After the first Reform Act and well into the 1840s, working-class education was one of the main issues of concern among radical theorists and utilitarian philanthropists. While the former group saw in it a formidable political tool for excluded workers to shape a sense of class consciousness and power, the latter thought that a knowledgeable labouring class would be more inclined to support the existing social order. As popular education developed through schools, churches, temperance societies, libraries and poetry readings, radical publications such as Cobbett’s Political Register and the SDUK-supported penny periodicals filled their columns with informative and enlightening stories. As Greg Vargo explains in An Underground History of Early Victorian Fiction, both radical writers and middle-class authors encouraged and employed popular literary forms, with each reading and writing community benefiting from the other. The reduction of the stamp duty in 1836 also resulted in a considerable growth of specialised periodicals and thus a segmentation of reading audiences. This included trade journals that encouraged creative contributions from their readers.

Printed and published by R. Thompson, the office keeper for the London Union of Compositors (LUC), The Compositors’ Chronicle first appeared in September 1840 as a monthly priced at twopence. Between that date and August 1843, when the magazine ceased publication, thirty-six regular issues and a single supplementary number were put in circulation and were later reprinted as a single volume.