Charlotte Crow, History Today
The only surviving possession known to have belonged to the black Chartist leader, William Cuffay, has been acquired by the Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. Romantic both in gesture and content, it is a volume of poems by Lord Byron given to Cuffay, the son of a former slave, by his Chartist comrades following his transportation to Hobart, Tasmania, in 1849.
After the famous Kennington rally in April 1848, the Chartists’ third petition demanding improved conditions for the working classes was rejected by Parliament. That August Cuffay and 11 other London activists were arrested and charged with sedition and for ‘levying war’ against the government. At the Old Bailey the 60-year-old tailor, who had supported – though not instigated – the planned uprising demanded ‘a fair trial by a jury of my peers in accord with Magna Carta’. On hearing his sentence to life in the antipodean penal colony he commented: ‘The press has strongly excited the middle class against me; therefore I did not expect anything else except the verdict of guilty, right or wrong’.
The voyage to Tasmania took 103 days and Cuffay arrived on November 29th 1849. During this time his friends in London sent the book to him. Its inscription reads:
Read what the inscription says – and the rest of the article – here
