In 1839, an economically battered Britain teetered on the threshold of revolution. The neo-Spencean poet Capel Lofft aspired to use his anonymously circulated epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration, to send it over the brink. Ernest describes, in sanguinary detail, the growth and eventual triumph of an agrarian-communist insurrection. A charismatic poet leads the revolt, using fiery oratory to inspire his co-conspirators. Because Ernest was clearly intended to galvanize militant elements within the Chartist movement into action—and because its author was alarmingly eloquent—hysteria greeted the epic’s appearance. This chapter’s reading of Ernest traces how Lofft employs vanguardism, the belief that artists can lead the masses in a progressive direction, to allay his own doubts about the viability of popular self-governance. More broadly, it utilizes Ernest, a hybrid of contemporaneous radical social and political thought, as a staging ground to investigate the uneasy comingling of Chartism and Owenite socialism, the two great working-class movements of the first half of the nineteenth century. Lofft’s epic stages several questions with exemplary clarity: is revolution a political event, or the anti-political mechanism by which “politics” is definitively superseded? Are the people the heroes of the emancipatory narrative? Or does the revolutionary leader, rendered sublime by the fervency of his commitment, inevitably eclipse them? Can poetry, a literary mode increasingly defined by its detachment from practical concerns, marshal the rhetorical and conceptual resources of the aesthetic to foster national regeneration?
Political Economy, Ideology and the Persistence of Working-Class Housing Problems in Britain, 1850–1914