ABSTRACT
From the early 1830s onwards, the London co-operator and journalist William Carpenter embraced the cause of political reform, which he promoted in various publications including Political Letters and Carpenter’s Monthly Political Magazine. The Address to the Working Classes, written while Carpenter was in jail due to his refusal to pay the stamp duty on newspapers, shows that he occupied a middle-ground between Robert Owen and the radical critics of the Reform Bill like James Bronterre O’Brien and William Cobbett. Unlike Owen, Carpenter was firmly in favour of an extended franchise for working men, a belief that would later see him join the Chartist movement. He also wished to avoid class conflict, and maintained the necessity of an alliance between working men and the newly enfranchised middle-classes. In whatever light Carpenter and Owen view the attempt to set the working classes against the bill, it appears extremely foolish and mischievous. They could get nothing by it; but they must lose much.
