On this date in 1795, Thomas Allsop was born near Wirksworth, Derbyshire, England. A silk trader and then stockbroker, he was a radical reformer on close terms with freethinkers such as Charles Bradlaugh. His friend G.J. Holyoake, in the Dictionary of National Biography, wrote of Allsop: “By reason of his friendships, his social position, and his boldness, he was one of the unseen forces of revolution in his day.”
A “disciple” of Samuel Coleridge, Allsop, after Coleridge’s death, collected Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S.T. Coleridge (1836). Allsop as a Chartist supported the parliamentary candidacy of Irish radical Feargus O’Connor in 1848 and was accused of complicity in a plot to assassinate Napoleon III in 1858 but was not charged.
Holyoake wrote that when they attended the funeral of Robert Owen together, Allsop was indignant that a “mummery of an outworn creed” (a church service) would be imposed to recognize a man who had fought hard to free fellow humans from “the degradation of superstition.” (Holyoake’s Life and Last Days of R. Owen.) D. 1880.
