Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819-1869

Ernest Jones (1819-69) was the last of the Chartist leaders, and in many ways the last in the long line of gentlemanly radicals who graced popular politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. His life was an extraordinarily colourful affair. Born into the fringes of the late Hanoverian court, and an habitué of the fashionable literary salons of London society, Jones renounced respectability and joined the Chartists, suffering imprisonment for his radical beliefs. He re-emerged as a popular leader at the height of the agitation for the second reform bill in the mid-1860s, becoming, alongside John Bright, the most popular orator of his generation. Jones was also a poet, dramatist and novelist, and this study - the first full biography in over a century - interweaves an account of his literary achievement with his political career, revealing Jones as the mid-Victorian incarnation of Shelley's romantic vision of the poet as patriot. A major contribution to Chartist historiography, this book also reveals the materials out of which political personality was fashioned in the mid-Victorian age.