Cooper Thomas

Cooper, Thomas, poet and journalist, was born in 1805 at Leicester, and brought up at Gainsborough. At 15 he was apprenticed to a shoemaker, but devoted every spare moment to study. In 1829 he became a schoolmaster, and soon afterwards a provincial journalist. The trial of Frost converted him to Chartism (q.v.), and in 1841 he was condemned to two years' imprisonment for sedition and conspiracy in connection with the Potteries' riots. In prison he wrote the Purgatory of Suicides. For a time a Methodist local preacher, he eventually rejected Christianity, but returned to it in 1855, and afterwards frequently lectured on Christian evidences. His autobiography appeared in 1872.