Lives of Illustrious Shoemakers

by W. E. Winks

Just before leaving Gainsborough he was constrained to gather a few pieces of his poetry together and publish them by subscription in a small volume, with the title, taken from the first piece, “The Wesleyan Chiefs.” The book fell flat on the market, and seems to have had very little merit. Its publication was chiefly remarkable for bringing the author into the company of James Montgomery, who kindly undertook to read the proof sheets. Only one of these selections seems to have called forth a word of commendation from the veteran poet. Against the lines addressed to “Lincoln Cathedral” he wrote: “These are very noble lines, and the versification is truly worthy of them.”[65] Montgomery was then over sixty years of age, and had published all the poems by which his name is known to fame.

Soon after going to reside in Lincoln, Cooper married Miss Jobson, sister of Frederic James Jobson, afterward well known as Dr. Jobson among the Wesleyan Methodists, and at one time their honored President of the Conference. The religious troubles at Gainsborough followed the local preacher to Lincoln, for the superintendent with whom he had disagreed at the former place would not suffer him to rest in his new home; and at length, soured and wearied by what he could not but deem ill-usage, he threw up his appointment on the plan, and finally cut himself off from the Methodist connection. Free to devote his energies to other pursuits, he now flung himself very zealously into the new Mechanics’ Institute movement, took a class in Latin, sought to perfect himself in French pronunciation, and to acquire a knowledge of Italian under the tutorship of Signor D’Albrione, “a very noble-looking Italian gentleman, a native of Turin, who had been a cavalry officer in the armies of Napoleon, had endured the retreat from Moscow, was at the defeat of Leipzig,“ etc., and had become ”a refugee in England on account of his participation in the conspiracy of the Carbonari.” German, also, was studied for a time; but very soon a new attraction arose in the formation of a Choral Society, of which the zealous schoolmaster became the secretary and chief manager, collecting its funds, enlisting by his persuasive powers the best singers in the city, and arranging for its meetings and public performances. His attendance at the lectures of the Institute incidentally led to a new employment, in which undoubtedly Thomas Cooper might have excelled and gained no mean emolument and renown had he chosen to devote himself exclusively to it. Having sent a paragraph report of one of the lectures on chemistry to the Lincoln, Rutland, and Stamford Mercury, he was waited upon by the editor, Richard Newcomb, and requested to supply intelligence weekly of any affairs of importance in the city, and promised £20 a year for his trouble. This was in 1834. In two years he gave up his connection with the Choral Society, cultivated the newspaper correspondent business to such an extent that he was advanced to £100 per year, and so gave up his school. Having put his hand to the work of newspaper correspondence, he did not do it by halves. He exposed the abuses, as he deemed them, then rife in the city, wrote sketches of the “Lincoln Preachers,” and created such a stir by his lively and racy articles on municipal and political matters, that the paper rapidly rose in circulation, and he found himself for a time the most notorious man in the city, feared by many, hated by not a few, and courted by those who had favors to win or help to secure from the lively correspondent.

In 1838, at the urgent request of Mr. Newcomb, he removed to Stamford, under a verbal promise that when the editor retired, which he intimated would be very soon, Cooper should have the sole management. After remaining for a few months in the position of clerk to Mr. Newcomb, and finding to his chagrin that the old editor gave no sign of keeping to his agreement, he very rashly threw down his pen and gave notice to leave. A little patience might have sufficed to gain his end, but his mortification was extreme, and so a good situation, worth, in all, £300 a year, was sacrificed. “On the 1st of June, 1839,” he writes, “we got on the stage-coach, with our boxes of books, at Stamford, and away I went to make my first venture in London.”

