His favourite poem, significantly enough, was William Cullen Bryant's Thanatopsis. Watson was a kindly, lovable man, an honest Yorkshireman with the broad and generous qualities bred on the Yorkshire moors, a man, we are told, after the fashion of Cromwell's Ironsides.
Watson and Lovett, perhaps Hetherington too, represent an interesting revolutionary type. They are intellectual men whom modern education might have lifted into quite other spheres of life, where their abilities would have found that expression which political agitation alone seemed to offer in their own day. They were men driven into revolutionary thought by the appalling misery which they saw around them and which tinged their whole mental outlook with a melancholy which sought refuge in political agitation. A feeling of baffled helplessness in the face of the massed array of vested interests, ignorance, prejudice, and conservatism added bitterness to their thoughts. But a horror of violence, of bloodshed, and of hate deprived them of that callous, calculating recklessness which is essential to a physical force revolutionary, and they were helpless in face of such men when the movement which they started took on the nature of a physical force demonstration.[1]
John Cleave was about the same age as Hetherington. He was the latter's right-hand man in the agitation for the unstamped press. He kept a bookseller's shop in Shoe Lane at the Holborn end, and was the publisher of the Weekly Police Gazette, which attained a very large circulation. He was less refined and perhaps less able than his three colleagues, but he was a capable and fluent speaker of courage and conviction. Like Hetherington he was very useful as delegate or missionary.
These were the leading spirits in the London Working Men's Association which came into existence in the summer of 1836. We have two accounts of its foundation, from Place and from Lovett. Place relates how John Black, editor of the Morning Chronicle, who had assisted very enthusiastically in the campaign for a free press, and had therefore come into contact with the Lovett and Hetherington group, tried, during the summer of 1834 when that campaign was at its height, to form the artisans into a study circle. On applying to Lovett with this suggestion, he found him "cold and especially guarded." He received no more encouragement from the other members of the group. Place attributed this to the growing jealousy conceived by the
- ↑ W. J. Linton, James Watson, a Memoir, 1879, pp. 1-73.
