ABSTRACT

The economic difficulties of 1837-42, when harvests were bad and there was a serious recession in manufacturing industry and much unemployment in Lancashire and the Midlands, produced the two great extra-parliamentary movements of the Victorian period, Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League. Although the Chartists failed and the League may be said to have succeeded; and although they differed in that Chartism was almost wholly a working-class movement and the League a wholly middleclass movement, they were alike in that they both testified to a widespread feeling that the Reform Act and the Whig reforms thereafter amounted to no more than an unfinished business. The two movements were also similar in their final outcome. Though Chartists sometimes acted violently whereas the League only talked violently, it could be seen in the end that Chartism

offered no serious threat to the existing social order and the League no serious threat to the existing political order.