Liberty or Death

This work chronicles the movement for parliamentary reform in the latter part of the 18th century. It is a history seen through the eyes of two very different reformers: Thomas Hardy, a Scottish shoemaker who moved to London in 1792 and founded the London Corresponding Society - a political society for working men, and John Cartwright, who came from the landed gentry and founded the Society for Constitutional Information - whose members were educated and from the middle and upper classes. These two only met once and the author traces their interweaving activities against a background of political, social and economic change. Thomas Hardy was imprisoned for treason for demanding the right of working man to vote. The treason trials of 1794 were directed against both societies, although John Cartwright himself was not imprisoned.