A meeting of Chartists by Mark Freeman
Last Monday I went to the Red Lion on Kingly Street, Soho. Nothing unusual about that, but on this occasion something different from normal was going on in the upstairs bar – a re-enactment of a Chartist meeting.
The re-enactment was part
of a day-long event organised by Katrina Navickas, senior lecturer in history
at the University of Hertfordshire. The event was supported by British Library Labs, an
initiative funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation which supports the public
use of the Library’s digital collections.
In the Red Lion, Kingly Street
Katrina has blogged about the walking tour here: http://historytoday-navickas.blogspot.co.uk/
The event in the pub was a short re-enactment of a Chartist meeting, including a speech by Feargus O’Connor, and resolutions – passed unanimously, of course – in favour of manhood suffrage and the People’s Charter. We all joined in with the voting, table-thumping and the occasional ‘hear hear’.
There was something pageant-like about the event, though it was short, held indoors and comprised only a single episode. Interestingly, nineteenth-century radicalism didn’t feature much in twentieth-century historical pageantry, with most large-scale pageants preferring to concentrate on more distant, and perhaps more uncontroversial, subject-matter.
Katrina and her volunteers were splendidly arrayed in period costume, and some of us, though wearing our normal clothes, were given a cockade to wear.
The author sporting a white cockade at the event.
It was enjoyable evening, and a reminder of the power of place in historical culture. We were able to imagine Chartist meetings, and earlier meetings of the London Corresponding Society, in the same venue. I’m looking forward to watching the video of the event, which is coming soon.