The Chartist movement was the mass-movement for constitutional reform in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Chartism is one of the most written about subjects in modern British history, yet the ideas of the movement remain strangely neglected. This thesis tackles this problem by examining Chartist ideas along a broad front. By examining the political thought of a movement, rather than a select number of highly educated intellectuals, this thesis also makes a statement about how to study popular political ideas. Chapter One locates the foundations of Chartist political thought in the movement’s social and cultural context. It asks what the Chartists read and were able to read, how they viewed knowledge and education, and the religious basis of Chartist intellectualism. Chapter Two turns to Chartist political theory, in particular, the Chartist interpretation of the British constitution. It is shown that Chartists drew on a sophisticated conception of the common law that rooted the British Constitution in natural law. Chapter Three considers Chartism’s economic ideas, which, it is argued, must be understood in relation to their understanding of classical political economy. Chapter Four examiners Chartist natural-right arguments alongside the ideas of non-Chartist radicals. Finally, Chapter Five traces the careers of a number of Chartists and the influence of Chartist ideas in America. It also attempts to take account of what Chartism meant to Americans. By considering these topics, this thesis provides a clearer impression of why ideas were important to the Chartists, what sort of ideas the Chartists held, and the legacies of Chartist ideas for democratic politics later in the century.

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Great Britain’s road to universal suffrage was a long one. Much attention has been paid by historians to the moments of great legislative reform, but less to the idea behind them. History is, however, also about the journey to such moments and how ideas gain or lose traction in society. The mass working-class movement of Chartism, with its call for universal (manhood) suffrage and its three national petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848, forced parliamentarians to debate this radical and, in the view of many, dangerous idea. This study analyses the political discourse of the parliamentary debates held in these years with the aim of shedding light on how the notion of universal suffrage was constructed and understood by parliamentarians at the time. By analysing the debates online with a keyword search for ‘universal suffrage’ several recurring arguments and discourses are revealed, namely the political and moral legitimacy of the chartists and their sympathisers in parliament; how the concept of time is used in arguments for and against universal suffrage; entitlement to political representation; and the security of property. Taking inspiration from the linguist Tuen van Dijk’s theory of political discourse analysis, these discourses are regarded as more than mere words spoken in parliament, but rather as political actions which had a bearing on the world outside. Moreover, the aim is also to situate and contextualise these discourses in broader society and the events and developments of the 1830s and 1840s. While the abovementioned discourses are prevalent in all three years, the debates of 1848 see a change in focus and tone, due the wider European revolutionary climate. It is hoped that this analysis of parliamentary debates between 1839 and 1848 will contribute to a better understanding of an oft-neglected chapter in Britain’s road to universal suffrage and of Chartism’s role in this hard-won struggle.

In a Victorian Britain in crisis, Chartism was as it remains an exemplary site for contestation of various forms of authority--social, political, theological, historical, and literary. When Carlyle in his Chartism essay demands what "the under classes intrinsically mean," he discounts "these wild inarticulate souls" unable to recognize or express their own true state (122). But even as Carlyle authorizes detached observation, he also helps cement those unpredictable alliances that haunt his work. In an increasingly statistical culture, the representation of Chartism has much to tell about technologies of power, the cultural inflection of difference, and the production and reproduction of knowledge, value, and legitimacy. Thus, it seems timely to re-examine Chartism and its diverse representations within and beyond the so-called social-problem novel. Like other forms of knowledge production, the novel both helped shape and was reshaped by Chartism which tested to the limit the novel's pretension to adequate representation of a common world. / Such investigation indicates the importance of interpretation despite its being attacked by everyone from political economists to postmodernists. I thus interpret Victorian reform through its literary mediations, and in relation to the kinds of authority and accounting associated with a history and theology in crisis. In reading for reform largely male middle-class experts, I deploy a double strategy, reading them to bring out the power and agency of the underrepresented, and realigning texts and contexts to reform the ways they are read. While Carlyle and Peter Gaskell defined the terms of succeeding debates on Chartism, they did not fully determine the interpretations of their own words or other pertinent evidence by the underclasses or by writers like Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Kingsley. By the forms of their fiction, these two writers helped legitimate the lives and utterances of the working classes and exposed the class- and gender-based hierarchies of literary genres and social and political conventions. Elizabeth Gaskell and Kingsley rework such authoritative discourses as history and theology and reform reading and writing in ways that frustrate the efforts of literary taxonomists then and now, and accept the burden of interpretation to make a difference in the literary and social scene. / By socializing and historicizing literary categories in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin and others, I aim to escape those intellectual "tramlines" that have constrained commentary. The careful generic and other demarcations and hierarchies of traditional critical discourse and unexamined allegiance to stable notions of class, gender, nation, and religion have operated against the disruptive power and productivity of the work of Gaskell and Kingsley. Equally, whereas historians like Dorothy Thompson turn to "empirical data" (Chartists x) to dispel the confusion of interpretations of Chartism, my practice is theoretical, as my story of the past is continuous with my understanding of the present. Even Gareth Stedman Jones (part of the linguistic turn in historical studies) cannot sufficiently rethink Chartism when he concedes determining force to government policy and Carlyle's terms, although he usefully shifts attention from the economic to the political. He operates, however, within a rigid binary logic that separates the social and political while underplaying the cultural and a range of linguistic practices and forms of dissemination that constituted Chartist identity.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University, 1927. / Vita. Published also without thesis note. Bibliography: p. [233]-234.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--Kassel, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 237-247).

