Thomas Cooper

Thomas Cooper (born March 20, 1805, Leicester, Leicestershire, Eng.—died July 15, 1892, Lincoln, Lincolnshire) was an English writer whose political epic The Purgatory of Suicides (1845) promulgated in verse the principles of Chartism, Britain’s first specifically working-class national movement, for which Cooper worked and suffered imprisonment.

While working as a shoemaker, Cooper read widely, and in 1827 he became a schoolmaster and in 1829 a Methodist preacher. In 1836 he became a journalist, working on newspapers in Lincoln, London, and Leicester, until his embrace of Chartism led to his dismissal in 1841. He then began to edit various Chartist weeklies. In 1842 he toured potteries to urge support for a general strike. He was convicted of sedition in 1843 and spent two years in a Stafford jail, where he wrote The Purgatory of Suicides, a verse epic in which a Dantean vision of the famous suicides of the ancient and modern world is combined with the anticipation of a coming age of liberty and happiness. After his release Cooper worked as a lecturer, and he turned to Christian topics after the recovery of his faith in 1856. He also published three novels (two under the name Adam Hornbook) and wrote an autobiography, The Life of Thomas Cooper (1872). The Paradise of Martyrs, a Christian sequel to The Purgatory of Suicides, was published in 1873. His collected Poetical Works appeared in 1877.