Chartist Lives: John Cleave

A radical publisher, Cleave[1] was born probably in Ireland and certainly of Irish parents. It is known that he served in the navy and visited America; otherwise his early life is obscure. By 1828, he was working as editorial assistant on the Weekly Free Press, a London radical paper. Soon afterwards he became a committee member of the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge. Here he met Henry Hetherington, William Lovett, and James Watson, who were to remain his closest friends and political associates. Cleave led the Westminster Co-operative Society, the largest in London, supporting himself through a coffee house and radical news room in Smithfield. Politically, he supported Henry Hunt, through the Radical Reform Association and the Metropolitan Political Union. Becoming more militant he achieved national prominence as an organiser, speaker, and provincial lecturer for the National Union of the Working Classes (1831–5). Here his republicanism, Irish nationalism and support for the unstamped press were much in evidence. The 1832 Reform Act he simply dismissed as ‘the production and idol of the enemies of the working classes’, declaring that ‘a war between labour and property had commenced’[2]. In 1834, he visited northern industrial centres in a covert attempt to maintain the revolutionary momentum briefly achieved by Owenism in its trade unionist phase.

As a Baptist, Cleave sought to exclude religious controversy from political proceedings. Equally he was strongly opposed to ‘the odious Law Established Church’[3], a stance plainly evident in A Slap at the Church, a periodical he assisted in 1832. When it closed, Cleave helped Watson edit the republican Working Man’s Friend. When this, too, folded he moved to another unstamped paper, Charles Penny’s People’s Police Gazette. This proved a seminal career move. In January 1834, he commenced newspaper publishing on his own account with Cleave’s Weekly Press Gazette, a move designed, successfully, to drive Penny out of business. With Hetherington, Cleave became one of the folk heroes of the unstamped press. He was twice imprisoned for his newspaper activities (briefly on each occasion the fine he refused to pay was met by admirers). The circulation of the paper reached 30,000–40,000, according to a supportive Edward Bulwer-Lytton[4]. Principled yet populist, it was the most successful unstamped paper and it laid the basis for Cleave’s subsequent career.

In June 1837, Cleave was one of the six working men who first signed the People’s Charter. He toured England as a missionary for the London Working Men’s Association, sometimes in the company of his future son-in-law Henry Vincent, whose temperance views he shared. But, like Lovett’s, Cleave’s revolutionary fervour began to dim. He signed Lovett’s call for the ‘new move’ and joined his National Association. He also published the moderate English Chartist Circular (1841–3), closely associated with so-called ‘moral force’ Chartism. Yet Cleave sat on the executive of the National Charter Association, was London agent for the Northern Star and stood surety for Fergus O’Connor at his trial in 1842. He did not break with O’Connor until 1847. The explanation for this balancing act probably lies in Cleave’s business acumen. He was now relatively affluent and his news agency made him indispensable to O’Connor. Increasingly his political energies were eroded by the time he devoted to publishing, especially once he turned to fiction. Cleave revealed a scant regard for the niceties of intellectual property in an output dominated by pirated Gothic romances. As early as February 1838, Cleave’s London Satirist had carried lengthy transcripts of Dickens’s Oliver Twist (along with pastiche material by ‘Bos’ and advertisements for works by ‘Poz’). Cleave continued to publish other material, however, including birth-control literature, Owen’s New Moral World, and several more ephemeral socialist periodicals. Another reason for his lower political profile was a personal scandal: in 1840, Cleave apparently introduced his mistress into his marital home. His wife, Mary Ann Cleave, who had hitherto been a strong supporter of his endeavours, suffered a nervous breakdown shortly afterwards. It was an unsatisfactory context within which to pursue the politics of moral persuasion. She, however, survived him; he died at his home, 22 Stanhope Street, London, on 19th January 1850.

Cleave’s career presents several contradictions. He was an avowed Christian, yet closely associated with Owenite socialism. He was cut-throat in business yet readily sustained heavy losses as a political publisher. His cultivation of a democratic readership required a catholicity of taste too generous for stringent reformers. He was a friend of O’Connor and Lovett yet cannot readily be placed in either strand of Chartism they epitomise. In this he was perhaps closer to grass-roots opinion than historians have allowed, which mirrors his shrewd assessment of the English common reader.


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[1] Sources: I. J. Prothero and J. H. Wiener ‘Cleave, John’, Dictionary of Labour Biography volume 6, L. James Fiction for the working man, 1830–1850, 1963, Poor Man’s Guardian (1831–5), especially 30th July 1831; 10th December 1831; 2nd June 1832; 23rd June 1832; 29th September 1832; 27th April 1833; 22nd November 1834, Public Record Office: HO 64/11, HO 64/12, HO 64/15 and British Library: Add. MS 27791, fols. 67–8, Add. MS 35151, fols. 360–61, Place newspaper collection, set 50, fol. 555.

