Dorothy Thompson: historian of Chartism
Labour and socialist historian Dorothy Thompson died on 29 January at the age of 87. She is best known for her large and tremendously important work on the 19th century Chartist movement. Thompson took an over-arching view of Chartism as a movement, never overlooking the contributions of the individual men and women involved. She studied in detail the culture of Chartism and the role of gender within it, without retreating from what was at root a class analysis. In The Early Chartists (1971) she stressed the diversity of Chartism while emphasising its national character. Her major work, The...