Divided We Grow 
John Barrell
- The London Corresponding Society 1792-99 edited by Michael T. Davis
- Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty by Helen Braithwaite
The London Corresponding Society was founded early in 1792 by a group of tradesmen who met in a pub off the Strand. The Society was to educate its members – expected to be artisans, mechanics, shopkeepers – about politics and history, and would function as a pressure group to persuade the Government to adopt the ‘Duke of Richmond’s plan’, the twin reforms of universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments which the Duke had supported a decade before but had since abandoned. The LCS was never very large: at its most successful, it may never have contained more than three thousand active, paid-up members, though many more thousands must have attended a few meetings, even joined it briefly, then hurriedly left or slowly drifted away. In bad times its membership dwindled away to a few hundred. Its importance, however, is out of all proportion to its numbers. From 1793 to at least the end of 1795, the Society was the co-ordinator of the numerous popular reform societies scattered throughout the country, which together constituted the first nationwide popular political movement in Britain.
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John Barrell has coedited, with Jon Mee, an eight-volume edition of political trials of the 1790s for Pickering and Chatto. He teaches at the University of York.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Positions He Takes · Hitchens on Paine
Inside the Head · The Corruption of Literary Biography
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