Henry Hetherington was the hero of the campaign for an
unstamped press – the radical protest movement which defied the law to publish
news and political opinion while refusing to pay a newspaper tax which put most
publications out of the reach of working people.
He would later go on to be a founder member of the London
Working Men’s Association and a delegate to the First Chartist Convention of
1839.
While serving as a delegate, the Charter newspaper published
a profile and portrait of Hetherington. This forms the basis of a page on Henry
Hetherington which now appears on Chartist Ancestors.
During the 1830s, Hetherington was three times imprisoned
for his principled stand before finally claiming a partial victory for The Poor
Man’s Guardian, which he published, when the government backed down and repealed
to obligation to pay tax on political publications.
He would later go to prison once again when he was convicted
of blasphemy for publishing a book attacking the Old Testament. In later years,
Hetherington would devote much of his energy to the cause of free thinking and
rational religion.
Hetherington played an important role in the development of the
moderate form of Chartism more usually associated with William Lovett, but less
as an original thinker or leader than as “a symbol of conscience”, as his entry
in the Dictionary of National Biography puts it.
Hetherington was largely out of sympathy with the mass
movement that Chartism became, and his lack of humour and tendency to
self-righteousness managed to alienate even his allies, among them Francis
Place, who described him as “one of those men whose peculiarities fit them for
martyrs”.
Yet he was without doubt a brave fighter for the causes in which
he believed.
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