Search results
During the academic year 1912–13, Mark Hovell studied and taught at Professor Karl Lamprecht’s Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte (Institute for Cultural and Universal History) in Leipzig. During his time there, Hovell wrote regularly to his fiancée, Fanny Gately, and to his mentor, Professor Thomas Tout. This article focuses on several of Hovell’s letters held at the John Rylands Library, presenting his thoughts and observations on aspects of social, political and academic life in Germany shortly before the outbreak of the First World War.
In the early years of the twentieth century, Professor Karl Lamprecht was a powerful and controversial figure in German academia, offering a universal interpretation of history that drew on an eclectic mix of politics, economics, anthropology and psychology. This article explores Mark Hovell’s experiences of working with Lamprecht at the Institut für Kultur- und Universalgeschichte [Institute for Cultural and Universal History] in Leipzig between 1912 and 1913, while also situating Hovell’s criticisms of the Lamprechtian method within wider contemporary assessments of Lamprecht’s scholarship.
This article provides the first detailed account of Mark Hovell’s The Chartist Movement, focusing on the overall achievement of the work as published in 1918, contemporary reactions to the circumstances of its production, and the ways in which Hovell’s research cemented twentieth-century dominant narratives around the rise and fall of Chartism. The article also offers a counterfactual evaluation of Hovell’s manuscript, focusing on the probable direction of his vision of Chartism, and suggesting how the work completed by Hovell (had he lived) might have looked compared with the version eventually produced by Tout.
Chartist historiography is inevitably inflected by the political desires of its authors. This desire, combined with the contingent nature of history, imparts a fictive dimension to Chartist historiography. In support of these claims, this article applies the literary concepts of plot and character to Mark Hovell’s The Chartist Movement (1918). It argues that Hovell’s political desire leads him to construct a tragic and entropic plot for Chartism, which is often contradicted by his own assessment of the movement’s vitality. Similarly, Hovell’s plotting is also driven by his reading of Chartism as a conflict between two characters, a flawed hero (Lovett) and a villain (O’Connor). The article closes with a close reading of Hovell’s characterisation of O’Connor, which demonstrates the skill with which he interweaves fact and interpretation.
. There was more to his cultural stylistics than Romanticism and melodrama; in contrast to Oastler, Stephens was a much less recognisably Gothic figure. 7 The early twentieth-century historian of Chartism Mark Hovell tellingly wrote of Stephens’s ‘unreasoning sentimentalism’, a judgement that placed Hovell in the proto-Fabian tradition begun by Francis Place which damned
Chartist movement (New York, 1916); Mark Hovell, The Chartist movement (Manchester, 1918). 24 ‘A new order of things’ 23 E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid (eds), Currents of radicalism: popular radicalism, organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform: popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992). 24 Philip Harling, ‘Equipoise regained? Recent trends in British political history, 1790–1867’, Journal of Modern History, 75:4 (2003), 901. 25 Paul Pickering and Alex
, Past and present (1843; 1897), p. 228. 4 Northern Star, 20 October 1838, p. 7. For similar views, see Mark Hovell, The Chartist movement (1918; Manchester, 1966), p. 118; Theodore Rothstein, From Chartism to Labourism (1929), p. 50; ‘Rejoicing in potatoes’ 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 55 G. D. H. Cole, Chartist portraits (1941), pp. 1–2, 74; W. W. Rostow, British economy of the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1948), pp. 122– 5. Gammage, the movement’s first historian, had a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between want and politics. See R. G. Gammage, The
class (Berkeley, 1995). ‘Consumers of their own productions’ 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 179 Northern Star, 3 August 1839, p. 4. Leeds Mercury, 10 August 1839, p. 8. Discussed by Stedman Jones, ‘The language of Chartism’, pp. 26–30. Northern Star, 22 June 1839, p. 7. Ibid., 25 January 1840, p. 4. Odd Fellow, 3 August 1839, p. 122. Mark Hovell, The Chartist movement (Manchester, 1966), pp. 148–9; Morning Chronicle, 5 July 1839, p. 4. Northern Liberator, 6 July 1839, p. 2. Northern Star, 6 July 1839, p. 1. Taylor was still arguing for
and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (London, 1987); Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester, 1918), pp. 243–44. 5 Northern Star, 8 May 1842. 6 Chase, Chartism, pp. 201–7. 7 McDouall’s Chartist and Republican Journal, 24 July 1841. 8 Non-Conformist, 3 May 1842. 9 Frank O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England 1780– 1860’ Past and Present 135:1 (1992), pp. 79–115, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford, 1989). 10 Thomas Beggs
. 131 Leeds Intelligencer , 2 February 1832. 132 Leeds Mercury , 30 October 1830. 133 Mark Hovell , The Chartist Movement ( Manchester : Manchester University Press , 1970 [ 1918 ]), p. 89