About Northern Star

Northern Star

The Northern Star was the leading newspaper of the Chartist movement, published weekly in Britain from November 1837 until 1852. It was founded at Leeds by Feargus O'Connor, a former Irish member of parliament who had rebuilt his career in English radical politics, and its full first title was the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser. At its peak in 1839 it reached a circulation of tens of thousands and had the second largest circulation of any newspaper in the United Kingdom. It reported Chartist meetings throughout the country, hosted vigorous debates on parliamentary reform in its letters pages, campaigned for workers harmed by new technology and falling wages, and gave the movement a national voice. As Chartism declined, so did the paper: it moved to London in 1844, was sold by O'Connor in 1852, and was merged into a short-lived successor before the end of that year.

Foundation in Leeds in 1837

O'Connor decided to establish a weekly newspaper in 1837 and based it in Yorkshire, one of the heartlands of campaigning for reform of the Factory Acts and against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, whose workhouses were bitterly resented in the northern textile districts. He chose the name Northern Star in tribute to the newspaper of the Society of United Irishmen, which the military had suppressed in Belfast in 1797. Meetings were held to promote the venture in Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Huddersfield and Hull, and share capital was raised from supporters in Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham and Rochdale as well. A total of £690 was raised to found the paper. Its first issue appeared in November 1837, dated 18 November in reference works and 22 November in some accounts of its publication history. From the beginning the paper was a stamped newspaper: it paid the stamp duty of fourpence, although O'Connor protested that the tax restricted free speech, because being legally stamped allowed it to circulate openly through the post and newsagents.

Growth to a national circulation

The paper's growth was rapid. Within four months of its launch it was selling about 10,000 copies; by September 1838 its circulation stood at about 10,000 and by the summer of 1839 it had risen to around 50,000 copies a week, with one reference putting an 1839 figure as high as 80,000. By the end of 1839 it had the second largest circulation in the United Kingdom, and O'Connor had made a personal profit of about £13,000 from it by the end of that year. Its success rested on a readership of working people in the manufacturing districts, and on communal reading: copies were read aloud in public houses, workshops, coffee houses and Chartist reading rooms, so that a single copy reached many listeners who could not read it themselves. The paper also benefited from the passion of its readers, who treated its correspondents, agents and vendors as the local structure of a national movement, and defended it against the hostility of the commercial press.

The voice of Chartism

The Northern Star was founded just before the People's Charter was published in 1838, and by 1839 it had become the leading Chartist organ. O'Connor used its columns to propagate the demands of the Charter: universal male suffrage, the secret ballot, equal electoral districts, payment of members of parliament, abolition of the property qualification for members and annual parliaments. It reported Chartist meetings throughout Britain in detail that no other paper attempted, printed the speeches of movement leaders, announced meetings and lectures, and published poetry and correspondence from local branches. Its letters page hosted lively debate on the strategy of the movement and the meaning of reform. It also campaigned on the immediate grievances of its readers, leading opposition to the new Poor Law and supporting workers, notably the handloom weavers, whose livelihoods were destroyed by new technology and falling wages. In doing so it gave a scattered movement a shared language, a shared calendar of meetings and a sense of belonging to a single national cause.

O'Connor's imprisonment

In March 1840 O'Connor was imprisoned for eighteen months for publishing seditious libels in the paper's columns. The prosecution was understood by Chartists, then and later, as an attempt to remove the movement's leader and deflate the cause. The strategy failed in the short term. The Northern Star continued to sell well during O'Connor's imprisonment in York Castle, far outstripping rival movement papers: Robert Hartwell's The Charter sold about 6,000 copies a week against the Star's circulation of about 48,000. O'Connor used the paper as his means of communication with the movement while he was in prison, and his letters from jail became part of its identity, reinforcing his personal bond with his readers. The episode also exposed the paper's central structural fact: the Star was simultaneously a commercial business, a movement institution and the personal property of one man, and those three characters never fully separated during its life.

