Date of Award
Fall 2025
Degree Type
Thesis
Department
English Language and Literatures
Director of Thesis
Dr. Anthony Jarrells
Second Reader
Dr. Alexander Millen
Abstract
This thesis examines the Chartist newspaper ballad as a politically charged poetic form that mediated working-class identity, moral economy, and collective action during the British Chartist movement, borrowing from and reinventing the political ballad as conceived during the Romantic period. Although Chartism is often defined through the political demands of the People’s Charter, Chartist thought framed the movement as equally rooted in intellectual and moral improvement. Poetry, particularly the ballad, became a crucial site where these aspirations were articulated. Drawing on the poetry columns in the Northern Star, the period’s most radical political paper, this study argues that the Chartist ballad transformed a historically “popular” form into a mode of poetic activism, capable of recording political struggle, forging imagined communities, and negotiating ideological boundaries within the movement. Through close readings of three representative ballads published in 1840, alongside analysis of Romantic antecedents in Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, and Shelley, the thesis reveals how Chartist poets adapted the ballad’s hybrid lineage in oral culture, print circulation, and communal storytelling. Hagiographic celebration of imprisoned leaders, satirical attacks on monarchy, and grotesque condemnations of political adversaries each demonstrate how the ballad’s cultural inheritance was repurposed to build solidarity, mobilize emotion, and articulate a working-class moral economy. Ultimately, this thesis contends that the Chartist newspaper ballad served as a vital instrument of political communication in reimagining the form’s eighteenth-century function as “recorder,” and that its evolution within radical print culture reflects a broader nineteenth-century effort to align poetic expression with movements for social and political reform. This thesis is concluded with a reflection upon my research process.
First Page
1
Last Page
32
Recommended Citation
Pritchard, Kaylen, "The Chartist Newspaper Ballad in the Northern Star" (2025). Senior Theses. 818.
https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/senior_theses/818
Rights
© 2025, Kaylen Pritchard