ABSTRACT
Thomas Cooper's all-encompassing and vastly erudite epic, The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), stands at the sublime summit of autodidact endeavour. Cooper’s own schooling had lasted considerably long, chiefly through the heroic efforts of his widowed mother. Cooper was eventually apprenticed as a boot-maker and describes in his autobiography, a ‘Victorian classic in the Self-help mode’, how long working hours were combined with a regimen of mental exercise so punishing that on several occasions he touched breaking point. The Purgatory of Suicides was written entirely in Spenserian stanzas, and the galvanic energy of the prefatory addresses to working people in all ten books is magnificently sustained. The increasingly Liberal tenor of his politics, together with the blazing emergence of a new Chartist star, the ‘ruling-class renegade’ Ernest Jones, further distanced him from the hub of labouring class radicalism.