The six years spent at Lincoln had been a time of literary activity in more ways than that of newspaper correspondence. Many minor pieces, such as are found at the end of the collected poems, were written, and the title and plan of his best poetical work, “The Purgatory of Suicides,” was decided upon. But he had done more in the way of prose. The first volume of a historical romance was finished ere he left Lincoln, and now that he had come to London, he hoped to make his way with this as an introduction to the publishers and the reading world. But he very soon discovered, as thousands besides have done, that he had little to hope from patrons, even though, like Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer, they might be men to whom he had rendered some political service in days gone by, and that his unlucky manuscript was a poor broken reed to lean upon. After nine months’ bitter experience of fruitless attempts to find employment, and when all his stock of five hundred books, the dear companions of the last ten years of earnest study, had been sold, and even his father’s old silver watch and articles of clothing had been carried to the pawnshop, he was fortunate enough to make an engagement, at £3 per week, as editor of the Kentish Mercury, Gravesend Journal, and Greenwich Gazette, of which Mr. William Dougal Christie was the proprietor. He had held this office but a short time when disagreement as to the management of the paper led him to give notice of retirement from his awkward position. Strangely enough, at this very juncture a letter reached him from a friend in Lincoln enclosing another from the manager of a paper in Leicester, asking to be informed of “the whereabouts of Thomas Cooper, who wrote the articles entitled ‘Lincoln Preachers’ in the Stamford Mercury.” Dropping the letter, he exclaimed to his wife, “The message has come at last—the message of Destiny! We are going to live at Leicester,” thus expressing a thought he had secretly cherished for years, “that he had something to do of a stirring and important nature at Leicester.“ And so it proved, but that ”something” was very different from what he had ever anticipated. Answering the inquiry in person, he agreed with the manager of the Leicestershire Mercury to accept a reporter’s place at a small remuneration, and in November, 1840, he went to reside in his native town and prepare himself for his “destiny.” In London he had met with his old friend Thomas Miller, who was then writing “Lady Jane Grey;” and here at Leicester he discovered another Gainsborough youth, Joseph Winks, who had been his companion and rival in the Improvement Society, and was now “a printer and bookseller, a busy politician, Baptist preacher, and editor of three or four small religious periodicals.”[66]

Sent one night by the manager of the Mercury to attend and report a Chartist lecture, he was introduced for the first time to those poor but desperately earnest politicians who were at that time making their pathetic and passionate voices heard throughout the Midland and Northern Counties. From that night Thomas Cooper was a Chartist; and for the next three years his best powers were devoted to the cause of the suffering operatives and his life-interests bound up in the Chartist movement. Nothing could be more pitiable than the condition of the Leicester “stockingers” at this time. The average weekly wages of a man who worked hard were four-and-sixpence! Ground down to the point of starvation by “frame-rent,” payment for “standing,” for “giving-out,” and for the “seamer,” and, worst of all, obliged to pay the full week’s rent when working on half-time, it is no wonder that his spirit was galled to madness, and that he looked to something like a political revolution for a redress of his wrongs. Lord Byron, in the only speech he ever delivered in the House of Lords, had spoken eloquently and generously in behalf of these suffering operatives of the Midland Counties.