[2] Poor Man’s Guardian, 23rd June 1832

[3] Poor Man’s Guardian, 29th September 1832

[4] Hansard 3rd series, volume 30, 18th August 1834, column 624

Chartist Lives: William Benbow

Benbow [1] was born at Middlewich, Cheshire in 1784. He learned the trade of a shoemaker, but was a dissenting preacher in Newton, Manchester, by the time that he commenced his political activities in 1808. In December 1816, he was delegated by the Lancashire radicals to liaise with ultra-radical elements in London. It seems likely that he was fully aware of the Spa Fields conspiracy of that month, and his association with the Spencean revolutionary group in London dates from about that time. He also associated with Sir Francis Burdett and William Cobbett, and acted as agent in Lancashire for the Political Register. He represented the Manchester Hampden Club at the convention called by Major John Cartwright in January 1817 and was an organiser of the Blanketeers’ march. After plans for a revolutionary government involving him were exposed later that month, Benbow prepared to flee to the United States, but he was arrested in May and detained for the remainder of the year.


After a brief spell in Manchester, mainly promoting a plan to destabilise the economy through the circulation of forged banknotes, Benbow joined Cobbett in America. Benbow was responsible for disinterring the bones of Thomas Paine, though it was Cobbett who brought them back to England. Benbow returned to Manchester in December 1819 to resume insurrectionary activity, but moved to London early the following year. From a shop in the Strand, he established himself as a major radical bookseller, a leading supporter of Queen Caroline, and also a publisher of bawdy and obscene literature. He was arrested for caricaturing George IV in May 1821 and was detained without trial for eight months, during which time his first wife died and his business collapsed. He resumed on a smaller scale in 1822, and was immediately prosecuted, unsuccessfully, for a pirated edition of Byron’s Cain. A further unsuccessful prosecution for obscenities published in his Rambler’s Magazine followed in July 1822. He quarrelled furiously with Cobbett and with the radical publisher Robert Carlile about his pirated editions of Paine and pornographic publications.


During the quieter political climate of the mid-1820s, Benbow concentrated on publishing pornography. After further imprisonment in 1827, possibly for debt, he changed his business to that of coffee- and beer-house keeper. The ‘Institution of the Working Classes’, his premises at 8 Theobalds Road, Holborn, became an important centre for metropolitan radicals, especially the National Union of the Working Classes, co-operators, and female radicals (led by Benbow’s second wife). His insurrectionary views were undiminished in the reform crisis, but his lasting contribution to radicalism was made in his pamphlet of January 1832, Grand National Holiday and Congress of the Productive Classes. In it, Benbow argued the case for a simultaneous general strike and radical convention. Neither of these ideas was original: he leaned heavily on Spencean thinking in his development of the strike proposal, while the idea of a national convention as a radical alternative to parliament had been a staple of English reform since the 1780s. Benbow’s anti-establishment invective and cogency were remarkable, however, and Grand National Holiday went through three large editions and continued to be read well into the 1840s.


Benbow is most easily characterised as an insurrectionary conspirator and opponent of the ‘old corruption’, whose political work constituted a significant stage in the evolution of a self-consciously working-class radicalism. However, his career after the famous pamphlet was anti-climactic and was marked by several unsuccessful publishing ventures, by quarrels with fellow radicals over his financial probity and by his trenchant opposition to the influence of Robert Owen. Benbow espoused the cause of working-class co-operation against what he claimed was Owen’s patronising and anti-democratic attitude, and in doing so he achieved some influence. In all, though, these were inauspicious circumstances in which to develop further his career as a radical reformer, even after he had ceased issuing libertinist literature. In 1834, his business failed and he turned first to shoemaking and then greengrocery to earn a living. He reactivated his links with Lancashire during the anti-poor law and Chartist agitations and was arrested there in August 1840 and charged with sedition. In all he spent two years in prison, where, in the words of a prisons inspector, ‘time seems to have abated nothing of his warmth in the cause of Republicanism’. Released in 1841, he returned to London and a precarious career as a Chartist lecturer. His last public appearance of any kind was on the platform of a meeting of the Finsbury Manhood Suffrage Society in October 1852. The date and circumstances of his death are unknown.



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[1] I. Prothero ‘Benbow, William’, Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume 6, I. McCalman Radical underworld: prophets, revolutionaries, and pornographers in London, 1795–1840, 1988, I. Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the concept of the “general strike”’, Past and Present, volume 63, (1974), pages 132–71 and Prison inspector’s report, 1st January 1841, Public Record Office: HO 20/10.