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‘The Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere and the Continuities of British Radicalism: New Directions in the history of popular politics, 1848-1884’

(chapter translated into Japanese by Takasi Kojima)

This article examines popular politics in the mid-Victorian period. It uses three examples to explore what happened to the working-class public sphere after Chartism: the journalism of G.W.M. Reynolds (founder of the radical ‘Reynolds’s Newspaper’); the demagogue John De Morgan, campaigner against enclosure of common land; and the supporters of the Tichborne Claimant, the imposter who generated one of the largest agitations between the end of Chartism and the rise of Socialism. These all exhibited forms of radical populism, claiming to speak on behalf of ‘public opinion’. The article examines arguments about the continuities of radicalism in the post-Chartist period.

Final draft English version available as PDF on demand