A short Q and A film was shown with Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo when I went to see it. Its main point was that the massacre in Manchester in 1819 of campaigners for the reform of parliament, and in particular for universal manhood suffrage, had been more or less forgotten, even in the city itself. The claim provoked a rustle of dissent in the small provincial cinema where the film was showing, and expressions of disbelief in the pub afterwards. No one in either place claimed to be an expert, but plenty seemed to know something about the occasion when members of the 15th regiment of hussars and of the Manchester and Salford and Cheshire yeomanries charged into a crowd of unarmed protesters from Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and other Lancashire towns as well as from Stockport, killing and wounding numbers of men and women who had been peacefully demonstrating.

The protesters, indeed, had done all they could to make clear their peaceful intentions. About one in eight of them were women, many wearing white. They and the men they accompanied, dressed in their Sunday best, were conspicuously respectable, and making a display, as instructed, of their “Cleanliness, Sobriety, Order and Peace”. They were unarmed, and though for weeks they had been learning military discipline under the instruction of former soldiers, using broom handles and walking sticks in lieu of muskets, they had surrendered their sticks without fuss as they marched into Manchester. The point of their drills was not to teach them how to resist the military, but to ensure that the civic authorities would have no reason to regard them as a disorganised rabble, a mob, and no excuse, therefore, to suppress the demonstration by force of arms. Yet in an attempt to justify the massacre, the Manchester magistrates claimed the meeting had been summoned for “Seditious and Treasonable purposes”.

Some 16 of the protesters, among them women and children, were killed by the cavalry, who had sharpened their sabres before the fight they seemed determined to provoke. A further 650 or more were wounded – sabred or trampled by horses. By the end of the brief engagement, St Peter’s Field, from which anything that could possibly be used as a missile had been carefully tidied away, was transformed from an orderly parade ground to a scene of bloody chaos. Samuel Bamford, the radical silk weaver, described it as follows: “Over the whole field, were strewed caps, bonnets, hats, shawls, and shoes and other parts of male and female dress; trampled, torn, and bloody. The yeomanry had dismounted – some were easing their horses’ girths, others adjusting their accoutrements; and some were wiping their sabres. Several mounds of human beings still remained where they had fallen, crushed down, and smothered. Some of these were still groaning, – others with staring eyes, were gasping for breath, and others would never breathe more …”

Jacqueline Riding’s book is quite simply magnificent: splendidly researched, thoroughly well written, and very difficult to put down.

The version of 18th- and 19th-century British history presented on BBC4 in recent years has been puzzlingly and relentlessly aristocratic. Here was an era when the fight for democracy was at its most bitter, a time when members of the working class campaigned vigorously for the right to representation, and were repeatedly threatened with punishment of death for doing so. But on our screens this appears as an age almost exclusively populated by posh people dancing minuets. Where are the London Corresponding Society, the Gordon Riots, Peterloo? I have heard, I hope mistakenly, that programme commissioners believe working-class history of the period to be too lacking in visual or dramatic appeal.

When did this version of the long 18th century take hold, as an era without class conflict, and in particular without Peterloo? In the 1960s, children studied it, along with the Chartists, the birth of the co-operative movement, the founding of the Labour party and so on. I first learned about Peterloo around 1963, when EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class was published. No doubt the O-level/GCSE history syllabus has altered with changes of government, and working-class history has taken an increasingly minor role in the approved version of “our island story”.

Thompson’s chapter on Peterloo remains one of the best accounts of what happened, along with RJ White’s Waterloo to Peterloo. Riding’s version, however, is quite simply magnificent: splendidly researched, thoroughly well written, and very difficult to put down. Among other things, it emphasises the importance of the contribution of the women of Lancashire (the “Lancashire Witches”, to whom the book is dedicated) to the events of 16 August 1819, which becomes an important theme of Leigh’s film. With the encouragement of Bamford, female reform societies were founded in Lancashire, and their members participated fully in the meetings of male reformers, something that seems to have happened nowhere else in the early 19th-century reform movement. The most prominent of the female reformers was Mary Fildes, later to become a member of the Chartist movement and a noted proponent of birth control. She named one of her sons after Henry “Orator” Hunt, chief of the speakers at the St Peter’s Field meeting, who was arrested and imprisoned for two years for his part in the proceedings.

Recovering this version of the story, spoken from below and by a variety of voices – a range that further research should expand still more – is a vital endeavour that develops our understanding of how the working poor in Britain have coped with their oppression, and how popular, rather than rightwing populist, movements can bring about change.

• Peterloo: The Story of the Manchester Massacre is published by Head of Zeus. To order a copy for £22 (RRP £25) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.