THOMAS

See also:

• COOPER
• COOPER (or COUPER), THOMAS (c. 1517-1594)
• COOPER, ABRAHAM (1787—1868)
• COOPER, ALEXANDER (d. i66o)
• COOPER, CHARLES HENRY (18o8-1866)
• COOPER, JAMES FENIMORE (1789-1851)
• COOPER, PETER (1791-1883)
• COOPER, SAMUEL (1609-1672)
• COOPER, SIR ASTLEY PASTON (1768-1841)
• COOPER, THOMAS (1759–1840)
• THOMAS COOPER (1805–1892)
• COOPER, THOMAS SIDNEY (1803–1902)

COOPER (1805–1892)  , English Chartist and writer, the son of a working dyer, was born at Leicester on the loth of March 1805 . After his father's death his mother began business as a dyer and fancy box-maker at Gainsborough . Young Cooper was apprenticed to a shoemaker . He had a passion for knowledge; studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew in his spare time; and in 1827 gave up cobbling to become a schoolmaster, and, later, a Methodist preacher . His affairs did not prosper, and after going to Lincoln, where he obtained work on a local news-paper, he came to London in 1839 . Here he became assistant to a second-hand bookseller, but in 1849 he joined the staff of the Leicestershire Mercury . His support of the Chartist movement obliged him to resign his position, but he undertook to edit The Midland Counties Illuminator, a Chartist journal, in 1841 . He became a leader of the extreme Chartist party, and for his action in urging on the strike of 1842 he was imprisoned in Stafford gaol for two years . Here he produced The Purgatory of Suicides, a political epic in ten books, embodying the radical ideas of the time . 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 it appeared in 1845, and Cooper then turned his attention to lecturing upon historical and educational subjects . In 1856 he suddenly renounced the free-thinking doctrines which he had held for many years, and became a lecturer on Christian evidences .

He died at Lincoln on the 15th of

July 1892 . Among his other works may be mentioned the Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time (1871) and the Life of Thomas Cooper, written by Himself (1872) .