Dr Vallance ('The Continuity of 19th Century Radicalism') provides a narrative that ties 'radical' political campaigns together, explaining how Mass Platform, Chartism and Women's Suffrage all share common themes. This continuity should not be seen as a series of failures. He was speaking at the Prince's Teaching Institute New Teachers Subject Days courses for History on the topic of Radicalism held at Pimlico Academy on 19th October, 2013.

Follow the link: HERE

Ted Vallance's "A Radical History of Britain" will serve as an excellent introduction to the British Radicalism 1780-1880 course. The book takes the theme of radical protest and traces its development from the age of the Saxons right through to the suspension of Habeas Corpus under New Labour in 2008. 

Vallance's writing is fast paced and engaging. He covers the historical detail without the book becoming overly heavy (it is a thousand years of history after all) and still manages to drop in some interesting tid bits. Did you know for example that ex-boxer "Kosher" Hunt was assigned to guard Sylvia Pankhurst as the Suffragette campaign became more violent. 

Whilst there is not enough depth here for this to be your only read for the course, the outline provided will certainly help you to put things into context. In addition to this, Vallance's own views shine from the pages, and I often found myself carried along by the force of his convictions. The book finishes by looking at the state of political agitation today and raises a number of important issues about protecting our political rights and freedoms in a world where protest has become taboo.

Highly recommended. 

Some good articles looking at the Chartists and their successes and failures. The debates document is good for looking at the historical opinion on Chartism.

E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class was first published  in 1963. Undoubtedly one of the most influential historical books of the twentieth century, The Making set much of the agenda for the ‘new social history’ of the 1960s and 1970s, influencing generations of historians and other scholars. In a few pages in the book’s Preface, Thompson laid out some of the ideas that would guide several generations of historians: class as a relationship rather than a structure or category; the working class being ‘present at its own making’; the revolutionary potentials of working-class politics; and, perhaps most memorably, the responsibility of historians to ‘rescue’ ordinary people of the past, especially those whose struggles were defeated, from the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’. You can now download the full ebook HERE

Dr Vallance ('The Continuity of 19th Century Radicalism') provides a narrative that ties 'radical' political campaigns together, explaining how Mass Platform, Chartism and Women's Suffrage all share common themes. This continuity should not be seen as a series of failures. He was speaking at the Prince's Teaching Institute New Teachers Subject Days courses for History held at Altrincham Grammar School for Girls on 10th November 2012.

Download the podcast HERE

This slender political tract The Tryal of Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburn links indelibly two of the most commanding figures in English radicalism, both of whom won key legal victories against the executive and so helped to establish greater freedom to publish and propagandise.


Read more here

You can now download Eric Hobsbawm's excellent "The Age of Revolution". Whilst it is quite a difficult academic text, it does provide an excellent overview of the early part of our period and Hobsbawm is an engaging writer. Note Hobsbawm's distincly Marxist perspective here too.

Visit this section of the HA site for some podcasts on various aspects of radical history: LINK
Early British Radicals 
The Chartists 
Gladstone and Disraeli - Reform and Rivalry 
1890-1922 - Change and Reform