The Chartist who called himself Shakespeare

They keep popping up these Chartists.  Another week, another Chartist.  Another Chartist, another blog post.  It’s not that I think about the Chartists all the time.  I do think about other things.  The new album that is coming from Bob Dylan.  Detective novels.  Shepherd’s pie. Aston Villa.  And Victorian Birmingham quite a lot.  I don’t often meet Chartists in the detective novels that I devour (though I do sometimes … they’re there in M.J. Carter’s The Printer’s Coffin).  But I do meet them when I am researching Victorian Brum.  A lot.  Yes, there were a lot of old men in the last decades of the nineteenth century who were able to proudly look back on their involvement in Brum Chartism.

I came across one such chap recently.  J.S. Manton was his name.  I’d heard of J.S. Manton, the button manufacturer.  But I’d never heard of J.S. Manton the Chartist.  Turns out they were one and the same.  This interesting discovery happened when, in one of the Birmingham newspapers, I came across a short article about J.S. Manton the button maker.  It was based on an autobiography he’d written.  An autobiography that was never published and is now sadly lost.  And there it was: at the age of nineteen Manton had been a Chartist, chaired meetings, signed the great petition, read the Northern Star and all that sort of thing.  He’d been warming up to it for a few years, I learned.  He’d been present at the great meeting on Newhall Hill in 1832 when huge numbers of Brums dressed up and demanded the passing of the Reform Bill.  Young J.S. remained glued to the rad cause.  He was there when the charismatic and much-loved rad preacher George Dawson cut the first sod for his new Church of the Messiah.  Dawson, J.S. recalled, ‘digged furiously.’  A few years later Dawson introduced J.S. to Mazzini in London.

I call him J.S. Manton.  His full name was John Shakespeare Manton.  Shakespeare?  Yep, he loved Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream and all that stuff so much that he added Shakespeare to his own name.  The no. 1 fan of Shakespeare amongst the Chartists, surely?  Well actually, no.  He was eclipsed by my old friend Thomas Cooper, who could recite all of Hamlet and made a trip to Stratford just so he could kneel on the poet’s tomb.  Anyway, back to J.S.  He wasn’t short of other people to talk to about the Bard.  For Victorian Brum, you see, loved Shakespeare.  Dawson loved Shakespeare.  Dawson’s best friend Sam Timmins loved Shakespeare even more.  These chaps got together and had long chats once a month in the smoke room of the Hen and Chickens on New Street,  They called themselves Our Shakespeare Club.  ‘Our’ …the Bard was theirs.  And, they also believed – very strongly, as it happens – that he belonged to the people of Birmingham.  So they set up the Shakespeare Memorial Library to collect together everything they could lay their hands on to do with Shakespeare. The 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birthday in 1864 was marked by dinners across the land.  In Brum it was marked by the establishment of a library  (though these energetic men managed to fit in a dinner, too).  Soon they had got their hands on a First Folio.

This desire to share culture and knowledge was all part of Birmingham’s famous civic gospel.  Lots of men and women joined in.  And now I’m co-authoring a book about them with Andrew Reekes. They’ll also be contributions from Ewan Fernie & Nicola Gauld – who are involved in an ambitious project to revive interest in Brum’s world-famous Shakespeare collection called ‘Everything to Everybody.’  The book will be out next year.  The civic gospel was a Birmingham thing.  But, as John Shakespeare Manton, tells me, it was also a Chartist thing.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *