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This essay will not argue the case for serious attention to the poetry of Chartism. After two anthologies and four and a half books on the subject, two of which appeared under a prestigious academic imprint, such legitimation seems no longer necessary.1 But a few observations on the state of the art may not be out of place.
The first thing to note is that well into the 1990s almost all the critics working in the field were based or coming from outside Britain. A different cultural, political, or academic background, and with it a contrasting perspective, no doubt helped them to move more confidently past certain native blocks. It took some time for these efforts to sink in, but Brian Maidment's The Poorhouse Fugitives (1987), an anthology-cum-commentary of nineteenth-century working-class poetry including a generous portion of Chartist lyrics, signaled a change.2 Yet the hermetic tendency has not entirely been overcome. For example, what was until 2009 the most comprehensive of the more recent studies has also remained the least perused in the Anglo-American academy. Hugues Journèss Une littérature révolutionnaire en Grande-Bretagne (1991), written in French and even reproducing the amply quoted texts only in translation, combines case studies of seven writers, among them the two Ebenezers (Elliott and Jones), with an exhaustive catalogue of the themes of Chartist poetry enhanced by countless examples. Journès has identified more than two dozen recurring topics-and one lacuna, the "student."3 And he has found this absence by consistently looking at his material through the prism of other proletarian and radical literatures of the period, especially French and German, to whose existence several Chartist writers were alive. The only regret is that he nowhere properly justifies the application of the adjective revolutionary to the poetry.
In The Poetry of the Chartist Movement (1993), Ulrike Schwab has also embarked on a systematic ordering of the corpus of works.4 She distin- guishes between "realistic poetry," by which she basically means poems reflecting the consequences of industrialization, and "programmatic verse," which she calls the "Nucleus." For the latter, which forms the main part of her study, she proposes, with a good deal of aplomb, nine characteristics: (1) the manifestation of a collective consciousness, (2) an "imminent intentionality" (i.e., spontaneously emerging), (3) poets...