Mary Ann Walker, Chartist lecturer
Mary Ann Walker was a Chartist lecturer who briefly became a media sensation. This is her story.
This article forms part of a collection about the City of London Female Charter Association. See:
- City of London Female Charter Association
- Susanna Inge
- Mary Ann Walker
- Emma Miles
- National Charter Association Hall, 55 Old Bailey
- Mary Ann Walker in her own words (PDF)
In an era just coming to terms with the idea of newspaper celebrity, Mary Ann Walker was something of a Chartist sensation. A young, outspoken woman who held very a definite fascination for male journalists, she shone briefly as a Chartist lecturer, whose quick mind and turn of phrase made her a match for hecklers and opponents alike.
For a matter of a few months, she and Susanna Inge, the leading lights of the City of London Female Charter Association, featured not just in the Chartist Northern Star but in the leader columns of The Times, in cartoon form in Punch and in local papers throughout the land. But virtually nothing is known of Mary Ann Walker’s life before she came to prominence in the autumn of 1842, and after the spring of 1843 she disappears back into obscurity.
The City of London Female Charter Association was already in existence when Susanna Inge, wrote an address “to the women of England” in which she described herself as a member (Northern Star, 2 July 1842). However, there is no record of Mary Ann Walker until the autumn of that year, when she intervened dramatically in a public meeting held at the Chartist meeting rooms at 55 Old Bailey.
Although the women’s organisation had already been in existence for some time, the Northern Star reported that the meeting, held on 17 October 1842, was “for the purpose of forming a ‘Female Chartist Association,’ to co-operate with the Male Association and for other objects connected with the ‘People’s Charter’.” Presumably this was to be a public launch or relaunch to create interest among potential members.
Controversy
As was typical of female Chartist meetings, the chair and both main speakers were men. Perhaps surprisingly, one speaker from the floor, a Mr Cohen, declared that he “did not consider that nature intended women to partake of political rights” (Evening Star, 19 November 1842; Northern Star, 22 October 1842). Rather, he argued, women were “more happy in the peacefulness and usefulness of the domestic hearth, than in coming forth in public and aspiring after political rights”. This created, in the words of the Northern Star’s reporter, a “sensation among the ladies”.
He asked the female association’s secretary, Susanna Inge, “to suppose herself in the House of Commons, as member for a parliamentary borough (laughter) and that a young gentleman, ‘a lover,’ in that house were to try to influence her vote through his sway over her affection, how would she act? whether in other words she could resist, and might not lose sight of the public interests?”
Mary Ann Walker was having none of it. Interrupting Mr Cohen, she stood up to declare that she was “astonished at the question”. “She would treat with womanly scorn, as a contemptible scoundrel, the man who would dare to influence her vote by any undue and unworthy means (cheers from the men); for if he were base enough to mislead her in one way, he would in another. (Hear, hear and renewed cheers).”
Her forthright rebuttal of the male speaker, and the remainder of her speech in which she damned the government for its treatment of Chartists in the North of England, were reported at some length in the two Chartist newspapers, and picked up by The Times, which ran a leader article in which it held her up to ridicule. The report was repeated by local newspapers up and down the country, and helped to establish Mary Ann Walker as a novel voice in Chartism.
A few days later, a second meeting was called at the National Charter Hall, where Miss Walker was able to speak at greater length and after some preparation.
“Miss Mary Anne Walker presented herself on the platform, and became at once the grand attraction of the audience, in connection with the prominent place she had filled within the last few days in the public eye, as the founder, or, at least, leading personage of the Female Chartist Association. Miss Walker was habited in deep mourning, and being tall and of prepossessing countenance and figure, with much of grace and dignity of contour in her manner and action, she looked a heroine in the cause which she had taken up with so much enthusiasm. She was received with the plaudits of some, while others, ‘from the curiosity to hear a woman speak,’ remained ‘silent and breathless,’ that they might hear.” (The Times, 25 October 1842)
She was clearly nervous (“wan”, according to the Star), and the chairman urged the audience to remember that this was her first speech to a large audience. To the arguments she had earlier advanced in the heat of the first meeting, however, she now added a further strand drawn from the Charter’s six points.