Nous étudions des stratégies d'investissement dont l'utilisation s'est généralisée sur les marchés financiers, et leur impact sur le prix des actifs et le risque de marché.Dans le premier chapitre nous nous intéressons aux stratégies de diversification de portefeuille. Nous montronsau travers d'un modèle théorique que si la diversification a un effet positif au niveau individuel pour l'investisseur,elle crée également des liens entre les différents investisseurs et titres, qui peuvent se révéler dangereux d'un pointde vue systémique. Nous mesurons les deux effets afin de discuter de la désirabilité globale de la diversification.Le second chapitre considère les stratégies d'investissement basées sur le groupement de titres financierspartageant certaines caractéristiques en différentes classes, ou styles. Nous postulons que ces stratégies créentun co-mouvement excessif entre titres d'un même style, qui seront vendus et achetés ensemble au sein d'une mêmeclasse. Appliquant cette intuition aux notes des agences sur les obligations, nous montrons qu'une obligation quichange de note se met en effet à varier comme sa nouvelle note, même quand les fondamentaux économiques ne lejustifient pas.Dans le troisième chapitre nous étudions trois types d'investisseurs opérant sur le marché des changes : les carry traders, les chartistes et les fondamentalistes. Notre modèle théorique suggère que l'interaction entre cestrois règles d'investissement peut expliquer la déconnexion bien documentée entre le taux de change et sa valeurfondamentale, ainsi que provoquer un effondrement endogène des taux de change. / We study how popular investment rules in financial markets may induce endogenous movements inasset prices, leading to higher market risk.In the first chapter, we focus on portfolio diversification. We show through a theoretical model that this strategyis beneficial at the individual investor level, but also creates endogenous links between assets and investors, whichcan be dangerous from a systemic perspective. We measure both effects in order to discuss the overall desirabilityof diversification.The second chapter considers strategies based on grouping assets that share common characteristics intodifferent classes, or styles. We postulate that these strategies create excess comovement between assets of asimilar style, as they are traded together as part of the same class. Applying this reasoning to bond credit ratings,we show that bonds joining a new rating class indeed start comoving more with the bonds of this rating, evenwhen fundamental factors suggest otherwise.In the third chapter, we study three investors who operate in the foreign exchange market: carry traders,chartists and fundamentalists. We provide a theoretical model which suggests that the interaction between thesetrading rules may explain the well documented exchange rate disconnect from its fundamental value, and lead toendogenous currency crashes.

