Radicalism and Reputation: The Career of Bronterre O'Brien

by Michael J. Turner

Overview

A thematic analysis of the career of Bronterre O’Brien, one of the most influential leaders of Chartism, this book relates his activities—and the Chartist movement—to broader themes in the history of Britain, Europe, and America during the nineteenth century. O’Brien (1804-64) came to be known as the “schoolmaster” of Chartism because of his efforts to describe and explain its intellectual foundations. The campaign for the People’s Charter (with its promise of political democratization) was a highpoint in O’Brien’s career as writer and orator, but he was already well known before the campaign began, and during the 1840s he distanced himself from other Chartist leaders and from several important Chartist initiatives. This book examines the personal, tactical, and ideological reasons for O’Brien’s departure, as well as his development of a social and economic agenda to accompany “constitutional” Chartism, in line with the evolution of radical thought after the Great Reform Act of 1832. It also evaluates O’Brien’s reputation, among his contemporaries and among modern historians, in order better to understand his contribution to radicalism in Britain and beyond.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611862294
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	04/01/2017
Edition description:	1
Pages:	390
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael J. Turner is Roy Carroll Distinguished Professor of British History in the Department of History at Appalachian State University.
 

Editorial Reviews

Bronterre O’Brien, the ‘schoolmaster of Chartism,’ was the intellectual, inspiring, irascible, and infuriating godfather of the early working-class movement in Britain. In his major biography, the first to be based upon full records and modern historiography, Michael J. Turner reevaluates this major figure and decisively confirms his importance. Highly readable and comprehensively informed, this is a book no student of nineteenth-century British social and political history can afford to ignore.”
—Marc Mulholland, Professor of History, Oxford University, author of Bourgeois Liberty and the Politics of Fear: from Absolutism to Neo-Conservatism
 

From the Publisher