ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 explores how Chartists sought to harness Richard Oastler, who, as Malcolm Chase has observed, was ‘one of Chartism’s inspirational figures’. Oastler presented the Chartists with both an opportunity and a problem: a huge personality whose constituency O’Connor and even the seemingly remote LWMA were keen to inherit, but a potentially divisive figure who, despite the best efforts of Chartists, awkwardly refused to be fully co-opted in to the moment. It is now over fifty years since Felix Driver published what remains the only full-length biography of Oastler, and while Oastler’s contribution to the factory reform movement, and his antecedents as an abolitionist have recently been revisited, the only study of the relationship between Oastler and the Chartists remains the chapter by G. D. H. Cole in his book Chartist Portraits, also over fifty years old, and a study – like Driver’s – that fails to address a number of key questions and themes: both accounts, for instance, tend to take Oastler’s Toryism at face value. As Chapter 5 argues, Oastler was, at best, a quixotic Tory; however, as a figure in the Chartist pantheon with genuinely radical strands to his ideology, he was a Chartist in all but name.
