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 hisradical 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 acentury - 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.

Ernest Jones is the last of the major Chartist leaders to have received a modern biography, and in this volume Miles Taylor does the job splendidly. Thoroughly researched, beautifully written ... the biography offers a bold and convincing interpretation of a man whose enigmatic life has confused and frustrated generations of Chartist scholars., Jones was a fantasist with no money, a man with aspirations to grandeur beyond his means, a failure in most things except in establishing his own heroically romantic reputation. In this last alone he succeeded. Miles Taylor tells us why and how., Taylor has written an immensely readable account, putting straight the record about some of Jones' romantic claims without debunking or ridiculing the man himself., ... of great interest to anyone wanting to understand some of the realities of life in the mid-Victorian period., Miles Taylor has done outstanding work as a sifter of documentation ... an excellent book.