Defiant Mourning: Public Funerals as Funeral Demonstrations in the Chartist Movement

Abstract

The popular radical movement that developed in Great Britain after the Napoleonic wars under the leadership of Henry Hunt made the mass-platform its main – and most striking – means of action in the fight for parliamentary reform. Mass-demonstrations became a defining feature of the radical agitation, a tradition also followed by the Chartist movement from the late 1830s to the mid-1850s. Chartist processions have been extensively studied by historians, but a certain type of procession has remained largely absent from the discussion: funeral cortèges. Through the study of the funerals of six local or national leaders of the Chartist movement, this article intends to address this issue and to work towards a rapprochement between the political history of popular radicalism and the cultural and social history of death in the Victorian period. The interments of Samuel Holberry, Joseph Williams, Alexander Sharp, Ben Rushton, Feargus O’Connor and Ernest Jones were made public by the radicals in charge of their organisation and gathered several thousand people. This work argues that these funerals can be seen as belonging to the radical repertoire of collective action that developed in nineteenth-century Britain. The way they were organised and advertised, the form and appearance they took, and the numbers involved, and debated, identify them as an integral part of the radical tradition of political agitation.