1 - The Chartist imaginary: ‘talking by turns of politics and poetry’

Summary

We became acquainted that evening, and, in the course of many subsequent years, I passed an agreeable half-hour in the shoemaker's garret, talking by turns of politics and poetry.

Thomas Frost, Forty Years' Recollections: Literary and Political

This chapter will follow Thomas Frost's conversational footsteps in ‘talking by turns of politics and poetry’. However, it also posits the unity of politics and poetry in the form of the ‘Chartist imaginary’ which both underpins the agency enjoyed by, and constitutes the unique form of historical knowledge embodied in, Chartist poetry. This chapter, therefore, offers both a theorisation and a definition of the Chartist imaginary.

How can Chartist poetry be said to possess agency? What does a Chartist poem make happen? It is certainly the case, as Timothy Randall has shown, that Chartist poetry was performed in a variety of settings including, but not confined to, ‘the mass open-air gatherings, the anniversary celebrations, the reading groups, the feasts, the evening teas, the workplace lunches, the public house meetings, the extempore singing in prison’. However, in these contexts Chartist poetry serves either as a mood enhancer, confirming or consolidating the ethos of the gathering, or it is entrusted with a cathartic role, with discharging anger which cannot be vented in any other form. In the first case it would appear to be the specific context (the mass meeting, etc.) which is the real locus of any agency, whilst in the second, the function of Chartist poetry appears to be the prevention of concrete action.