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A LIFE IN FRAGMENTS: THOMAS COOPER'S CHARTIST BILDUNGSROMAN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2010

Gregory Vargo
Gregory Vargo*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
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Extract

The improbable course of Thomas Cooper's life (1805–1892) – from shoemaker and autodidact, to school teacher, to Methodist circuit rider, to Chartist activist, to prison poet, and finally to working-class lecturer and editor – encapsulates the tensions and contradictions of Victorian self-help. Fiercely devoted to projects of self-education and improvement, as an apprentice craftsman in Lincolnshire, Cooper memorized Hamlet and significant portions of Paradise Lost, and taught himself Latin, French, and some Hebrew. The publication of The Purgatory of the Suicides, the epic poem for which he is best known, made Cooper a minor celebrity in the world of middle-class literary reformers, who praised his artistic and educational accomplishments. The novelist and Christian socialist Charles Kingsley discerned in his heroic commitment to “the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties” an alternative to political militancy and loosely based Alton Locke, the story of a disillusioned Chartist hero's spiritual redemption, on Cooper's own life (Collins 3–4). Samuel Smiles, the Scottish reformer and author of Self-Help, celebrated Cooper's writing as part of a national culture which could help heal the country's social and economic divisions, arguing that his literary achievements placed him in “the same class as Burns, Ebenezer Elliot, Fox, the Norwich weaver-boy, to say nothing of the Arkwrights, Smeatons, Brindleys, Chantrys, and the like, all rising out of the labour-class into the class of the thinkers and builders-up of English greatness” (Smiles 244).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2011 , pp. 167 - 181
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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