The Literary Form and Revolution: The Politics of Melodrama in Late Chartist Literature

Abstract

The period of late Chartism beginning in the late 1840s coincided with the transformation of the British press as a reaction to the advancement in industrial capitalism and the changing character of the public sphere to which it contributed directly. The resultant emergence of the British press in the mid nineteenth century from a political discourse to print journalism had direct political implication on the working class/Chartist press as well as their political agitation and plebeian public sphere. This paper will explore the effect of the ‘popular’ (both the press and culture) on the Chartist Press and literature and how the Chartist writers and editors including Ernest Jones and George W.M. Reynolds appropriated the emergent notion of the popular for radical political propaganda. I will argue that the staple rhetoric and dominant form of nineteenth century melodrama and sensationalism were used by these authors to create a distinctive class-conscious readership. Melodrama became, in the Chartist press, both an emotional reaction to the liberal capitalist economy’s classificatory politics as well as formed a resistance to the same creating a distinctive working class public sphere that publicized the private in political terms.