Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press

Jones ensured that The Labourer was not just a public-relations tool for the Chartist Land Plan, but also served to showcase Chartist literary skills, until his arrest ended his association with the journal and with Feargus O'Connor. Each adds appreciably to our knowledge of the Chartist press, even though the focus on individual newspapers, people, and localities means that the content analysis is generally not tied to the larger picture of Chartist political theory or political economy. While the barriers to starting a newspaper or journal were fairly low, and the number of subscribers needed to support a provincial Chartist newspaper was small, most of the newspapers studied petered out after only a few months (telling us something about the otherwise neglected topic of Chartist readership).