Old Fashioned Stories

This volume contains some twenty-six short stories. The bulk of them were written whilst Thomas Cooper served two years in Stafford prison. An active Chartist he attended the 1842 National Chartist Association conference. It agreed a resolution in support of workers involved in a General Strike against swingeing wage cuts imposed by the coal-owners of Staffordshire, the textile manufacturers of Lancashire and the woolen manufacturers of West Yorkshire. Peel's Tory Government, always on the look-out for a way to halt Chartism and the workers demand for Universal Suffrage arrested the bulk of delegates to the conference. Despite the situation in which Thomas Cooper found himself, these stories are far from serious and depict life in the last decade of the 18th and the early decades of the 19th century in a humorous and light-hearted way. Published in support of the Working Class Movement Library, Salford M5 4WX.