Oratory, itinerant lecturing and Victorian popular politics: a case study of James Acland (1799-1876)

Martin, Janette

doi:10.1111/j.1468-2281.2012.00607.x

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…Even in instances where an article purports to be a "verbatim report," the oral and written versions should not be conflated. 22 My interest is not in the events themselves but in how they are rendered textually in the pages of periodicals, extending their temporal and geographic reach.…”

Section: Dialogic Formsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogic Forms in Freethought Periodicals: Free Discussion and Open Debate

Stainthorp¹

2022

Victorian Periodicals Review

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Nineteenth-century atheists, agnostics, and secularists were committed to the pursuit of truth via reason and viewed debate to be an ideal form through which to further their cause. As Agnosco, a regular contributor to the Secular Review, wrote in 1890: "He must study both sides of every debateable question. It is only by examining both sides that the truth can be discovered." 1 Freethinkers such as George Jacob Holyoake considered open debate to be at the heart of their movement. His four "rights of Secularism" each address a different facet of intellectual freedom:1. The right to Think for one's self, which most Christians now admit, at least in theory.2. The right to Differ, without which the right to think is nothing worth.3. The right to Assert difference of opinion, without which the right to differ is of no practical use.4. The right to Debate all vital opinion, without which there is no intellectual equality-no defence against the errors of the state or the pulpit. 2 Thus, he asserts, freedom and progress are predicated upon reasoned dissent and being unbound by prevailing opinion. The influence of John Stuart Mill's brand of liberalism, as well as Richard Carlile's libertarian stance, upon freethinkers' commitment to a free platform has been well established. 3 In 1886, a symposium on the "Value of Platform Discussion" in the National Reformer provided the opportunity for W. H. Utley to explain how the right to liberty of thought and discussion, and the creation of platforms where this could be freely expressed, was conceived as a challenge to religious authority: "Free discussion of all lectures is a tradition which has rooted itself into the very core of the Secular movement, and not without Postprint -accepted to appear in Victorian Periodicals Review 55 (Fall/Winter 2022)cause, as all must recognise who have ever sat through a sermon in a church or chapel and felt the almost uncontrollable desire to get up and lay bare its absurdities, and the sense of utter impotence the prohibition causes." 4 This ethos of open debate and honest enquiry permeates freethought periodicals' form and content, promoted as a tactic to overturn religious dogma and what was characterised as the unenlightened faith of believers. Through debates, dialogues, and correspondence, the editors of and contributors to freethought periodicals sustained and grew a radical secular movement that challenged Christian conventions. This article considers how these divisive Victorians used dialogic forms to enact freethinking ideals, but it also identifies ways in which the concept of free debate proved at times to be more of an aspiration than a reality.Freethought is a useful term for understanding the extent of this primarily workingand artisan-class movement, which encompassed multiple forms of irreligion as well as a wider political and social commitment to challenging the status quo. Freethinkers supported a range of activist causes, particularly those that sought to address inequalities such as women's rights, workers' rights, ...

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Section: Dialogic Formsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dialogic Forms in Freethought Periodicals: Free Discussion and Open Debate

Stainthorp¹

2022

Victorian Periodicals Review

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“…The second, David Goodway () ed., George Julian Harney: The Chartists Were Right offers a selection of post‐Chartist reflections on the Chartist movement from its single most influential journalist and editor. Janette Martin's () “Oratory, Itinerant Lecturing and Victorian Popular Politics: A Case Study of James Acland 1799‐1876” (2013), reminds us of the importance of oral culture, whether political oratory or the lecture, in the circulation of Chartist ideas (a topic explored at greater length in Martin's PhD thesis).…”

Section: Chartist Literature and Chartist Historiographymentioning

confidence: 99%

Coordinating chartist poetry: Past, present, future

Sanders

2020

Literature Compass

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This article traces the development of the critical debate surrounding Chartist poetry with a particular focus on work from the last decade. It situates that critical work in relation to four key areas: its relationship to Chartist historiography, the implications of Romanticism as the dominant critical frame for discussions of Chartist poetry, its contribution to the wider field of Victorian Studies, and attempts to identify the esthetic specificity of Chartist writing. The article concludes by suggesting a number of areas for further study including discussions of the particular historical knowledge/ evidence provided by Chartist poetry, the antecedents of Chartist poetry in the radical working-class press of the 1820s and 1830s, its relationship to canonical Victorian poetry, and the elaboration of an appropriate set of esthetic criteria for Chartist poetry.

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“…10 Janette Martin traces the use of elocution and gesture manuals in the training of public speaking -an acknowledgement that those addressing crowds were aware not only of the need to perform but to present themselves in visually arresting ways. 11 If research has focused on how politicians conceptualised themselves as performers, history' and 'cultural history', then the uptake of performance enables the uptake of methodologies drawn from both.…”

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Introduction: the politics of performance and the performance of politics

Yeandle¹,

Newey²

2016

"Politics, Performance and Popular Culture"

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This book aims to create a space for historians and theatre scholars to continue a dialogue about the relationship between representations of politics in the theatre and the theatricality of politics itself in the long nineteenth century. Our aim is to provoke as much as to synthesise.The period of our investigation, from the time of the Napoleonic wars to the early twentieth century, resists synthesis. This is not a unified period, spanning the agitations and suppressions of democratic culture in Britain in the aftermath of the French Revolution, to the jingoism of late Victorian and Edwardian nationalism. By spreading across the boundaries of the Romantic and the Victorian, these essays examine a series of debates and conflicts in the development of industrial modernity, united by the manipulations and uses of performative strategies to engage with structures of political and cultural power. The terms in which we have staged the discussion --'performance,' 'politics,' 'history' and 'theatre' --are contingent. Our contributors engage with these key concepts in part to problematize them. If we can take it for granted that the problematization of key concepts is an important component in driving forwards debate, then we will succeed insomuch as the essays in this book represent the debate, and offer views with which to argue.In drawing together scholars from political and social history, literary studies, and theatre history, we were immediately aware of the problem of the arbitrary identification of disciplinary divides. Political historians are joined by those who draw their methodologies from social history and cultural studies; theatre studies scholars by those working in English departments and those with research interests in textual analysis. The purpose of this book, then, is more than to demarcate relationships between politics and performance in the Boyd Hilton's catchy formulation is worth repeating: 'if the theatre was political, it is equally the case that politics was theatrical … if public life was a stage, so too was the society it mirrored'. 3 Hilton's argument -that the spectacular and unregulated nature of early nineteenth-century society was a reflection of the topsy-turvy world-turned-upside-down of

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Oratory, itinerant lecturing and Victorian popular politics: a case study of James Acland (1799-1876)

Cited by 5 publications

References 41 publications

Dialogic Forms in Freethought Periodicals: Free Discussion and Open Debate

Dialogic Forms in Freethought Periodicals: Free Discussion and Open Debate

Coordinating chartist poetry: Past, present, future

Introduction: the politics of performance and the performance of politics

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