Thomas Cooper (poet)

Thomas Cooper (20 March 1805 – 15 July 1892) was an English poet and among the leading Chartists. His prison rhyme the Purgatory of Suicides (1845) runs to 944 stanzas. He also wrote novels and in later life religious texts. He was an autodidact, who worked otherwise as a shoemaker, preacher, schoolmaster and journalist, before taking up Chartism in 1840. He was a passionate, determined and fiery man.

Thomas Cooper
Thomas Cooper
Engraving by John Cochran
Born(1805-03-20)20 March 1805
Leicester
Died12 July 1892(1892-07-12) (aged 87)
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish
GenrePoetry
Literary movementChartism

Early years

Cooper was born in Leicester, the son of a working dyer. After his father’s death his mother began business as a dyer and fancy box-maker at Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, and young Cooper was apprenticed to a shoemaker.[1] In spite of hardships and difficulties, he managed to educate himself, and at the age of 23, having been a shoemaker in Gainsborough, managed to open a school there in 1827.[2] He married in 1834; his wife died in 1880.[3]

Chartist leader and lecturer

After journalistic work in Lincoln and London, Cooper joined the staff of the Leicestershire Mercury in 1840.[1][4] Leicester under his leadership became a Chartist stronghold, with its own journals, such as the Commonwealthman, and a school for adults. He became a leader and lecturer among them and in 1842 was imprisoned in Stafford for two years after riots in the Staffordshire Potteries, where he wrote his Purgatory of Suicides, a political epic.[1] However, Cooper abandoned full-time radicalism on his release.[3]

In his efforts to publish this work after his liberation he came under the notice of Benjamin Disraeli and Douglas Jerrold. Through Jerrold's help the work appeared in 1845, and Cooper then turned his attention to lecturing on historical and educational subjects.[1]

Writing and lecturing

In addition to various papers with which he was connected, Cooper in 1850 ran Cooper's Journal, but only a few issues appeared.[3] At the same time he adopted sceptical views, which he continued to hold until 1855, when he became a Christian, joined the Baptists, and was a preacher among them. Though still calling himself a Chartist, he sought to earn a living and a reputation as a writer. In addition to his poems, he wrote several novels, although those like Alderman Ralph (1853) failed on both counts.

Having abandoned his religious beliefs at the time of his imprisonment, Cooper was dramatically re-converted to Christianity in 1855. His next thirty years were spent as a lecturer in defence of Christianity, attacking the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Ernst Haeckel. He authored Evolution, The Stone Book, and The Mosaic Record of Creation (1878), which argued for creationism and rejected evolution.[5][6]

Somewhat impulsive, he was an honest and sincere man. His autobiography (1872) is regarded as a minor Victorian classic.

In his later years he settled into being an old-fashioned Radical. His friends in 1867 raised an annuity for him, and in the last year of his life he received a government pension. He died in Lincoln on 15 July 1892 and was buried there.[3]

Works

Cooper's major works were:[3]

  • Wise Saws and Modern Instances, London, 1845; written in Stafford jail.
  • Two Orations against Taking Away Human Life, 1846, on nonresistance.[7]
  • The Baron's Yule Feast, London, 1846.
  • Land for the Labourers, London, 1848.
  • Captain Cobbler: his Romance, London, 1848.
  • Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time, London, 1871.
  • Life of Thomas Cooper, written by Himself, London, 1872.
  • Plain Pulpit Talk, London, 1872.
  • God, the Soul, and a Future State, London, 1873.
  • Paradise of Martyrs, London, 1873.
  • Old-fashioned Stories, London, 1874. New York, 1893.
  • Evolution, The Stone Book, and The Mosaic Record of Creation, London, 1878.
  • Atonement, second series of Plain Pulpit Talk, London, 1880.
  • Thoughts at Four Score, London, 1885.

Cooper's Poetical Works were published in London, 1877.[3]

References
  1. Chisholm 1911.
  2. The Dictionary of National Biography: the concise dictionary ... to 1930; p. 276.
  3. MacDonald 1901.
  4. The Dictionary of National Biography: the concise dictionary... to 1930, p. 276.
  5. David Knight, Public Understanding of Science: A History of Communicating Scientific Ideas. Routledge, 2006, p. 191. ISBN 0-415-20638-3
  6. "Evolution, the Stone Book, and the Mosaic Record of Creation". The Spectator.
  7. Brock, Peter (8 March 2015). Pacifism in Europe to 1914. Princeton University Press. p. 397. ISBN 9781400867493.

Attribution:

Sources
  • Stephen Roberts (2008), The Chartist Prisoners: the Radical Lives of Thomas Cooper (1805–1892) and Arthur O'Neill (1819–1896)
  • www.thepeoplescharter.co.uk
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