeoning Jones cult. [47]  An over-emphasis on the foibles and political machinations of Jones, risks ignoring the human warmth of the man that made him such a respected and admired figure within the movement.  Posthumously, radical accounts of his life showed him to be an inspiration and an example to the generation of reformers who came after him.  Specimens of his poetry, speeches, and writings circulated widely in the years after his death and until the 1890s featured heavily in radical and reform journals. [48]  Examples like his, wrote the Single Tax with reference to Matthew Gass, the radical orator of Glasgow Green, ‘had a powerful influence on young men like Mr. Gass’. [49]  Justice even exonerated him from the traits usually attributed to lawyers. [50]  In the years up until the eve of the Great War radicals were fiercely protective of Jones’ memory.  Questioning the quality or scansion of his poetry was an inflammatory act at radical meetings. [51]   The esteem in which Ernest Jones was held by his many followers demonstrates that he was one of the handful of nineteenth century political leaders who was truly loved.  For those who remembered Jones he was the embodiment of a tradition that was suppressed by Liberalism, subsumed within it, or exiled to the political fringes.

DR. ANTONY TAYLOR,
Humanities Research Centre
 Sheffield Hallam University
2003.

END NOTES

1.

Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Cambridge, 1986, chapters. 2–5.

2.

Justice, 15 April 1893, p. 3.

3.

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 6 December1890. Also see the Northern Star, 2 July1853.

4.

See Allen Clarke, The Men Who Fought for Us, Manchester, 1914, chapter 6.

5.

See Elijah Ridings, ‘Suppressed Verses’ in  ‘Ridings – Newspaper Cuttings 1857–58’ (ms 821 08 R6 1858, Manchester Central Library), p. 133, Ben Turner, About Myself , London, 1930, pp. 28–9 and Philip Viscount Snowden, An Autobiography, London, 1934, vol. 1,pp. 18–19.

6.

Kate Tiller, ‘Late Chartism: Halifax 1847-58’ in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds.) The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 , London, 1982, pp. 311–344.

7.

C. Aspin (ed.) Angus Bethune Reach: Manchester and the Textile Districts in1849, Helmshore, 1972, p. 107.

8.

Anna M. Stoddart, John Stuart Blackie, Edinburgh, 1911, pp. 243–246.

9.

For the career of Ernest Jones, see Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869, Oxford,2003.

10.

See for the death of Pitkethley, the People’s Paper, 12 June 1858, p. 4, and for George Lomax, the Manchester Guardian, 6 January 1880, p. 3.

11.

Manchester Courier, 1 February 1869, p. 3.  See also P.A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, Basingstoke, 1995, chapter 10.

12.

Manchester Guardian, 1 February 1869, p. 3.

13.

The considerable industry in hagiographical pro-Jones pamphlets that appeared after his death tended to over-inflate this figure; see David P. Davies, A Short Sketch of the Life and Labours of Ernest Jones, Chartist, Barrister and Poet, Liverpool, 1897, p. 18.

14.

Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 6 November1897.

15.

For the full list of correspondence delivered to Jones shortly before he died see F. Leary, The Life of Ernest Jones, London, 1887, p. 80.

16.

See for recollections of the Chartist disturbances at New Cross, the Manchester City News, 15 November 1913, p. 2.

17.

Manchester Guardian, 1 February 1869, p. 3.

18.

See Blair Worden, Roundhead Reputations: The English Civil War and the Passions of Posterity, London, 2001, chapters 8–9.

19.

See remarks by Herbert Burrows in Justice, January 1901, p. 5.

20.

A. B. Wakefield, ‘Ernest Jones: Poet, Patriot and Politician’, (Pamphlet reprinted from the Brighouse Echo, 9 January 1891).

21.

