ABSTRACT
By 1860, two monuments had been erected: at the grave site in London and in the Nottingham Arboretum. Just as Francis White and Company effectively erased the statue from the townscape of Nottingham, so too have both monuments been virtually lost to the history of Chartism. The neglect of the O'Connor monuments is symptomatic of a general lack of attention to the cultural artefacts of Britain's first predominantly working-class movement. This chapter discusses these monuments in their rightful place in local and national history as 'sacro-secular political sites', and highlights the value of a more sensitive approach to the study of the culture of popular radicalism. The London monument to O'Connor was nearly a casualty of the wider malaise that affected metropolitan Chartism in the 1850s. Numerous commentators agreed that most of the problems confronting the democratic movement in this period arose from the 'destructive game' of 'follow my leader'.