One cannot wonder that a man like Cooper, who had known the pinchings of poverty, should have felt his soul stirred within him. His sympathies and views soon drew him into writing and speaking for the Chartists. This was an offence in the eyes of his employers of the Mercury, and led to his severance from them. He now, at the request of the factory hands of Leicester, became their political leader, and the editor of their paper, the Midland Counties Illuminator, which fell into his own hands after a few weeks, and was changed in style and title, and made a new appearance as the Chartist Rushlight, and afterward as the Extinguisher. In the midst of the dispute between Whigs and Tories, Cooper was “nominated” by the Chartists as their candidate, not with any hope of being carried at the poll, but rather as a means of spiting the Whigs, against whom the working-men were intensely bitter, on account of their unwillingness to support “The People’s Charter.” Endeavoring to turn his leadership of the Chartists to some account apart from politics, he added to the task of regular addresses in the open air the conduct of a Sunday adult school and Sunday-evening meetings; and, when the winter came on, gathered his friends together, and sought to lift their thoughts above their daily care, and awaken in their minds a desire for reading, by a course of lectures on literature and science. But the bad times of 1842 put a stop to all this. The condition of the stockingers grew worse and worse, and Cooper took to supplying bread on sale or loan, to meet the wants of the poor starving creatures, and ran into debt by so doing. The poorhouse, or Bastile, as the working-men always called it, was crowded to excess, and riots broke out now and again; but with these neither Cooper nor the Chartist Association had anything to do. In August of the same year he was appointed by this body as a delegate to the Chartists’ Convention at Manchester. On the way thither he lectured or spoke in the open air at Birmingham, Wednesbury, Bilston, Wolverhampton, and at length came to Hanley, where he addressed a vast crowd of men at “the Crown Bank.” His subject was the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt do no murder,” in which he spoke of the violations of this law by conquerors and legislators, and by masters who oppressed the hireling in his wages. The men were now out on strike, and the excitement produced by this and another address on the following night was intense. He counselled perpetually “peace, law, and order,” and bade the men hold out in their strike until the People’s Charter became the law of the land. Riot and incendiarism broke out in a short time, for which Cooper was in no way directly responsible, but had, on the other hand, distinctly endeavored to dissuade them from. He was taken prisoner on his return from Manchester, and having been tried for the crime of arson, was acquitted, having pleaded his own case so eloquently that the judge was evidently affected, and the ladies present at the trial were even moved to tears. Tried again at the Spring Assizes on the charge of sedition, he cross-examined the witnesses from Monday to Saturday at noon, and then proceeded to sum up his defence in a speech which altogether (Sunday intervening) lasted ten hours. “I do not think,“ he remarks, ”I ever spoke so powerfully in my life as during the last hour of that defence. The peroration, the Stafford papers said, would never be forgotten; and I remember as I sat down, panting for breath and utterly exhausted, how Talfourd and Erskine and the jury sat transfixed, gazing at me in silence, and the whole crowded place was breathless, as it seemed, for a minute.” The case being removed by a “writ of certiorari“ to the Court of Queen’s Bench, was tried on the 5th of May, 1843. In his defence Thomas Cooper again delivered an eloquent speech, five and a half hours long, and was again acquitted of the charge of felony. Judge Erskine’s notes of the trial had “mistake” written alongside the evidence on that part of the charge. But the eloquent Chartist orator was convicted on the charge of sedition and conspiracy, and sent to Stafford jail for two years.

There are few chapters in the Autobiography so full of interest and so graphically written as those which describe Thomas Cooper’s prison experience. Galled to the quick by the treatment he received—for he was kept on low, miserable fare and denied “literary privileges”—he determined to break down “the system of restraint in Stafford jail, and win the privilege of reading and writing, or die in the attempt.” After many manœuvres he managed to get pen, ink, and paper, and write a petition to the House of Commons, which was handed in at the bar of the House by Mr. Duncombe, M.P. for Finsbury. All that he could reasonably expect was now granted in answer to his appeal, and the remainder of his time was filled up with literary work. He revelled in the English poets from Shakespeare to Shelley; read again the “Decline and Fall,” Prideaux’s “Connexion,” White’s “Selborne,” etc., etc.; fell passionately in love with the study of Hebrew, and almost raved about the glories of the sacred language of the Old Testament; and read two thirds of the Hebrew Bible, copying out verbs and nouns as he went along. One day he was visited by Lord Sandon, afterward Earl of Harrowby, who fell into conversation with the learned prisoner about the poetical books of the Bible in the old German edition which lay open before him on the table. A short time before his release the chaplain told him that the way was open for him to go to Cambridge if he would; but the conditions were such as did not suit the independent mind of the political martyr. Cooper had a shrewd suspicion that the visit of the nobleman had some connection with this generous offer.

Cooper’s best work in Stafford jail was the composition of the well-known poem, “The Purgatory of Suicides.” This poem, he tells us, was the working out of a thought which occurred to him ten years before, when he was sitting as a reporter in the assize court at Lincoln. The historical romance, the first part of which he had carried to London in 1839, was also completed during his imprisonment, and he wrote during the same period a volume of tales, afterward published under the title, “Wise Saws and Modern Instances.” “These,” he says, “I took out of prison with me as my keys for unlocking the gates of fortune.”

On his liberation, May 4th, 1845, he went up to London, shedding tears of gladness and gratitude on the way as he looked once more on the green fields and hedgerows of the Midland Counties. His first care was to find a publisher for his prison rhyme and tales. As soon as he was able he sought out Mr. Duncombe, to thank him for his generous help in the matter of the petition to the House of Commons, and to ask for counsel in seeking a publisher. Duncombe sent him to Mr. D’Israeli, with the following note: