Charles Dickens and Fictions of the Crowd‪.‬

In 1838, four years after the Tolpuddle Martyrs were deported for forming a trade union, and four years after the Poor Law Amendment Act, the People's Charter was published in London. The working classes, engendered as a class-conscious body by the 1832 Reform Bill which enfranchised the propertied bourgeoisie but left un-propertied working people without access to parliamentary representation, found in Chartism a platform for protest and debate. Chartism was the movement organized around the Charter that was drafted in 1837 by the London Working Men's Association to demand the political enfranchisement of working-class men. Lenin was to call the Chartists the "first broad and politically organised proletarian-revolutionary movement of the masses" (Briggs 7). If the demands of the Charter themselves did not strike fear into the hearts of the establishment, then the tactics of the Chartists did, with their mass platform tradition, and the underlying threat of confrontational physical violence. As Asa Briggs notes: "Even Chartists who were repelled by the language of physical force believed in the slogan 'Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must'" (Briggs 13). The debate concerning the justification of "physical force" protest would be at the center of many of the representations of Chartism.