The London Corresponding Society (LCS) was a federation of local reading and debating clubs that in the decade following the French Revolution agitated for the democratic reform of the British Parliament. In contrast to other reform associations of the period, it drew largely upon working men (artisans, tradesmen, and shopkeepers) and was itself organised on a formal democratic basis.
Characterising it as an instrument of French revolutionary subversion, and citing links to the insurrectionist United Irishmen, the government of William Pitt the Younger sought to break the Society, twice charging leading members with complicity in plots to assassinate the King. Measures against the society intensified in the wake of the naval mutinies of 1797, the 1798 Irish Rebellion and growing protest against the continuation of the war with France. In 1799, new legislation suppressed the Society by name, along with the remnants of the United Irishmen and their franchise organisations, United Scotsmen and the United Englishmen, with which the diminishing membership of the LCS had associated.
Early influences and foundation of the society
In the last decades of the eighteenth century the percolation of Enlightenment thinking and the dramas of American independence and the French Revolution stimulated in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, new clubs and societies committed to principles of popular sovereignty and constitutional government. In the north of England the Non-Conformist, principally Unitarian, currents in the new disenfranchised mill towns and manufacturing centres, supported the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI). This had been founded by, among others, Major John Cartwright, author of Take Your Choice (1776) which called for manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections and equal electoral districts.
In 1788, prominent Unitarian members of the CIS, Richard Price and Joseph Priestley among them, formed the Revolution Society. Ostensibly convened to commemorate the centennial of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the society called for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts on the grounds that "the right of private judgement, liberty of conscience, trial by jury, freedom of the press and freedom of election ought ever to be held sacred and inviolable". After 1792 the radical momentum shifted from the Revolution Society back to the SCI and, more decidedly, to a new London society.
During the American Revolutionary War, Thomas Hardy, a Scottish shoemaker in London, was convinced of the American cause by the pamphlets of Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister and prominent reformer. A gift of the pamphlet library of the SCI, including a reprint of a proposal from a "Correspondence Committee" of the Irish Volunteer movement to restore "the purity and vigour" of the Irish constitution through parliamentary reform, persuaded him of the need for a workingman's reform club.
At the first meeting of his "Correspondence Society" on 25 January 1792, Hardy led seven friends in a discussion that determined that "gross ignorance and prejudice in the bulk of the nation was the greatest obstacle to obtaining redress" from the "defects and abuses that have crept into the administration of our Government"; and that to remove that obstacle it should be the aim of those subscribing:to instil into [the public] in a legal and constitutional way by means of the press, a sense of their rights as freemen, and of their duty to themselves and their posterity, as good citizens, and hereditary guardians of the liberties transmitted to them by their forefathers.
Hardy is said to have been distinguished in radical company by never speaking "but to the purpose at hand" and by his "high organising ability".
In promoting the new society, Hardy and his friends rode a wave of popular political engagement lifted by the two-part publication (March 1791, February 1792) of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. Selling as many as a million copies, Paine's reply to Edmund Burke in defence of the French Revolution (and of Dr. Richard Price) was "eagerly read by reformers, Protestant dissenters, democrats, London craftsman, and the skilled factory-hands of the new industrial north".