ABSTRACT
People who have not shared in the hopes of the Chartists, who have no personal knowledge of the deep and intense feelings which animated them, can have little conception of the difference between our own times and those of fifty or sixty years ago. The whole governing classes — Whigs even more than Tories — were not only disliked, they were positively hated by the working population. Nor was this hostility to their own countrymen less manifest on the side of the ‘better orders’ 1