This thesis tells the story of an historical tradition of radical literacy and literature that is defined as the British radical literary tradition. It takes the meaning of literature at its broadest understanding and identifies the literary and educational relations of what E.P. Thompson terms 'the making of the English working class' through its struggle for literacy and freedom. The study traces the developing dialectic of literary radicalism and the emergent hegemony of capitalism through the dissemination of radical ideas in literature and a groundswell of public literacy. The proposed radical tradition is defined by the oppositional stance of its participants, from the radical intellectual's critical texts to the striving for literacy and access to literature by working class people. This oppositional discourse emerged in the fourteenth century concomitant with nascent capitalism and has its literary origins in utopian vision. This nascent utopian imagination conceived a democratic socialism that underpinned the character of much of the following oppositional discourse. The thesis establishes the nexus of the oppositional discourse as a radical literary tradition and the earliest instances of adult education in autodidacticism and informal adult education. The ascent of middle class power through the industrial revolution is shadowed by the corresponding descent of the working class into poverty. Concomitant with this social polarisation is the phenomena of working class literary agency as the means to political and economic agency. While Protestant dissenting groups such as the Diggers and Levellers were revolutionary activists, it was Methodism that formed a bulwark against revolution. Yet it was their emphasis on self-improvement that contributed to an increasingly literate populace. Radical texts produced and disseminated by individuals and organisations and read by autodidactics and informal reading groups are seminal in the formation of a working class identity. Spearheaded by the Chartist movement, education became a central ethic of working class politics and the civil struggle for economic and political justice throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth centuries. The avant garde movements of the early twentieth century are analysed as a strand of this tradition. The narrative of the thesis then moves to the penal colony of Australia and explores the radical literary tradition's development there. Early colonial culture is seen as having a strong impetus towards a developing a native literary expression of the new land. Where conservative colonial literature struggled to differentiate itself from formal British literary models, the radical heritage and its utopian vision of a working man's paradise gave definitive expression to the Australian experience. This expression was strongly influenced by Chartist ideals. The British radical literary tradition is thus seen to have had a dominant influence in the development of a native radical literary tradition that strove to identify the national character. Socialist thought developed in Australia in concert with that in the parent culture, and anarchist and libertarian trends found a ready home amongst independent minded colonials. Yet, in preventing the formation of a native aristocracy the small radical population made a compromise with liberalism that saw a decidedly conservative streak develop in the early labour movement. There were little in the way of sophisticated radical literary offerings at first, but from the mid-nineteenth century a vanguard of radicals produced a thriving native press and other fugitive text forms. At the turn of the century the native radical literary tradition was vibrantly diverse, with a definitive style that claimed literary ownership of the Australian character. However, exhausted by the battles over WWI conscription and isolated by censorship, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was able to subsume the vanguard position from the socialists. The Party laid claim to the Australian radical literary tradition, at once both strengthening it with the discipline of a Marxist ideology and diminishing its independence and diversity. Party literary theory centred upon the issue of class, developing a doctrine of socialist realism that communist writers were expected to practice. How well a writer adhered to socialist realist principles became a measure of their class position and loyalty. Drawing more from primary sources, the thesis develops an analysis of the intellectual development of the Australian post-WWII writer Eric Lambert through his experience of class instability during Depression and war. The study examines Lambert's decision to join the Party and his literary response to his experiences of war, the Party, the turmoil of 1956 and life after the Party. Lambert's body of work is then analysed as the unintentional memoir of a writer working as an adult educator in the radical literary tradition. Lambert's struggles, for artistic independence within the narrow precepts of Party dogma and with class tensions, were common amongst intellectuals committed to the communist cause. Like many of his peers, Lambert resigned from the Party at the end of 1956 and suffered a period of ideological vacuum. However, he continued to write as a Marxian educator, seeking to reveal that which makes us human in the humanity of ordinary people. It is concluded that, while the Party did much to foster disciplined cohesion, the mutual distrust it generated amongst its intellectuals suppressed the independent thought that had kept the radical literary tradition alive. Although the Party developed an ideological strength within the radical literary tradition, its dominance over thirty years and subsequent fall from grace acted to fragment and discredit that centuries-old tradition which it subsumed. An argument is made for a reinvestment of the centrality of the radical literary tradition in the education of adults for the maintenance of social justice and the democratic project.

From 1838 until the end of the European Revolutions in 1852, the French Revolution provided Chartists with a repertoire of symbolism that Chartists would deploy in their activism, histories, and literature to foster a sense of collective consciousness, define a democratic world-view, and encourage internationalist sentiment. Challenging conservative notions of the revolution as a bloody and anarchic affair, Chartists constructed histories of 1789 that posed the era as a romantic struggle for freedom and nationhood analogous to their own, and one that was deeply entwined with British history and national identity. During the 1830s, Chartist opposition to the New Poor Law drew from the gothic repertoire of the Bastille to frame inequality in Britain. The workhouse 'bastile' was not viewed simply as an illegitimate imposition upon Britain, but came to symbolise the character of class rule. Meanwhile, Chartist newspapers also printed fictions based on the French Revolution, inserting Chartist concerns into the narratives, and their histories of 1789 stressed the similarity between France on the eve of revolution and Britain on the eve of the Charter. During the 1840s Chartist internationalism was contextualised by a framework of thinking about international politics constructed around the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, while the convulsions of Continental Europe during 1848 were interpreted as both a confirmation of Chartist historical discourse and as the opening of a new era of international struggle. In the Democratic Review (1849-1850), the Red Republican (1850), and The Friend of the People (1850-1852), Chartists like George Julian Harney, Helen Macfarlane, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, along with leading figures of the radical émigrés of 1848, characterised 'democracy' as a spirit of action and a system of belief. For them, the democratic heritage was populated by a diverse array of figures, including the Apostles of Jesus, Martin Luther, the romantic poets, and the Jacobins of 1793. The 'Red Republicanism' that flourished during 1848-1852 was sustained by the historical viewpoints arrived at during the Chartist period generally. Attempts to define a 'science' of socialism was as much about correcting the misadventures of past ages as it was a means to realise the promise announced by the 'Springtime of the Peoples'.