Definitions

• Parliamentary Reform Act 1832:

  An Act that extended the franchise so that one adult male in seven had the vote in general elections, and reorganised the constituencies to give greater representation to the industrialising Midlands and the North.
• Dietary:

  Types and amounts of food that could be supplied by a workhouse for their resident paupers.
• Tolpuddle Martyrs:

  In 1834, six agricultural workers from Tolpuddle, Dorset, led by George Loveless, were sentenced to 7yrs transportation for swearing illegal oaths. The oath swearing was part of a loyalty ceremony that bound men into a trade union. Although trade unions were not banned at the time, the government feared that unions of agricultural workers would heighten the general rural unrest and so used this device to nip such unions in the bud. After a series of mass campaigns, the men were pardoned and finally returned home.
• The Ten Hours' Movement:

  A sustained campaign in the 1830s for the reduction of hours worked in textile mills to ten per day. The campaign was led inside parliament by Lord Shaftesbury and John Fielden, and outside by Richard Oastler. As part of the campaign, short-term committees were set up in most industrial towns to press for factory reform.
• Bastille:

  A prison in Paris stormed by the mob at the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789. It came to be a symbol of despotic rule.
• Chartist:

  A member of the working class movement that emerged in the mid-1830s. The aim of the movement was to gain political rights for working class people (just men).