ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 focuses mainly on Chartist banners as sites of memory – a still too often neglected source but one that allows the historian to enter the mental world of the Chartist rank and file who brought banners with them to the mass outdoor meetings. Part tangible, part intangible heritage, banners were one of the most visible ways in which Chartists clothed themselves in legitimacy – at least in the eyes of their own supporters – by anchoring the movement in earlier reform episodes, literally in the case of banners as old ones were dug out and re-displayed or amended. Thus, in a very obvious sense when Chartists got their banners out, they were actually unfurling the radical tradition. As Malcolm Chase has observed, while the ‘cultural turn’ in Chartist studies has led to important work on fiction, poetry, music, portraits and iconography, much work remains to be done on other aspects of visual and material culture, including banners. Paul Pickering’s exemplary local study of Chartism in Manchester and Salford pointed to the rich potential of banners as sources for studying the ideology of the rank and file, but his research was limited to an analysis of forty-four banners carried by Chartists in ‘six major parades’ between 1838 and 1842. It is not clear from Pickering’s account how representative these six major parades were of the region, let alone elsewhere in Britain. This chapter draws on a database of 482 Chartist banners from across Britain (the most comprehensive study of its kind to date). Although the focus is mainly on Chartist banners, they are contextualised in relation to other media, and some preliminary conclusions are offered on the broader role of visual and material culture in Chartism – preliminary as this is clearly an aspect of the Chartist experience that merits further study beyond banners.
