Dorothy Thompson (1923-2011) was the foremost historian of Chartism.

Over more than half a century of research, reflection and writing, she entirely transformed the way in which the movement was seen.

Exploring for the first time the front-line participation of women and emphasising the importance of class consciousness in uniting working people, her book The Chartists was published in 1984.

Yet Dorothy also wrote many essays and reviews about Chartism which are now difficult to find, or in the case of one major piece, never published. These writings have now been gathered together in a single volume The Dignity of Chartism, to be published by Verso Books.

She was convinced that those who wrote about the popular movements of the past better understood them by participating in the political campaigns of their own times.

She herself had become politically active very early on, selling Challenge — the newspaper of the Young Communist League — in Bromley High Street in the late 1930s.

Dorothy met her future husband Edward at Cambridge University and the two of them formed a political and scholarly relationship which lasted almost 50 years.

“We were both interested in history, both members of the Communist Party,” she later recalled.“I fancied him, he fancied me. I suppose that’s all one can say.”

They both joined the Communist Party historians’ group, though her involvement was greater than her husband’s, who was concentrating at this time on writing poetry.

The couple remained members of the Communist Party until the great rupture of 1956 when, with other Marxist intellectuals, they broke away to launch the “New Left.”

Both were also, from the 1950s, active campaigners for nuclear disarmament and their promotion of this cause was at its most intense in the first half of the 1980s, with Edward producing a stream of pamphlets and Dorothy editing Over Our Dead Bodies, a collection of anti-nuclear writings by women, which appeared in 1983.

Of particular interest in this new collection is a previously unpublished essay written by Dorothy in collaboration with Edward when they were living in Halifax in the 1950s. A lengthy piece, it tells the story of Chartism in this West Riding town from its inception to its end and is shot through with sympathy for the plight of the weavers and combers as they struggled to cope with industrialisation.

At the centre of the story is Ben Rushton, the resilient, optimistic and talented weaver who led the local struggle. It is a deeply researched, beautifully written and poignant essay, finished on the eve of Edward beginning work on his famous 1963 book The Making of the English Working Class.

There are other notable pieces in the collection. Dorothy responds powerfully to arguments that Chartism was not a movement underpinned by a strong sense of class consciousness. She shows how the role of women in the movement was far from negligible and reflects on the tracts, and later the autobiographies, produced by the Chartists.

It was not in 1848, a year of great revolutions, that Chartism was an insurrectionary threat, she explains. Rather it was during the years from 1838 to 1840, the time of torchlight meetings on the moors in the north, underground planning for an outbreak and the Newport Rising, when 24 demonstrators were shot down by soldiers.

When she was at Cambridge University, Thompson complained about the absence of Chartism from the syllabus and its study was to become her life’s work. No-one now disputes the main conclusions that Thompson reached about Chartism and these 16 essays, deftly written, thoroughly researched and infused with deep sympathy for working people, explore different aspects of the movement. There’s also a biographical introduction discussing Thompson’s political and scholarly work.

Overall, the book is an eloquent reminder of what is owed by those who study and read working-class history to Dorothy Thompson.

• The Dignity of Chartism is published by Verso Books, price £14.99. Stephen Roberts was trained as an historian by Dorothy Thompson. His books include Images of Chartism (1998, with Dorothy Thompson), The People’s Charter: Democratic Agitation in Early Victorian Britain (2003) and The Chartist Prisoners (2008).