“As soon as the anxious press toward the platform had ceased, Miss Walker observed, she had a few words to say to the meeting. (Hear, hear.) ‘Wonders,’ she continued, “would never cease.’ (Laughter.) Who would have thought that Mr Cohen, Miss Susannah Inge and herself (Miss Mary Anne Walker), would have been so far distinguished as to be made the subjects of a “leading article” in The Times? – The Times! Yes, The Times, indeed! (Laughter.) Mr Cohen had brought all this upon them by his question – ‘Suppose ladies were in the House of Commons for a Parliamentary borough, and that a young fascinating sprig of Tory aristocracy were to try to sway their votes through an influence over their affections, how could they resist?” (Laughter from the gentlemen, and tittering among the ladies.) How ridiculous that was! (A laugh.) She (Miss Walker) would tell Mr Cohen, and The Times too, that they had got a nice little point in ‘the Charter’, which would act as an antidote to that sort of ‘influence over their affections.’ They would be discharged from their situation of members at the end of twelve months, should they weakly prove ‘unworthy of their trust,’ and thrown out ‘on the wide world, out of place,’ and ‘without a character from their last masters and mistresses.’ (Laughter, and much applause from the gentlemen.)”
Despite this, it is worth noting that Mary Ann Walker did not advocate that women should be given the vote there and then. In a letter read to a meeting of the City Charter Association (Evening Star, 23 November 1842) she wrote:
“While I hold woman to be entitled by nature to use the franchise with as much credit to the state as many, I think that the time has not yet arrived when it would be prudent for her to claim it. I think, Sir, that education must have full scope – that the present darkness must be removed – in fact, the ignorance which woman has ever been made by man’s laws the victim of, must be dispelled, before she should lay claim to the right of franchise.”
Public lecturer
Mary Ann or Mary Anne Walker (the Evening and Northern Star used the first, The Times the second) went on to appear at a series of further meetings. She was on the platform alongside “Miss Miles and a large number of members of the Female Chartist Association” for a “giant meeting” at the Crown and Anchor Tavern on the Strand (Northern Star, 26 November, 1842). Speakers included Thomas Slingsby Duncombe and Feargus O’Connor.
Her first lecturer as the main speaker was at a “crowded and most respectably composed meeting” on Monday 5 December at the National or Complete Suffrage Association in High Holborn on “the social evils which afflict the state, and on the People’s Charter as the remedy” (Northern Star, 10 December, 1842).
The Star’s reporter appears to have confused the Complete Suffrage Union (which owed its allegiance to the middle-class reformer Joseph Sturge) with the wordier National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People (set up by William Lovett and other veterans of the London Working Men’s Association. The December lecture took place in the latter – a venue able to hold more than 1,000 people, and reported to have been full for Mary Ann Walker’s appearance.
She recalled then how her “excited state of mind and sympathy with her poor, suffering fellow creatures” had encouraged her to intervene against Mr Cohen, and added that “if she were satisfied that her coming out had the effect of alleviating the trouble of even one poor fellow creature, she would feel herself for life repaid, and would go on in that virtuous course, let the obloquy and the consequences that would attach to her be what they might.” Emma Miles then moved and Mrs Watts seconded a vote of thanks.
She is next seen at a meeting in Bristol where, according to hostile local papers, she “opened with a violent tirade against the press” before moving on to the low rates of pay for women, constitutional issues, workhouses and the Six Points, concluding that “she was very tired, and hoped to give them a better lecture on Thursday” (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 14 January 1843). A more detailed report in the Evening Star, however, suggests that she built on many of the points made in her first lecture to draw attention to the plight of women workers in London’s garment industry, and to compare their situation with that of the dowager Queen Adelaide and her generous tax-payer funded pension.
Mary Ann Walker had intended the two lectures she gave in Bristol to be the first in a nationwide tour. However, there is no trace of any further meetings outside London.
But early the following month, she was back in London at the Old Bailey meeting rooms. The following account from the Hereford Journal (8 February, 1843) was most likely lifted from a London paper. It is extraordinarily snide, but offers some interesting details. Clearly Mary Ann Walker was enjoying her fame. The report is worth reproducing in full:
“A meeting of Chartists took place on Tuesday night at their hall in the Old Bailey. Miss Mary Anne Walker was engaged from eight till nine o’clock in exhibiting a bundle of her lithographed portraits, recently taken, and offering them for sale at 6d each. She sold two. This young lady for full and hour, and for want of any business to transact, kept the Chartists, both male and female, incessantly laughing by her jokes and anecdotes, and playfully remarked, when she found herself so badly seconded in her efforts to keep up their spirits, that were it not for her own individual exertions it would be ‘quite a Quaker’s meeting’. Miss Susannah Inge, jealous of the superior attraction of her rival, sat at the table biting her nails with vexation, and now and then darting withering glances at the fair democrat who monopolised all the attention. A chairman having been appointed, the minutes were read, and then the members passed a resolution to the effect that a committee be appointed to raise money to pay the delegates for their trouble at the recent conference in Birmingham. Miss M.A.Walker was so particularly talkative during the discussion that a chartist begged her, if she possibly could, to hold her tongue until the adjournment of the meeting. Miss Susannah Inge, who had hitherto remained silent, now rose and tendered her resignation as secretary of the Female Chartist Association, saying with disdain, that she was quite sick of the business. Miss Walker: “That won’t matter for I dare say we shall easily get another.” Miss E.M.Miles was nominated, but for some reasons was not elected; and Mrs Wyatt, who was proposed as more matronly, declined, on the ground that she had just given up a secretaryship at another place, and did not wish to enter into public life again. The election was postponed. Miss Walker then deplored the fact that, notwithstanding all she had done for the cause of Chartism as connected with women, they had go no new proselytes; while many members whom they had before she became notorious, had left them. The meeting then broke up.”
