In 1838, a document called the People's Charter was published by the London Working Men's Association, setting out six demands for parliamentary reform. The men who signed it wanted universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, the abolition of the property qualification for MPs and payment of MPs to allow working men to serve. These demands seem modest now — most liberal democracies take them for granted — but in the England of 1838 they were revolutionary, representing a fundamental challenge to a political system still largely controlled by landowners and manufacturers who saw no reason to share political power with those below them.
The Chartist movement that grew around the Charter was the first genuinely mass democratic movement in British history, drawing its membership from the industrial working class of the Midlands, Yorkshire, Lancashire and South Wales. It organised at times of severe economic distress — the Hungry Forties saw real wages fall and unemployment rise sharply — when the gap between the formal exclusion of the working class from politics and their central role in producing the nation's wealth was felt most acutely. The great Chartist orator Feargus O'Connor, who edited the Northern Star newspaper that was the movement's most important voice, drew enormous crowds to outdoor meetings across the industrial north.
The movement submitted three great petitions to Parliament — in 1839, 1842 and 1848. The 1842 petition carried over three million signatures, the largest ever presented to Parliament at that time. On each occasion, Parliament rejected the petition, often with barely concealed contempt for the pretensions of the labouring classes to a say in their own governance. The rejection of the 1848 petition — presented during the year of European revolutions and accompanied by apocalyptic predictions that England would follow France into republican upheaval — was particularly significant. The demonstration on Kennington Common that accompanied it attracted far fewer people than its organisers had hoped, and the authorities' confident show of force signalled that the revolutionary moment, if there had ever been one, had passed.
The movement declined after 1848 but its demands did not die with it. The Second Reform Act of 1867 enfranchised urban working-class men. The Ballot Act of 1872 introduced the secret ballot. The Third Reform Act of 1884 enfranchised rural labourers. The Corrupt and Illegal Practices Act of 1883 tackled electoral corruption. The Payment of Members Act of 1911 allowed working men to stand for Parliament without independent means. By 1918, five of the Charter's six demands — all except annual parliaments — had been enacted, many of them by Conservative as well as Liberal governments. The Chartists did not live to see their victory, but the victory came.
