Author: Wooler, Thomas Jonathan
Biography:
WOOLER, Thomas Jonathan (1786-1853: ODNB)
Pseudonym The Black Dwarf
He was born in the parish of St. Michael, Wood Street, City of London, in Dec. 1786, the son of Thomas Wooler, loriner, and his wife Betty (maiden name unknown) who may have married at St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch, in 1782. Nothing is known of his education. He was originally apprenticed to a clothworker in 1801 but probably switched to a printer at an as yet unknown date. By 1808 he was moving in radical circles and organised the Socratic Union, a debating club which met at the Mermaid Tavern, Hackney. Its debates were often reported in The Reasoner (1813-14), which he may have edited. He also published the Republican (1813) and a theatrical journal, The Stage (1814-16). In Jan. 1817 he began the radical newspaper, The Black Dwarf (1817-24). He fell foul of the Treason Act (1817) and Seditious Meetings Act (1817), was arrested in May 1817 and tried for seditious libel on 5 June. As the printer, not the writer, he was acquitted on one charge and the government decided not to proceed on the second. He responded with a pamphlet attacking the practice of jury-packing. He was a strong supporter of parliamentary reform, Major John Cartwright (who largely financed The Black Dwarf), and his Hampden Clubs. In 1820 he was tried for “seditious conspiracy to elect” Sir Charles Wolseley as MP for Birmingham without due authority. He was convicted and spent eighteen months in Warwick gaol. He studied law but Lincoln’s Inn refused him admission in 1825, which he detailed in Case between Lincoln’s Inn . . . and Mr. T. J. Wooler (1826). After the Reform Act (1832), he gave up printing and politics and worked for many years for the Old Bailey lawyer Samuel Harmer, of Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, as a prisoner’s advocate. His final years were marked by “dissipation.” He married Elizabeth Pratt on 10 Sept. 1818 at St. John’s, Hackney. They had one son, John Pratt Wooler, born in 1824. Wooler died on 29 Oct. 1853 at his residence in Carburton Street, Portland Road, Marylebone. His wife Elizabeth died at Islington in 1871. (ODNB 8 June 2024; DNB; ancestry.co.uk 8 June 2024; findmypast.co.uk 8 June 2024; Michael Scrivener, Poetry and Reform [1992], 249-81; SJC 8 Nov. 1853; GM Dec. 1853, 647-8; N&Q 7 Oct. 1865, 295; GRO death cert.; Morning Advertiser 1 July 1871) AA
Other Names:
- T. J. Wooler