From fame to anonymity
The Northern Star records two further meetings, at which Mary Ann Walker spoke alongside Feargus O’Connor on the land issue in the Hall of Science, Blackfriars Road (Northern Star, 18 February 1843), and at the Political and Scientific Institute, Turnagain Lane (Northern Star, 13 May 1843). There may have been others, but after that date, with the exception of a single curious instance that summer, there appears to be no further sighting of Mary Ann Walker.
According to The Times of 17 August 1843, the Rotunda Theatre at Blackfriars Road was crowded out after placards declared that the part of the queen in Shakespeare’s Hamlet was to be taken by “Miss Mary Ann Walker of Chartist celebrity”. When the queen appeared on stage and was clearly not the person expected, a cry went up of “No, no! That ain’t Miss Walker.” Despite an apology and explanation from the stage manager that the placards had been a hoax, the crowd howled and laughed for the rest of the play.
And in one final newspaper mention some years later, the Northern Star (6 January 1849) records donations to the Victim and Defence Fund. Among the numerous books, paintings and more random items (two pairs of buckskin braces, a boy’s cap, three pairs of men’s hose) is listed a contribution from Mrs Cuffay which includes a “portrait of Mary Ann Walker”.
Frustratingly, almost nothing more is known of Mary Ann Walker. Several reports say that she wore mourning dress as a mark of respect for her father, who had died some months earlier. She described herself as the daughter of a humble working man, and one condescending reporter judged her “from her dialect, manners and knowledge, to have been of the order of ‘Ladies Maid’.” Others with equal hostility thought her to be a cut above the common crowd at Chartist meetings.
There is no good reason to think Walker’s class origins were anything other than as she described them herself. But it is clear from the way she talks about the plight of the poor seamstresses and those forced to rely on the workhouse guardians that she did not see herself to be in the same dismal financial circumstances. And the fact that she could afford mourning dress and mourning jewellery also suggests that her life was a little less precarious than that of such individuals. The historian Helen Rogers notes of Walker that, “she does not seem to have identified herself with, or sought to politicise, women workers” (Women and the People: Ashgate, 2000)
Some of the anecdotes Walker included in her lectures are also interesting, and suggest both significant self confidence and some personal social clout. A butcher and the baker whom she convinced to advertise Chartist meetings in their shop windows did so because they feared the loss of her trade; she must have been a good customer indeed, and one who felt able to ask and expect that shopkeepers would comply with her wishes. Similarly, an intervention she made in a recruiting sergeant’s attempt to convince a young man to join the army earned her a rebuke from the soldier, but it seems not to have occurred to her that his threat to have her arrested should be treated too seriously.
Mary Ann Walker in view
There are several newspaper mentions of the full-length photographic portraits of Mary Ann Walker on sale at her lectures. Frustratingly, none are known to have survived. But reporters who attended these meetings seem almost universally to have wanted to describe her, frankly, somewhat Gothic look and dress (see Mary Ann Walker and the Chartist Gothic). And although there are some differences between them, on the essentials they are largely in agreement.
Reporters put her 22 or 23 years of age. She was said to be of average height, or sometimes a little above the medium, and of slight build. She had a pale, ‘more than usually wan’ complexion, dark eyes, oval face and aquiline nose. And she wore her ‘coal-black’ hair in long ringlets. Having lost her father some months before entering into Chartism, she wore full mourning which consisted of a black bombazine dress ‘made very low in the neck’, ‘with a light sort of crepe scarf, or negligee, attached to, and hanging from her arms’ and with a cross of black jet around her neck.
What happened to Mary Ann Walker beyond the spring of 1843 remains a mystery. She almost certainly appears somewhere in the 1841 census. There are, however, rather too many Mary Ann Walkers in London that year who might be her – even after excluding the married Mrs Walkers and those in domestic service (whose employer would almost certainly not have tolerated her political activities.
What we do have, however, are her political arguments and ideas, not quite but almost in her own words thanks to the Chartist Evening Star’s assiduous reporter, who wrote up her speeches for publication. This PDF gives us Mary Ann Walker in her own words.