ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at middle- and working-class radicalism. The monarchy was never seen to serve the interests of the people but rather to be part of an aristocratic and middle-class constitution’s obstruction of these interests. The republicanism of Europe, and especially of Giuseppe Mazzini and Italy, came as an inspiration to leading radicals disillusioned with the increasingly apparent failure of Chartism. The Benthamite preoccupation with rationality in government pervaded middle-class radicals’ discussion of the Crown and also entered into working-class discourse, with allusions to the utility – or lack of it – of the Crown and Royal Family. The chapter analyses the emergence, content and failure of the republicanism inspired in some prominent Chartists by the European republicans, especially Mazzini, in 1848. Republicanism was only stimulated by foreign influence and then only as the preserve of a small group of former Chartists, whose shortlived newspapers were read by a closed circle of adherents.
