William Villiers Sankey came from aristocratic stock. The
son of an Irish volunteer and Member of Parliament, he moved among the
political elite of his day. Yet he also served as a delegate to the First
Chartist Convention of 1839.
While representing Edinburgh at the convention, Sankey was
profiled by The Charter newspaper. Both the profile and a portrait sketch which
accompanied it now appear on Chartist Ancestors.
Sankey appears to have been a fiercely clever young man who
considered the law, the church and medicine as potential careers before
settling on a life as a professor of mathematics. He had also shown an aptitude
for Ancient Greek and Hebrew studies.
As a convention delegate, Sankey proved to be somewhat
erratic, voicing hard-line views before retreating to a moral force position as
the convention went on.
However, his sympathy for the Chartist cause outlasted the
first flush of enthusiasm, and he was still politically active in the early
1840s, all the while contributing his thoughts on mathematics and other
subjects to specialist publications.
In
Friends
of the People: The Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists Owen
Ashton and Paul Pickering focus on six middle class Chartist leaders, among
them William Villiers Sankey. Order
this book online
.
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