The London Corresponding Society (LCS) was a federation of local reading and debating clubs that in the decade following the French Revolution agitated for the democratic reform of the British Parliament. In contrast to other reform associations of the period, it drew largely upon working men (artisans, tradesmen, and shopkeepers) and was itself organised on a formal democratic basis. At its height of its popularity in late 1795, the Society had upwards of 5,000 subscribing members, and was able to broadcast its demands for universal (male) suffrage and annual parliaments to meetings and rallies attended by tens of thousands of unenfranchised working people.
Characterising it as an instrument of French revolutionary subversion, and citing links to the insurrectionist United Irishmen, the government of William Pitt the Younger sought to break the Society, twice charging leading members with complicity in plots to assassinate the King. Measures against the society intensified in the wake of the naval mutinies of 1797, the 1798 Irish Rebellion and growing protest against the continuation of the war with France. In 1799, new legislation suppressed the Society by name, along with the remnants of the United Irishmen and their franchise organisations, United Scotsmen and the United Englishmen, with which the diminishing membership of the LCS had associated.
Early influences and foundation of the society
In the last decades of the 18th century the percolation of Enlightenment thinking and the dramas of American independence and the French Revolution stimulated in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, new clubs and societies committed to principles of popular sovereignty and constitutional government. In the north of England the Non-Conformist, principally Unitarian, currents in the new disenfranchised mill towns and manufacturing centres, supported the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI). This had been founded by, among others, Major John Cartwright, author of Take Your Choice (1776) which called for manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections and equal electoral districts.
In 1788, prominent Unitarian members of the SCI, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley among them, formed the Revolution Society. Ostensibly convened to commemorate the centennial of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the society called for the repeal of the Corporation Act 1661 and Test Act 1673 on the grounds that "the right of private judgement, liberty of conscience, trial by jury, freedom of the press and freedom of election ought ever to be held sacred and inviolable". After 1792 the radical momentum shifted from the Revolution Society back to the SCI and, more decidedly, to a new London society.
During the American Revolutionary War, Thomas Hardy, a Scottish shoemaker in London, was convinced of the American cause by the pamphlets of Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister and prominent reformer. A gift of the pamphlet library of the SCI, including a reprint of a proposal from a "Correspondence Committee" of the Irish Volunteer movement to restore "the purity and vigour" of the Irish constitution through parliamentary reform, helped persuade him of the need for a workingman's reform club.
At the first meeting of his "Correspondence Society" on 25 January 1792, Hardy led seven friends in a discussion that determined that "gross ignorance and prejudice in the bulk of the nation was the greatest obstacle to obtaining redress" from the "defects and abuses that have crept into the administration of our Government"; and that to remove that obstacle it should be the aim of those subscribing:to instil into [the public] in a legal and constitutional way by means of the press, a sense of their rights as freemen, and of their duty to themselves and their posterity, as good citizens, and hereditary guardians of the liberties transmitted to them by their forefathers.
Hardy is said to have been distinguished in radical company by never speaking "but to the purpose at hand" and by his "high organising ability".
In promoting the new society, Hardy and his friends rode a wave of popular political engagement lifted by the two-part publication (March 1791, February 1792) of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Selling as many as a million copies, Paine's reply to Edmund Burke in defence of the French Revolution (and of Dr. Richard Price) was "eagerly read by reformers, Protestant dissenters, democrats, London craftsman, and the skilled factory-hands of the new industrial north".
From the beginning, the LCS was viewed with suspicion by the British government, and was infiltrated by spies on the government payroll. In addition to domestic subversion, the state authorities feared collaboration with French agents, against whose entry and circulation within the country they had introduced the Aliens Act 1793. Partly in response to the surveillance, and in express "imitation of the societies in and about Sheffield" whose cutlers had repudiated deference to Whig constitutionalists, the society adopted a decentralised, democratic structure. The LCS organised in "divisions" each comprising neighbourhood "tithings" of not more than ten members. Each division met twice a week to conduct business and discuss historical and political texts.
In contrast to some of Whig-establishment reform clubs, the organisation allowed all subscribers to participate in open debate, and to elect members to leadership positions such as tithing-man, divisional secretary, sub-delegate, or delegate. Rules also ensured that discussion was not monopolised. Francis Place recalled that "no one could speak a second time [on a subject] until every one who chose had spoken once".
The LCS issued its first public statement in April 1792. In addition to Sheffield (the "Faubourg Saint Antoine to an English Revolution") sister societies existed, or by 1793 had sprung to life, in Manchester, Norwich, and Stockport.
By May 1792 the LCS comprised nine separate divisions, each with a minimum of thirty members. The height of its popularity in late 1795 it may have had between 3,500 and 5000 member organised in 79 divisions In contrast to the SCI with its annual 4 guinea subscription, in levying just a penny a week the LCS opened its proceedings to workers of almost every condition. Those, however, who as independent tradesmen were not subject to the political disapproval of employers took the leading role. They were the committeemen.[John] Ashley, a shoemaker, [John] Baxter, a journeyman silvermith; [John] Binns, a plumber, John Boyne, a Holborn bookseller, Alexander Galloway, a mathematical machine- maker . . ., Thomas Evans, a colourer of prints and (later) a patent brace-maker, Richard Hodgson, a master hatter, John Lovett, a hairdresser, [John] Luffman, a goldsmith, [John] Oxlade, a master book-binder ... While the LCS remained primarily a forum for "a politically conscious and articulate artisan population", men of a more prominent social and professional standing did join, drawn in many cases from existing debating societies. They brought with them important political connections and skills. Barristers such as Felix Vaughan and attorneys like Joseph Gerrald (who had practiced law in Philadelphia, and there associated with Paine) were especially useful given near continuous entanglement of members in court proceedings. Among the physicians were SCI member James Parkinson, a prolific propagandist, and John Gale Jones, an accomplished orator. But the Society's egalitarian constitution accorded them no definitive preference. Hardy in particular was wary of placing them in positions of authority lest ordinary members be discouraged from "exerting themselves in their own cause".
Women participated in some of popular debating societies from which the LCS recruited. For short periods they created their own, bringing to public notice demands for equal education, equal rights and protection of female occupations. While it counted among its members men like Thomas Spence and Dr William Hodgson (The Female Citizen) who did advocate political rights and equality for women, the LCS appears to have been a male fraternity. The venues in which its divisions met – taverns and coffee houses – were predominantly male spaces, and reference to women in records of their proceedings are few.