I recently bought a first edition of Gammage’s book online to use as a working copy. A former library copy, listed as being ‘in poor condition’ and with the spine attached only by sellotape in one corner, I didn’t expect much from it or from the ‘ink inscription on the front page’. It cost only a few pounds. When it arrived, however, I was delighted to see that the inscription read, ‘Lucy E. Vincent, from her husband Henry Vincent’, and even more excited to discover that two pages of the fly leaf were covered in handwritten notes. Having seen other examples of Vincent’s handwriting and of his signature, I have no doubt that all of this is in his hand.
Henry Vincent had been one of the six working-men entrusted by the London Working Men’s Association with drawing up the People’s Charter. He was a delegate to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes in early 1839. And he published the Western Vindicator, an important Chartist newspaper aimed at radicals in Wales and the West of England.
