This paper is part of a larger project which offers new perspectives on the politics of nineteenth-century language theory by using contemporaneous literary texts to interrogate a range of writings on language. Here, the focus is on the period 1830 to the early 1850s, characterized by Tony Crowley in The Politics of Discourse (1989) as the moment when a new discursive formation first emerged that led to a project to construct a New (later Oxford) English Dictionary as a monument to the nation’s language. Using Valentin Nikolaevich Voloshinov’s distinction between the dead dictionary word of the philologists and the living word that is an arena of class struggle, the paper revisits Crowley’s claim that the discourse of ‘the history of the language’ arose as a response to radical politics and Chartism. Having illustrated the new discourse in practice, through the example of Richard Chenevix Trench’s On the Study of Words, I use the writings on language of William Hill (once editor of The Northern Star) and John Goodwyn Barmby (an early communist writer) to assess whether radical politics challenged the new philology on its own territory – the conceptualization of language. I go on to suggest that, in the absence of successors to Hill or Barmby as radical writers of language theory, Chartist literary writings are a significant textual resource. With reference to two works by the Chartist leader Ernest Jones – the poem ‘The New World’ and the novel De Brassier, A Democratic Romance, published in his journal Notes to the People (1851-2) – I show how literary texts raised important questions about language, power and national identity. Jones’s poem and novel are examples of how aesthetic writings foreground words as arenas of ideological conflict, promoting issues of language and identity formation that were increasingly obscured in the shadow of the philological monument constructed by Trench and others.