Chartism

Named after the People's Charter of 1838, laying out the movement's six main aims.

Chartism (plural Chartisms)

1. (historical) A working-class movement for political and social reform in the United Kingdom during the mid-19th century.
   • 1840 May 19, Thomas Carlyle, “Lecture V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns.”, in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and The Heroic in History, London: Chapman and Hall, […], published 1840, →OCLC, page 162:

     An insincere world; a godless untruth of a world! It is out of this, as I consider, that the whole tribe of social pestilences, French Revolutions, Chartisms, and what not, have derived their being,—their chief necessity to be.

   • 1857, [Thomas Hughes], chapter II, in Tom Brown’s School Days. […], Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Macmillan & Co., →OCLC:

     […] when she married the young clergyman, and went to settle in that smoky hole Turley; a very nest of Chartism and Atheism, in a part of the country which all the decent families had had to leave for years.

   • 1888, William Morris, Signs of Change […] ‎, London: Reeves and Turner, page 103:

     Chartism therefore, though a genuine popular movement, was incomplete in its aims and knowledge; the time was not yet come and it could not triumph openly; but it would be a mistake to say that it failed utterly: […]

   • 1921, Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria‎:

     The dangers of this revolutionary ferment were grave; even in England Chartism was rampant—a sinister movement, which might at any moment upset the Constitution and abolish the Monarchy.

   • 1957 [1944], Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press: Boston, page 167:

     When Owenism and Chartism had burned themselves out, England had become poorer by that substance out of which the Anglo-Saxon ideal of a free society could have been built up for centuries to come.

• Chartist