Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 14

ODAK

14 • Anthony P. Pennino
ish reader, safe in the assurance that ‘England is not France’,
call all this unpleasant doctrine of ours ideology, perfectibility, and a vacant dream?” (47). To many in Britain, ideology
– and the theories which underlay an ideology -- had a distinct
continental or French flavor and stood outside of a Newtonian
and rational worldview. Chartist Ernest Jones, in a speech on
universal suffrage, articulates the dangers inherent in abstract
political formulations, “To-day the Constitution recognizes universal suffrage in theory that it may, perhaps, deny it in practice
on the morrow” (Marx). To promulgate an ideological agenda,
complete with acultural program in support, was a seemingly
insurmountable task, for the laissez-faire status quo was not understood as the dominant ideology but rather as the natural state
of the human polis. The utilization of Shakespeare (and other
literary figures) and the recasting of history serves the larger
purpose of the Chartists. Though chronologically pre-revolutionary, at least in regards to the major works of Marx and Engels, the Chartists were attempting, as their successors would,
to render ideology as a product of rationality by embracing all
of human knowledge. Raymond Williams’ analysis of ideology in Marxism and Literature (with regard to a brief examination of Lenin) has applicability here, “More significantly,
perhaps, ‘ideology’ in its now neutral or approving sense is
seen as ‘introduced’ on the foundation of ‘all…human knowledge…science…etc.’, of course brought to bear from a class

The Reconstructed Bard: Chartism and Shakespeare • 15

point of view” (69). From this perspective, Chartists engaged
in conversations about literature and history, in part, to embrace
all of human knowledge and render their ideology “neutral”.

Thus, history for them is no longer a static knowledge
of dates and facts, but a conversation – what Williams terms
geschichte – between past and present based upon a particular
political agenda. Roger G. Hall states: “Although Chartist activists and leaders not infrequently referred to statutes, documents,
and printed authorities, they turned to history primarily out of
the pursuit of democratic political power, not out of an impartial
search for ‘objective’ historical truth” (233). That the Chartists
would take an interest in creating such a narrative is not that surprising considering they are advocating for their cause scant decades after Gibbon completed his magnum opus, which, despite its
flaws, developed a coherent account of the fall of the Roman Empire based on a highly contentious and inflammatory argument.

At this juncture, an overview of the Chartist Movement
is in order. Chartism flourished in the 1830’s and 40’s in Great
Britain reaching its height in 1848 before tensions among the
leadership and efforts by the ruling classes (coinciding with
the reactionary response on the Continent to the Springtime of
the Peoples) led to its gradual demise. Chartism arose during
the first wave of the Industrial Revolution and correspondingly during very difficult economic times in Britain. Not coincidentally, Charles Dickens in his fiction chronicles many of

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