What Was Chartism and Why Did It Fail?

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What was Chartism and why did it fail? In this essay we will be looking into the Chartism movement. Firstly, we will begin by analysing the causes and reasons that led to Chartism being formed, what happened during the time when Chartism was at the top of the political agenda, and inevitably, why it failed. Chartism was the working class movement that called for radical political reform in Britain during 1838 and 1848, especially in terms of equal voting rights. In the early nineteenth century only men with above a certain amount of wealth or land were able to vote, and people, especially the working class concluded that this wasn’t fair and started to in a sense, rise up, and join the charter movement which is tracked back to eighteenth-century radicals. Let’s look at more specific economic reasons that led to the charter being formed. Firstly, industrial and agricultural workers were still facing harsh conditions in their workplaces, mainly low wages, periods of low unemployment and high prices. This led to a country felt resentment of the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and the sense of not being able to change anything through mainstream parliamentary politics, which was of course at this time dominated by upper classes. This leads on to another cause that led to the Chartism movement, the disappointment of the 1832 Reform Act. Leading up to the act, working classes had given massive support to the middle class led campaign for the act, with the hope of legislation to help them. Although it was passed by the Whigs, the working class were dissatisfied because it did not enfranchise them and they were still left without the vote. Whigs regarded the act as the final change in the electoral system, but Chartists labelled it just the beginning. Although we’ve only listed two causes in detail there were many more that led to the Chartist
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