Monograf Journal Edebiyat ve İktidar (2014 / 1) | Page 22

ODAK

22 • Anthony P. Pennino
into demonstrations protesting the deportation of Italian nationalist hero Giuseppe Garibaldi from the country; these demonstrations were an inciting incident in the eventual creation of
the Reform League a year later (Anthony Taylor 358). It should
be noted that the Reform League would advocate for many of
the same principles that the Chartists had two decades prior.

In the pursuit of literature as a political enterprise,
Chartists were both critics and creators. What the Chartist authors sought to convey in their own works they believed they
perceived reflected in Shakespeare’s canon. Aesthetically, the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw literary realism at its height. Realism, however, was a mode of expression
that many Chartists foundunavailable to them. Haywood argues
that realism was firmly entrenched in the concerns and culture
of the bourgeoisie. He continues, “By the time the Chartist authors turned their hands to fiction, the British novel was deeply
biased against reflecting a working-class perspective on society” (3).In challenging middle-class attitudes Chartist fiction by
necessity challenges a rigorous realism. This fiction is often set
away from the metropolitan center of London and in the “wilderness” of far-flung regions of the British Isles. For instance,
Chartist poet Robert Peddie, who wrote a good deal of verse
while in prison, penned much of his work in his native Scottish
dialect; his “Spirit of Freedom” references the mythic Scottish
heroes Robert Bruce and William Wallace. Some Chartist fic-

The Reconstructed Bard: Chartism and Shakespeare • 23

tion, such as that of Cooper, resists traditional narrative closure
wherein the ordered world of the middle-class family is restored
and strengthened. Further, Chartist fiction tends to eschew domestic settings while focusing on a number of a characters rather than a single individual hero, hence celebrating the spirit of
class unity and achievement over a single person’s endeavors.
Thomas Martin Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow (serialized
March 1849 – January 1850) serves as an excellent example of
this genre in that it equates the marriage of middle-class women with the exploitation of the working class and equally condemns chattel and wage slavery. Though George W. M. Reynolds was both a Chartist and a novelist, his fiction stands outside
of consideration here because his work, such as The Mysteries
of London, in the penny dreadfuls was more concerned with
the needs of melodrama than the promulgation of his ideology.
Reynolds aside, most Chartist literature was quite radical or,
as Haywood states, “[N]ot all working class texts are as clearly oppositional in form and content as those of Chartists” (3).

This spirit of creation informs their criticism as well,
which, not surprisingly, is often quite materialist in its evaluative process. Chartists honored the Romantic poets, but more
for their political aspirations than the innovation of their poetry.
They brought a similar assessment to Shakespeare. By the nineteenth century, Shakespeare had gained the stature