Stephen Roberts (historian)

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Stephen Frederick Roberts (1958 - July 2022) was an historian of nineteenth-century Britain who wrote extensively about Chartism and Birmingham in the Victorian era.^[1] He was educated at Bishop Vesey's Grammar School in Sutton Coldfield and the University of Birmingham, from where he held B.A. and M.Litt. degrees. At the University of Birmingham he was taught by the leading historian of Chartism, Dorothy Thompson, who had been a major influence on his work. This is reflected in the co-editing of a festschrift for Thompson entitled 'The Duty of Discontent' (1995), a collaboration with her on a collection of contemporary illustrations entitled 'Images of Chartism' (1998) and the editing of a posthumous collection of her writings entitled 'The Dignity of Chartism' (2015).

Born in Sutton Coldfield, he studied history at the University of Birmingham completing a master and bachelor's degree. Roberts studied Victorian Britain, publishing various papers and books on the political, socioeconomic, and societal environment of the period.

Roberts has been described as an example of that increasingly rare phenomenon - the schoolteacher-scholar. For thirty years he held a teaching post at Hagley Catholic High School in Worcestershire whilst at the same time being a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Research in Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham. He has described how a day might begin by teaching the Great Plague of 1665 to teenagers and might finish giving a paper on Chartism to a university seminar attended by venerable professors. For a brief period, Roberts also taught at Newman University, Birmingham.

Roberts spoke about the Chartists on BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and Radio WM. Since 2015 he had been visiting fellow at the Australian National University.^[2]