Divided We Grow

John Barrell

• The London Corresponding Society 1792-99 edited by Michael T. Davis
  Pickering & Chatto, six volumes, £495.00, June 2002, ISBN 1 85196 734 6
• Romanticism, Publishing and Dissent: Joseph Johnson and the Cause of Liberty by Helen Braithwaite
  Palgrave, 243 pp, £45.00, December 2002, ISBN 0 333 98394 7

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.