Editors and editorial staff

Although O'Connor owned the paper and set its political line, day-to-day editing passed through several hands. William Hill edited it in its successful early years before quarrelling with O'Connor and giving up the post in 1843. George Julian Harney, a veteran of the war of the unstamped who had worked as a boy's apprentice for Henry Hetherington of the Poor Man's Guardian, joined the paper after the Chartist trials of 1843 and became its editor within about two years. Harney edited the Northern Star from about 1845 to May 1850, and historians have described those five years as his finest period: he was an outstanding editor of a great newspaper who widened its interests to include international affairs, literature and the cause of oppressed classes in every country. Harney persuaded Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write for the paper, and in 1845 he founded the Society of Fraternal Democrats, linking British Chartism to democratic movements abroad. O'Connor tolerated Harney's independence for as long as it lasted; Harney himself later said of O'Connor that he never interfered with what Harney wrote and never knew what was in the paper until he saw it printed. Harney resigned in May 1850 to concentrate on his other journalistic ventures.

Move to London and changes of title

In the autumn of 1844 the paper's office was transferred from Leeds to London. The move followed the Chartist executive's own move south the previous year, on the logic that the organ of the movement should be based in the capital, close to Parliament and to the national press. It also marked a weakening: the paper had lost momentum in 1843 and 1844 along with the rest of Chartism, and its circulation and influence had fallen from their 1839 heights. From November 1844 the paper appeared as the Northern Star and National Trades' Journal, a title it retained until March 1852. In London it no longer enjoyed the automatic loyalty of the northern manufacturing districts that had sustained it, and it competed in a more crowded metropolitan market. The successes of its early years, when it had been both the oracle of northern industrial discontent and a source of funds with which O'Connor subsidised the finances of the cause, were not repeated.

Decline with the movement

The paper's fortunes followed those of Chartism. After the great year of 1839 its sales declined steadily; by 1840 they had halved, and each succeeding year brought a further drop, until by the summer of 1843 the position was becoming critical. The movement revived partially in the later 1840s, and O'Connor was returned to Parliament for Nottingham in 1847 and headed the great Chartist demonstration in London in 1848, but the failure of the 1848 petition and the collapse of his land scheme damaged both the cause and its proprietor. By the end of 1851 the Northern Star's weekly circulation was only about 1,200 copies. O'Connor was losing interest in the campaign, and his own health deteriorated thereafter. A paper that had once defined a mass movement had become, commercially, a shadow of itself, surviving on the loyalty of a shrinking core of readers.

Sale, merger and final issues

In April 1852 O'Connor sold the Northern Star to Harney, who merged it with his paper the Friend of the People. The combined publication briefly appeared as the Star and National Trades Journal from 20 March to 17 April 1852, and then as the Star of Freedom from 24 April 1852. The successor was printed in a smaller format and, in order to avoid stamp duty, carried no news. It survived only until December 1852; the last issue of the Star of Freedom was dated 27 November 1852. With that, the newspaper line that had begun in Leeds fifteen years earlier came to an end. O'Connor died in London in August 1855, and a large funeral procession followed his remains to Kensal Green Cemetery.

The Star in literature and memory

The paper's cultural reach was reflected in contemporary literature. In Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton, published in 1848, a Sunday afternoon scene showed John Barton smoking his pipe by the fire while reading an old Northern Star borrowed from a neighbouring public house, a small detail that captured how the paper entered working-class domestic life. Charles Kingsley's novel Alton Locke of 1850 included a radical newspaper, the Weekly Warwhoop, owned by a character called Feargus O'Flynn, who was understood to represent O'Connor and the Northern Star. The paper's memory was formally commemorated in its home city in the twenty-first century, when Leeds Civic Trust unveiled a blue plaque for the Northern Star on 30 November 2024, as part of a wider commemoration of the Chartist historian Malcolm Chase.

Legacy

The Northern Star was the most successful newspaper Chartism produced, in a movement that published more than 120 newspaper titles between 1837 and 1859. It proved that a radical weekly, legally stamped and commercially sold, could out-circulate almost every respectable paper in the country when it spoke for a mass movement, and it provided the communications system without which a national movement of working people could scarcely have existed in the 1840s. Its reports, letters and advertisements have made it an indispensable archive for historians of Chartism, and its complete run was made available in digital scholarly editions. Its history also illustrated the dependence of movement newspapers on the movements that created them: founded in the surge of 1837, supreme in 1839, sustained through repression, and diminished year by year as its cause declined, the Northern Star rose and fell with Chartism itself.