Ernest Jones (1819–1869) was England's outstanding contribution to the gallery of 19th-century romantic populists. As is generally well known, he was a lawyer who rose to prominence in the Chartist movement in 1848, kept the remnants of working-class protest alive during the 1850s, and reappeared in the parliamentary reform campaigns at the time of the second reform bill in 1866–1867. Jones 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 mid-Victorian England. He has gone down in history as the principal En ... More

Ernest Jones (1819–1869) was England's outstanding contribution to the gallery of 19th-century romantic populists. As is generally well known, he was a lawyer who rose to prominence in the Chartist movement in 1848, kept the remnants of working-class protest alive during the 1850s, and reappeared in the parliamentary reform campaigns at the time of the second reform bill in 1866–1867. Jones 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 mid-Victorian England. He has gone down in history as the principal English ally of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, yet focusing on this friendship tends to distort from his real significance. Jones wrote hundreds of poems, several dramas and full-length serial novels, as well as editing or contributing to a dozen or so newspapers. Jones's suffusion in late romanticism was not a hindrance, as some of his biographers have suggested, but rather the perfect preparation for a political career in mid-Victorian Britain. As scholars have begun to recognise more and more, the arts of democratic oratory were often indistinguishable from the conventions of the stage, the bar, and the pulpit. In his time Jones played all these parts, and the story of his life is thus also a small chapter in the history of the coming of the golden age of mass politics.