Samuel Bamford, Peterloo et l’histoire du radicalisme anglais
Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical, 1839-1842 is perhaps the most widely read 19th-century English autobiography. In it, Bamford (1788-1872) recounts how, on 16 August 1819, he led a procession of 3,000 inhabitants of Middleton, a village north of Manchester, to the mass radical meet...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Presses Universitaires du Midi
2021-10-01
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| Series: | Caliban: French Journal of English Studies |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/caliban/9980 |
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| Summary: | Samuel Bamford’s Passages in the Life of a Radical, 1839-1842 is perhaps the most widely read 19th-century English autobiography. In it, Bamford (1788-1872) recounts how, on 16 August 1819, he led a procession of 3,000 inhabitants of Middleton, a village north of Manchester, to the mass radical meeting which ended in a bloodbath and which would go on to be dubbed ‘Peterloo’. Bamford’s account has stood the test of time, and has even become the very embodiment of the event. When he wrote his memoirs at the end of the 1830s however, Bamford was no longer the radical he had once been in 1819. He was a writer aspiring to literary greatness, and he had largely toned down his radical views. His memoirs were not simply an attempt to provide a written record of the past, they also formed part of an anti-Chartist narrative, critical of the latter’s supposed violence and their antipathy to the free-trading industrial middle classes. By highlighting the pacificism of his youth, in contrast to the revolutionary spirit of the Chartists, Bamford was perhaps inventing himself anew. Considering this double time frame and the issue of memory is a way of questioning the history of radicalism over the course of 1819-1820, what it was and what has been said about it. |
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| ISSN: | 2425-6250 2431-1766 |