George Holyoake, the son of a Birmingham
whitesmith, was born on 13th April, 1817. At the age of eight George
began working with his father at a local foundry. In 1836 George started
attending evening classes at the Birmingham
Mechanics' Institute. It was at this time that he first heard
about the socialist ideas of Robert Owen.
The following year Holyoake joined Robert Owen's Association of All
Classes of All Nations.
Holyoake also became a member of the Birmingham
Chartists. Holyoake was a Moral Force Chartist
and in 1839 he refused to become involved in the Birmingham
rioting which followed the rejection by Parliament of the Chartist
petition.
In 1840 Holyoake applied to become a teacher at the Birmingham
Mechanics' Institute. Holyoake believed that he was rejected because
of his socialist and atheistic views. Upset by his failure to become
a teacher, Holyoake applied and was accepted as an Owenite Social
Missionary. His first post was in Worcester and the following year
he was transferred to a more important position in Sheffield.
As well as giving lectures to adults, Holyoake also established a
day school for children in the city. Holyoake began contributing articles
to Oracle of Reason, a journal
highly critical of Christianity. In January 1842, Charles Southwell,
the journal's editor, was arrested and convicted of blasphemy. While
Southwell was in prison, Holyoake became the journal's new editor.
Six months later Holyoake was also charged with "condemning Christianity"
in a speech he made at Cheltenham. In August 1842 he was found guilty
and sentenced to six months in prison.
After Holyoake was released from prison he started a new weekly journal
called The Movement. The journal
appeared for three years and was then replaced by The
Reasoner. Published for over fifteen years, The
Reasoner became one of the
most important working class journals of the 19th century. Holyoake
used his journal to campaign on a wide variety of different social
and political issues. The Reasoner
was a loyal supporter of non-violent Moral Chartism
and Holyoake eventually became a member of the Chartist executive.
Holyoake also joined people like Richard Carlile
and Henry Hetherington in their struggle
against the government's attempt to censor newspapers and journals.
In 1851 Holyoake helped Hetherington and James
Watson form the Association for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge.
By 1853 Holyoake's The Reasoner
was selling 5,000 copies a week. In his journal Holyoake criticised
Christianity and suggested that it should be replaced by a belief
system based on reason and science. Holyoake called this new theory
Secularism and by the middle of the 1850s
there were over forty Secular Societies in Britain. Holyoake remained
the leader of the Secular movement until he was replaced by the more
militant Charles Bradlaugh in 1858.
After the decline of Chartism, Holyoake
became one of the leaders of the National Reform
League. In 1859 he wrote and published The
Workman and the Suffrage where he argued that members of
the working class could be trusted to vote wisely. In The
Liberal Situation (1865) he supported the views of Samuel
Smiles that the franchise should be based upon educational rather
than property qualifications.
George Holyoake had been deeply influenced by the ideas of Robert
Owen. This included Owen's views on co-operation. Holyoake had
supported the co-operative movement in his journal The Reasoner
and in in 1858 wrote Self-Help by the People,
a book on the history of the Rochdale Pioneers. Holyoake continued
to campaign for the movement and in 1870 was one of the founders of
the Co-operative Union. In 1877 Holyoake completed his two-volume
The History of Co-operation in England.
In the late 1880s George Holyoake began work on his autobiography.
The book Sixty Years of an Agitator's Life
(1892) was not only an account of Holyoake's life but a history
of radicalism in the the 19th century. George Holyoake died in 1906.
The Co-operative Union recognized the great contribution that he had
made by erecting Holyoake House in Manchester, the main offices and
library of the movement in England.
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