Blackwell Reference Online

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Thomas Hardy was a leading figure in the French Revolution-inspired British Jacobin movement. He was a working man – a shoemaker by trade – who founded the London Corresponding Society (LCS) , the first successful organizational attempt in England at bringing the working class into the political arena. The LCS was dedicated to promoting parliamentary reform, specifically universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments, but it also included within it more radical currents that developed explicitly revolutionary agendas. Hardy was born in Scotland, where he was brought up by his mother and maternal grandfather. His father, Walter Hardy, had drowned when Thomas was 8 years old. Hardy was schooled until the age of 10 and then trained in the cobbling trade, eventually moving to Glasgow to find work. In 1771 he abandoned shoemaking and worked briefly as a bricklayer, but in 1774 after a workplace accident in which one of his colleagues died, Hardy decided to return to his original trade and relocated to London. He found work as the foreman of a shoemaking shop and in 1781 married Lydia Priest. Together they had six children, none of whom survived past infancy. In 1791 Hardy set himself up as a master bootmaker in Piccadilly, which despite early growing pains became a profitable business. At about the same time Hardy began to involve himself in radical politics, his interest having ... log in or subscribe to read full text