THOMAS COOPER, CHARTIST AND POE r.*
CARLYLE, in a very characteristic letter to the author of the Purgatory of Suicides—a poem of some power, ten books in length, and written in Spenserian verse, we wonder how many readers of the Spectator are familiar with it—invites "the dark Titanic energy he sees struggling therein" to come forth and display itself in facts. Mr. Cooper could scarcely have answered that invitation more completely than by the publication of his autobiography, in which whatever energy he possesses (and whether Titanic or not it is certainly considerable) is shown in conflict with the hardest facts of life, and in which the old man "fights his battles o'er again," with a vigour and enjoyment that can hardly fail to amuse and interest the readers of his stirring narrative.
Ambition, pugnacity, and the "enthusiasm of humanity" are the chief traits in Mr. Cooper's character. Very early in life he determined that he—a journeyman shoemaker, self- educated and weakly in health—would rise into a scholar and poet, and would leave behind him "something which the world will not willingly let die." Later in life he devoted himself heart and soul to the relief of the suffering masses of his fellow- workmen of all trades, of whose condition in those days of dear bread and crippled trade, when the first agitation for the repeal of the Corn Laws was setting in, he gives a piteous description. He had zeal, but not according to knowledge, and sincerely believing that the sole remedy for existing evils lay in the People's Charter, he became one of the chief leaders in those Chartist risings which cast a yet darker shade over the dark years of which an artizan once said to the present writer, in his strong Northern tongue, "It was not to be called living then, it was just clemming," and which revealed all their horrors in the reply of a workman to another who pleaded for a little longer patience, since God Almighty would surely help them soon, "Talk no more of thy Goddle-mighty," was the sneering remark, writes Mr. Cooper,—" there isn't one. If there was one, He wouldn't let us suffer as we do." Mr. Cooper had been a fervent adherent of the Wesleyan branch of the Methodist faith and a local preacher, but the influences of the time and the all but hopeless misery around him, combined with private grievances to undermine his early belief, and his indignation against injustice and sense of the apparently hopeless tangle of human life breaks out in his "Prison Rhyme" (the Purgatory of Suicides) into bitter invec- tives against tyrant and priest,—invectives which in their pas- sionate eloquence remind us of Shelley's Revolt of Islam. In his old age he has become as fervent and diligent an advocate of the truths of Christianity as he was in his mid-life of the rights of labour and of the freedom of the human intellect ; in eight years and a half he tells us he has visited "every county of England and many of Scotland and Wales, as also the Channel Islands," preach- ing 3,373 times. "Now I am on the way to sixty-seven years of age, I must never think of trying to return to the old passionate speed of working, but I hope to keep in harness to the end ; and never to give up my work of duty save with my life." Mean- while, he is engaged in the intervals of his lecturing tours upon a companion poem to the Purgatory of Suicides, to be called the Paradise of Martyrs. Mr. Carlyle may not always approve of the ends to which the energy he invoked has been applied, but with the motive-power itself even he may be content, since it has always shown itself resolutely bent on struggling against the " horrible practical chaos" around us, "out of which every man is called by the birth of him to make a bit of Cosmos."
Thomas Cooper was born at Leicester in 1805. His father died while he was quite young, and his mother took up her husband's trade of a dyer, having learnt the "art and mystery" thoroughly from him. Her son brings vividly before us the strong, hard- working woman, toiling over her coppers, her frames, and her • The Life of Thomas Cooper. Written by Himself. London: Hodder and Stoughton. ironing, while she still had words of tenderness for her child, whose healthy infancy had been beaten down by small-pox, measles, and scarlet fever in rapid succession. "My altered face," he writes, "had not unendeared me to her ; she could, in the midst of her heavy toil listen to my feeble repetitions of the fables, or spare a look at my entreaty for the figures I was drawing with chalk upon the hearth-stone."
