Thomas Jonathan Wooler was born in Yorkshire in 1786. Wooler moved
to London where he was apprenticed as a
printer. After working for the radical journal, the Reasoner,
Wooler was appointed editor of the Statesman.
Wooler took a particular interest in legal matters and in 1817 he
wrote and published the pamphlet An Appeal
to the Citizens of London against the Packing of Special Juries.
In January 1817 the British government persuaded Parliament to pass
the Gagging Acts. Whereas William
Cobbett responded to this act of government repression by leaving
the country, Wooler was motivated to start publishing a new radical
unstampedjournal, the Black
Dwarf. When the journal first appeared in January 1817
it was an eight page newspaper but it later became a 32 page pamphlet.
In his journal Wooler was highly critical of Lord
Liverpool and his government and within three months he had been
arrested and charged with seditious libel. The prosecuting council
argued that Wooler had written the articles that had libeled the government.
However, Wooler, who defended himself, was able to convince the jury
that although he had published the article, he had not written it,
and so was therefore not guilty.
The court
case did not stop Wooler from publishing the Black
Dwarf and he continued to
use the journal to argue the case for parliamentary reform. Wooler
was also an active supporter of Major John
Cartwright and his Hampden Club movement.
In 1819 Wooler joined the campaign to elect Sir Charles Wolseley to
represent Birmingham in the House
of Commons. As Birmingham had not
been given permission to have an election, Wooler and his fellow campaigners
were arrested and charged with "forming a seditious conspiracy
to elect a representative to Parliament without lawful authority".
Wooler was found guilty and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment.
After the death of his main patron, Major
John Cartwright, in 1824, Wooler decided to stop publishing the
Black Dwarf. For a while Wooler
was the editor of the British Gazette
but after the passing of the 1832 Reform Act
he gave up politics and became a lawyer. In later life Wooler
wrote books and pamphlets on the British legal system, including Every
Man his Own Lawyer (1845). Thomas Jonathan Wooler died
on 29th October 1853.
George Cruikshank,
Funeral Pile,
published in 1820. Thomas Jonathan
Wooler is the one with the bellows.
(1)
Thomas Wooler, Black Dwarf
(20th August 1817)
The principal justification of Mr Owen's pretensions are that he has
succeeded in changing, as he calls it, the moral habits of the persons
under his employment in a manufactory at Lanark, in Scotland. For
all the good he has done in that respect, he deserves the highest
thanks. It is much to be wished, that all who live by the labour of
the poor would pay as much attention to their wants and to their interests
as Mr Owen did to those under his care at Lanark.
But it is very amusing
to hear Mr Owen talk of re-moralizing the poor. Does he not think
that the rich are a little more in want of re-moralizing; and particularly
that class of them that has contributed to demoralize the poor, if
they are demoralized, by supporting measures which have made them
poor, and which now continue them poor and wretched?
Talk of the poor being
demoralized! It is their would-be masters that create all the evils
that afflict the poor, and all the depravity that pretended philanthropists
pretend to regret.
In one point of view Mr
Owen's scheme might be productive of some good. Let him abandon the
labourer to his own protection; cease to oppress him, and the poor
man would scorn to hold any fictitious dependence upon the rich. Give
him a fair price for his labour, and do not take two-thirds of a depreciated
remuneration back from him again in the shape of taxes. Lower the
extravagance of the great. Tax those real luxuries, enormous fortunes
obtained without merit. Reduce the herd of locusts that prey upon
the honey of the hive, and think they do the bees a most essential
service by robbing them. The working bee can always find a hive. Do
not take from them what they can earn, to supply the wants of those
who will earn nothing. Do this; and the poor will not want your splendid
erections for the cultivation of misery and the subjugation of the
mind.
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