The Autobiography of Thomas Cooper

The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself (1872) is the full-length autobiography of a self-taught working man who became one of Victorian England’s most vivid public figures. Cooper rose from a shoemaker’s bench in Leicester to lead Chartist agitation, was convicted of sedition, and composed his verse epic in a Stafford jail — and the book carries all of that with the energy of a man who lived it.

It is also a conversion narrative. In prison and after, Cooper cast off his Christian faith and spent years as a popular freethinking lecturer, until in the mid-1850s he stood up in public and declared himself a Christian again. He gave the following decades to lecturing on the evidences of Christianity, defending the faith he had once attacked from the same platforms.

Long counted among the finest memoirs of a self-educated Victorian working man, the book joins political history, self-improvement, doubt, and return in a single sweep. It is Cooper’s own account, told at length and in his own voice.

Our public-domain edition presents Cooper’s text in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.

This edition follows the first edition of The Life of Thomas Cooper, Written by Himself, published at London by Hodder & Stoughton in 1872.

Archive.org holds five scans of this book, and they agree on its length to within two parts in a thousand — 100,250 to 100,414 words — so no printing among them is cutting anything. We chose the cleanest, and keep the Cornell copy as a witness for places where one scanner misread a word and another did not.

Two repairs to the scan are worth declaring, because both put something back rather than take something away. The first chapter’s heading is preceded in the scan by a stray mark, “^ CHAPTER I.”, which hid it from the extractor and would have folded Cooper’s childhood into the front matter. And the heading of chapter nineteen is not in the scan at all — the page it stood on is damaged, and only its title survives, “Chartist Life Continued: Remarkable Night Journey: 1842.” The chapter is plainly there, the book’s own contents page lists it as the nineteenth, and we have put the heading back rather than run two chapters into one.

The chapter titles are Cooper’s, taken from his contents page, with the dates he gives. Five of them had been damaged there and were recovered from the headings in the body.

What has otherwise been repaired is damage done by the scanner, not by the author. Running heads, page numbers and catchwords have been removed; words broken at the line ending have been rejoined; letters the scanner confused have been restored where the book’s own vocabulary settles the question. Cooper’s spelling, punctuation and wording stand.

The book the scan opens with is not this one: the front matter is Hodder & Stoughton’s advertisement for Cooper’s other book, The Bridge of History over the Gulf of Time, with its press notices. None of it is in this edition. We publish that book as well, and the two belong together — the autobiography is how he came to make the argument, and the argument is what he did with the rest of his life.

Prepared by T.S. Baker Books, 2026.