Editing Samuel Bamford (section)

===Death and legacy===
In the 1871 England Census, taken the year before Bamford's death, he is recorded as living at 109 Hall Street, [[Harpurhey]], as a widower, with a widowed housekeeper, Elizabeth Hilton.<ref>Class: ''RG10''; Piece: ''4065''; Folio: ''169''; Page: ''20''; GSU roll: ''846347.'' Ancestry.com. ''1871 England Census'' [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2004. ''Census Returns of England and Wales, 1871''. Kew, Surrey, England: The National Archives of the UK (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO), 1871.</ref>

[[Image:SamBamfordPlaque.jpg|thumb|right|Plaque marking where the Middleton contingent gathered before being led by Bamford to [[Peterloo Massacre|St Peter's Fields]]]]
[[Image:Samuel Bamford Obelisk Portrait.jpg|thumb|right|Relief of Samuel Bamford on the obelisk in Middleton Cemetery]]
Bamford died in Harpurhey on the 13th of April 1872 at the age of 84 and was given a public funeral in Middleton on the 20th, attended by several thousand people.<ref>''Manchester, England, Church of England Deaths and Burials, 1813–1985'' [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2013. ''Anglican Parish Registers''. Manchester, England: Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives.</ref> A memorial obelisk unveiled in Middleton Cemetery in 1877 reads in part, "Bamford was a reformer when to be so was unsafe, and he suffered for his faith."<ref>{{Cite web |title=Samuel Bamford Memorial |work=National Recording Project |publisher=Public Monument and Sculpture Association |url=http://pmsa.cch.kcl.ac.uk/MR/MR-ROC19.htm |accessdate=2008-02-15 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110716184014/http://pmsa.cch.kcl.ac.uk/MR/MR-ROC19.htm |archivedate=2011-07-16}}</ref>

In 2000 ''The Diaries of Samuel Bamford'' were released, edited by [[Robert Poole (historian)|Robert Poole]] and a critical Martin Hewitt, according to whom "Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-Chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion."<ref>Martin Hewitt, "Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: The Case of Samuel Bamford", ''The Historical Journal,'' Vol. 34, No. 4, 1991, pp. 873–892.</ref>