To the severity of these childish illnesses and the weakness of health they long left behind them we are probably to attribute the early passion for learning which possessed young Cooper. He was looked upon as a prodigy in his neighbourhood, could read like "the parson in the church" before he was six years old, and after leaving off such schooling as his mother had been able to afford him, resolved that in the intervals of his manual labour he would "combine the study of languages with that of mathematics, complete a full course of reading in ancient and modern history, and get an accurate and ample acquaintance with the literature of the day." He succeeded in acquiring a fair knowledge of Latin and mathematics, made some way in Greek and Hebrew, was well read in English classics, learnt off the four first books of Paradise Lost and Ifandet by heart, and had read most of the poems and novels of the day, when the end came. "I not unfrequently swooned away and fell along the floor when I tried to take my cup of oatmeal gruel at the end of my day's labours." The break-down was complete. Shoemaking, which never brought him in more than 10s. a week, and study were over for many weeks ; on his recovery, a few friends who had helped in his illness now set him up in a day school, which was eagerly patronised by the neighbours, who had long wondered over the lad, as he eat in a corner of his mother's cottage, repeat- ing aloud strange languages while he bent over his work. Mr. Cooper threw his whole heart into his school, as into his studies, and it was for a time a great success. The impulsiveness of his tiature interfered here, as often in after life, with the permanence of that success. We have no space, if even these columns were the place, for entering into the immediate causes of failure; the religious difficulties of a fervent spirit, the conversion, the state of religious exaltation, the failure and collapse, the growing discord in the once united body of Wesleyan worshippers, and the un- just treatment that finally drove Mr. Cooper from that body, em- bittering his mind, and preparing it for the scepticism that shadowed all his mid-life. On leaving at once his profession and his creed, he threw himself into politics; became first contributor to, then editor of, several local papers ; was imprisoned for two years in Stafford Gaol, gave himself after his liberation to literary pursuits, in which he does not seem to have been, in a pecuniary sense, successful ; and finally resumed his old life of a lecturer, at first on every topic be believed to be interesting and instruc- tive to the working-classes, including religion, though only from a purely rationalistic point of view, afterwards solely upon the Christian evidences and doctrines. We cannot at- tempt to follow his active and changeful career in closer detail, but will content ourselves with a few extracts from the more striking passages that exemplify his character. Here is one which points out a serious danger to the popular orator. He is speaking of his Chartist lectures in '42 :—" How fierce my dis- courses now became in the market-place on Sunday evenings ! I wonder that I restrained myself at all. My heart often burned with indignation I knew not how to express. Nay, there was something worse I began from sheer sympathy to feel a ten- dency to glide into the depraved thinking of some of the stronger but coarser spirits among the men. It is horrible to me to tell such a truth, but I must tell it, for if I be untruthful now, I had better not have begun my life-story."
"They are about to abolish our old-fashioned nomination-days, and not before due time," he writes, "but I must confess I enjoyed the old days ;" and that he did enjoy them is plain, for he gives the " humours " of the election-days in the rough Northern towns with much gusto, and has waged fierce battle in his day with the "Nottingham Lambs." In 1841 he was editing at Leicester a small paper called the Halfpenny Rushlight ; an election came on, and "Samuel Deacon, a well-known native of Leicester, made a large tin extinguisher ; with this he approached the hustings, and before I was aware of what he meant to do, placed it on my head, while the Whigs cried out, 'There, he has extinguished the Rushlight." His answer was to start, instead of the extinguished Halfpenny Rushlight, a Penny Extinguisher.
In Stafford Gaol he proved the most refractory of prisoners. He left the officials no peace till he had obtained "his rights," the use of his books and writing materials, permission to write and receive letters, and food on "which he could subsist." He
began the campaign with vigour by dashing past the turnkeys to the door of the Governor's room, where he thundered till he came out in alarm, shouting, "Give me food that I can eat, or some of you shall pay for it !" His next onslaught was upon the chaplain, whom he seized by the arm in full chapel, crying, "'Are you a minister of Christ ? If you are, see me righted ; they are starving me on skilly and bad potatoes; and they neither let me write to my wife, nor receive a letter from her, if she be alive.' The poor chaplain shook like an aspen leaf, and stared at me with open mouth, but could not speak.'D'ye hear me, man ?' I cried, shaking him by the arm ; will you see me righted, I say?' ' He's mad, he's mad ; ' gasped the poor chaplain; 'take him off, take him away !' Four of the turnkeys seized me by the legs and arms, and bore me away, while made the vaulted passages ring with my shouts of 'Murder ! murder I' " Ile smuggled in pens and paper, and wrote a petition to the House of Commons, which he dared the magis- trates not to forward to Mr. Duncombe for presentation. It was presented, and the result may be briefly summed up in the fare- well words of the governor, "I admire your pluck, Cooper." It was to Mr. Duncombe that the liberated Chartist turned when he reached London, with his poem and a romance, for sole main- tenance. Mr. Duncombe referred him to Disraeli in these words, "I send you Mr. Cooper, a Chartist, red-hot from Stafford Gaol. But don't be frightened. He won't bite you. He has written a poem and a romance, and thinks he can cut out Coningsby and Sybil. Help him if you can." The note was taken, and proved efficacious in gaining kindly welcome and sympathy, though little availing help. The total result of so much youthful self-denial aud such a long strife against adverse cir- cumstances may not seem much. The People's Charter is not gained, nor is it any longer, in the eyes of its once most ardent supporter, a panacea for all earthly ills. His "Prison Rhyme" has not brought him a world-wide reputation, nor even a noticeable place among the poets of the day ; but no one can read Mr. Cooper's autobiography without strong feelings of admiration aud respect, or his Purgatory of Suicides without recognising in it creative imagination and true poetic fire.
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