Author: Davenport, Allen
Biography:
DAVENPORT, Allen (1775-1846: ODNB)
He was born on 1 May 1775 at Ewen, Gloucestershire, one of ten children of a hand-loom weaver, was largely self-taught, and received a poetic education from Cooke’s editions of English Poets. His parents’ names are unknown. At nineteen, he enlisted in the Windsor Foresters, a light-cavalry regiment, and served mostly in Scotland. Discharged in 1801, he spent four years in Cirencester, working as a shoemaker, before moving to London. He married Mary, a shoebinder, in 1806. She died in 1816 and a daughter, Mary Ann, in 1824. In London he first fell under the influence of Thomas Spence (1750-1814), the radical land reformer. He was fiercely republican, as demonstrated by his fiery poem The Kings, or, Legitimacy Unmasked (1819), and the anti-monarchist Claremont (1820, 8 pages) on the Queen Caroline affair and the death of Princess Charlotte. He eventually sided with Richard Carlile, G. J. Holyoake, and Robert Owen, major influences on the moral force wing of Chartism, and downplayed his earlier radicalism. From 1822-28 he was watchman and overseer of properties newly built by his shoemaker employer William Bainbridge in Tollington Park, Holloway. While living in one of the cottages there, he published The Muse’s Wreath [1827]. On his return to London, he became involved in Owenite groups and the growing numbers of lecture halls and adult educational establishments. His Life…of Thomas Spence (1836) kept earlier ideas of land reform alive in an increasingly co-operative movement. (Davenport was sceptical of trade unionism.) He promoted adult education in later works, the poem English Institutions (1842) and his recently rediscovered autobiography The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport (1845). He collected some of his lectures on land reform and private property in The Origin of Man and the Progress of Society (1846). Five poems published in the newspaper Northern Star, Apr.-Aug. 1846, are worth another look: "The Poet’s Hope," "Ireland in Chains," 'The Land, the People’s Farm," "The Iron God," and "O’Connorville." He died of stomach cancer on 29/30 Nov. 1846 at 75 Nobel Street, off Goswell Road, Clerkenwell, and was buried in unconsecrated ground at Kensal Green. The burial costs were met by public subscription. (ODNB 25 Jun. 2021; Goodridge; Northern Star 5 and 12 Dec. 1846; The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport, ed. M. Chase [1994]) AA