Christian Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones's Chartist Poetry

Between 1846 and 1858 Ernest Jones was one of the foremost Chartist leaders. He has recently come under scrutiny for the ‘particular version of his own life’ – as a gentleman-leader and fallen aristocrat – which he created and protected to secure his place upon the popular political platform. His life, as Miles Taylor notes, is ‘a case study of the increasingly contested role of gentlemanly radicalism in the nineteenth century’.1 The Christian discourses present in his poems, written mostly between 1846 and 1852, were an important means by which his role as a committed gentleman leader was mediated. Publicly feted at Chartist rallies, mass meetings and extensively published in the Northern Star, Jones’s speeches, journalism and poems reached large audiences during his rise to prominence.2 He was imprisoned between 1848 and 1850, but following his release he became the movement’s leader and took Chartism in a more centralised direction.3 After his death in 1869, Jones was popularly remembered as a prison martyr, an industrious Chartist leader and latterly a Reform League leader and lecturer. He was revered by remaining grassroots Chartists, viewed as a man exhausted by his commitment to radical causes and remembered as martyr who attained a place in ‘the pantheon of the elect’, while the Liberal tradition also tried to claim him as a reformer.4 As such, his life and death became synonymous with competing trends within radicalism. Just as Jones’s death was associated with the Christian symbolism of his personal sacrifice, his poems often project in Christian terms the very virtues he was understood to have died for. This article will demonstrate the importance of Christianity to the models of political conduct Jones projected through his Chartist poetry. The specific Christian elements through which the poets of the movement conceived Chartist identities however, have been largely overlooked in Anne Janowitz’s Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition. The attention to Christianity