Diagram of a slave ship
Shopping for fabric
Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
Textiles from India
Beethoven's sketches
Exhibition of a rhino and zebra
Deciphering the Rosetta Stone
Battle of Waterloo letter
Jane Austen, Persuasion
Peterloo Massacre
Cartoon of a street accident
Shampooing Surgeon
Description of London
Execution of a 12 year old boy
Diary entry on 'The Pillory'
Invention of photography
1832 Reform Act
Tolpuddle Martyrs
Early Chartist meeting notes
Dickens, Oliver Twist
The People's Charter
Dickens: Nicholas Nickleby
Poster for Living Mermaid
The Railways
First postage stamp
Coal mining
Popular entertainments
Engels: factory conditions
Freak show: What is it?
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
The Communist Manifesto
Chartist William Cuffay
The Great Exhibition
Sketch for the Crystal Palace
Woman's magazine
Poverty and the workhouse
London Zoo
Cookery for the poor
Human Exhibition
Mary Seacole
Ship building
Britain's Indian empire
Nightingale, Notes on Nursing
Victorian fashion
Florence Nightingale letter
Coal mining
Mrs Beeton - Lady's maid
Mrs Beeton
Mrs Beeton's Turkey
A Hulk (prison ship)
Underground trains
Alice in Wonderland
Letter from Charles Darwin
City slums
Opening of the Suez Canal
Music Hall
Street sellers
Freakshow posters
Invention of the telephone
Illusionists and conjurers
The textile industry
Victorian farming
Magic show
Circus poster
Victoria's Indian servant
Match Girls Strike
Jack the Ripper murders
Daily shopping
An Asian MP in Parliament
Gladstone: Irish Home Rule
Oscar Wilde on trial
Nightingale Nurse diary
Factory accidents
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
The electoral system in the early 1800s was very different from that of today. The majority of people had no say in the way the country was run. The Chartists were a political group who fought for electoral change - their People’s Charter (1838) demanded among other things that all men should be able to vote.
William Cuffay (1788 - 1870) was a prominent London Chartist. Born on a merchant ship in the West Indies in 1788, Cuffay was the son of a freed slave. He worked in London as a tailor, and first became involved in politics when he was fired from his job after taking part in the Tailors' Strike of 1834. Convinced that workers needed representation in Parliament, he became sympathetic to Chartism.
In 1839, Cuffay helped form the Metropolitan Tailors’ Charter Association and was later voted president of the London Chartists in 1842. Cuffay took part in planning for an uprising in London after the Chartist's third petition to Parliament was rejected. Although Cuffay probably only played a small part in the plans, he was arrested and sentenced to deportation to Tasmania for 21 years. The newspaper article displayed here, published in The Northern Star on 4 August 1849, gives details of donations that people made so that he had some money when he arrived in Port Phillip, Australia. Despite a pardon three years later, Cuffay stayed in Tasmania and played an active role in politics there until he died in poverty in 1870.
Shelfmark: British Library Newspaper Archive