Antony Taylor, ‘“The Best Way to Get what he Wanted”: Ernest Jones and the Boundaries of Liberalism in the Manchester Election of 1868’, Parliamentary History, 16 (1997), pp. 185–204.  For the significance of Newall’s Buildings, the former headquarters of the Anti-Corn Law League in the city, see P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League, London, 2000, chapter 1; Manchester Faces and Places (14 vols., 1894), v, pp. 83–86.

22.

Ernest Jones – G. J. Holyoake, 7 January1869, Ernest Jones Papers, International Institute for the Study of Social History, Amsterdam.

23.

Manchester Examiner and Times, 30 January 1874, p. 7 and 5 February 1874,p. 7.

24.

Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, 1931, reprinted, London, Virago, 1984, p. 11.

25.

‘Lines in Memory of Ernest Jones, Esq., Poet, Patriot, Orator’, Manchester Central Library, Pearson Ballad Collection, vol. 2, p. 227 (q 398.859.1869).

26.

Manchester Courier, 2 February 1869, p. 5.

27.

Manchester Examiner and Times, 5 January 1871, p. 5.

28.

Hawthorne died on 2 February 1879. See the Manchester Evening News, 18 December 1984.

29.

Manchester Guardian, 2 June 1908, p. 5.

30.

Manchester Guardian, 5 January 1871, p.6, and the Manchester Examiner and Times, 5 January 1871, p. 5.

31.

Manchester Courier, 30 January 1869, p. 7.

32.

The Times, 27 March 1869

33.

The Bee-Hive, 27 March 1869.

34.

The Bee-Hive, 24 April 1869.

35.

See the Bradford Observer, 1 April 1869, p. 1, and 2 April 1869, p. 2; the Preston Guardian, 20 February 1869, and Dr. F. R. Lees, In Memoriam: An Oration on the Death of Ernest Jones Esq., The People’s Friend, Leeds, 1874, especially pp. 6–7.

36.

See ‘Antony Taylor, Commemoration, Memorialisation and Political Memory in Post—Chartist Radicalism: The 1885 Halifax Chartist Reunion in Context’ in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts (eds.), The Chartist Legacy, Woodbridge, 1999, pp 255–285.

37.

For suggestions that Jones’ family suffered political persecution after his death see Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, p. 11.

38.

See Justice, 2 March 1895, p. 7.

39.

National Reformer, 23 August 1874, p. 113

40.

Douglas Jerrold, ‘Red London: The London Patriotic Society’, Weekly Dispatch, 6 July 1879, p. 12.

41.

The City Jackdaw, 14 March 1879, p. 138. Also see the National Reformer, 16 March 1879, p. 170, J. Creuss, (ed.), In Memoriam, Ernest Jones, Manchester, 1879, especially pp. 5–8, and for a commemoration of Jones’s birthday, the Bacup Times, 10 February 1877.

42.

National Reformer, 4 October 1874, p. 220.

43.

Manchester Examiner and Times, 10 April 1871, p. 4.

44.

The Pioneer, 16 February 1889, and the Manchester Examiner and Times, 16 December 1869, and 20 December 1869.

45.

Joyce Bellamy and John Saville (eds.), Dictionary of Labour Biography, London, 1976, vol. 3, p. 49.

46.

Taylor, ‘Commemoration, Memorialisation and Political Memory in Post—Chartist Radicalism’, p. 271.

47.

Edward Pearce, ‘Spurning at the High’, London Review of Books, 6 November 2003, pp. 36–7.

48.

See, for example, The Labourers’ Chronicle, 8 January 1881, p. 7, 5 March 1881, p. 3, and 23 April 1881, p. 5, and Justice, 2 February 1884, p. 5, and 26 July 1884, p. 1.

49.

The Single Tax, 1 February 1900, pp. 130–131.

50.

Reynolds’s Newspaper, 6 March 1898, p. 2.

51.

See a fierce argument about ‘Ernest Jones the Poet’ at the Secular Club, Manchester, in the National Reformer, 5 June 1870, p. 366.