ABSTRACT
Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articulate utterance to the discontent of the English people, could not by its worst enemy be said to be without a function. For the origins of the powerful Chartist movement of 1838–9 it is first necessary to examine the activities of a central knot of London working men who since 1830 had been able to play a very considerable part in national politics. Educated in the Mutual Improvement Societies and the Coffee House Debating Clubs of the ’twenties, brought together in the London Mechanics’ Institution and in the Owenite Movement they had been able to found a National Union of the Working Classes in March 1831 with a programme of universal suffrage. The People’s Charter as published on May 8, 1838, was the result of many months of effort on the part of Lovett.
