Mike Sanders. The Poetry of Chartism: Politics, Aesthetics, History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009. ISBN: 9780521899185. Price: US$89.00/£53.00

Long a victim of neglect driven by condescension, nineteenth-century working-class poetry has begun to come into its own. In his overview of attitudes toward Chartist literature in the second chapter of The Poetry of Chartism, Mike Sanders correctly remarks that “Chartist poetry has a higher academic profile than at any time in the past half-century” (66), and his most recent study clarifies its qualities and a number of ways in which it has been subtly misread. One of these critical lapses has been the exclusive concentration on a small number of “Labor Laurates” (66), a focus which has led to under-attention to the historical circumstances in which these context-sensitive poems were written. Another was to dismiss the importance of editorial and political influences which largely determined which poems were read; and a third has been to confine consideration to poems with a readily discernible political import. Such approaches employed a “‘self-evident’ definition of [their] object of study, constructing Chartist poetry as an ‘ideal type’ consisting of poems on a recognisably Chartist theme written by self-identified Chartist poets” (66). In his response to these oversimplifications, Sanders examines Chartist poetry as an evolving effort to express authors’ personal aspirations and political agenda in a chaotic period that ultimately crushed these newly-aroused aspirations. He considers Chartist poetry in relation to the movement’s rise before 1842, for example, its organizational surge after the rejection of the Charter, and its ambivalent and conflicted attempts to rally against the harsh repression of 1848. He has also broadened the scope of inquiry to include selections from quite literally thousands of poems written by the Chartists and their ideological allies as examples of “the Chartist imaginary” (3). Sanders also critiques prior accounts of Victorian (middle-class) poetry as dominated by the dramatic monologue, the epistemologically skeptical double poem (a concept developed by Isobel Armstrong), and preoccupations with marital unity and national identity. He makes a strong claim for working-class poetic patterns of “negation, opposition and transformation,” which form a “Chartist equivalent to the double poem” and will “broaden and deepen our understanding of Victorian poetry” (37). Sanders’s first chapter establishes that poetry was pervasive in the everyday practice of Chartist institutions—sung at meetings and published in broadsides and newspapers, of course, but also composed by Chartist leaders, who sought to inspire and communicate with their followers as they responded to the events of the day. In a period before the dominance of prose, the power of the secular ‘good word’ could soften harsh everyday reality, alternately channel and mute anger, and offer a hope of earthly change as a counterpoint to the religious verities that permeated middle-class literature designed for the working-classes. Even readers predisposed to agree with Sanders’s larger arguments may be startled at the evidence of the force of working-class poetic interests and aspirations. The various editors of the Northern Star from 1838-52 struggled with deluges of poetic submissions; one beleaguered editor complained that that “[w]e have received as much poetry as a donkey could draw” and [are] “glutted with poetry, [with] almost a jackass load of what claims to be original poetry waiting for insertion” (qtd, in 72). A second chapter on the Northern Star’s poetry column explores the complex interrelations between poetically inclined readers and the country’s most widely read Chartist newspaper, which reached an estimated weekly circulation of 50,000 at its peak in 1842. As the editors alternately responded to and attempted to shape the quality of the contributions submitted, its poetry column moved “from the margins to the centre of the paper” and expanded in length and scope (71). The quality …