Rethinking 'Rethinking Chartism': Revisiting the linguistic turn on the failure of Chartism.

摘要

Since the publication of "Rethinking Chartism" by Gareth Stedman Jones in 1983, the historical discourse on Chartism's failure has come to a virtual standstill. His assertion that Chartism failed because the movement's language limited it to the narrow realm of traditional political radicalism undermined the assumption by historians for over a century that Chartism was a class-conscious movement of workers that sought significant change to Britain's social and economic systems.;Scarborough directly confronts "Rethinking Chartism" by arguing that the Chartists cannot be distinctly defined as traditional radicals simply because of their use of certain words associated with traditional radicalism. He argues that the Chartists often used language with non-radical influences, including socialism, and that their use of radical language was a not a limiting factor because it was imbued with different meanings from the words of the radicals of the past. He contends that it is possible that the use of traditional radical rhetoric aided Chartism by broadening the movement's appeal and that the use of socialist rhetoric, as well as the contemporary perception of the Chartists as vaguely socialist, contributed to the marginalization and failure of the movement.;To support these claims, Scarborough conducts a contextualized analysis of the discourse on the major Chartist issues of the New Poor Law, the Corn Laws, and the Land Plan, using the Northern Star and The Times as sources for Chartist and contemporary language.