(1800–77). British Chartist leader William Lovett was an advocate of political rights for the working class. He was mainly responsible for drafting the People’s Charter of 1838, which contained demands such as suffrage (the right to vote) for all men, not just wealthy ones, and a system of voting by secret ballot.
Lovett was born on May 8, 1800, in Newlyn, Cornwall, England. After 1821 he was a cabinetmaker in London, England. Lovett was self-educated in economics and politics and a follower of the utopian socialist Robert Owen. In 1829 Lovett became honorary secretary to the British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge, an organization that proved to be important in the development of working-class radicalism. Radicals are people who want to make rapid and sweeping changes to laws and methods of government. In 1836 Lovett and a number of other radicals founded the London Workingmen’s Association, which issued the People’s Charter two years later.
Lovett was more moderate than some of the other radicals, and he found it difficult to work with the more militant Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor. For that reason, Lovett’s role in Chartism was limited, although in 1839 he was secretary of a Chartist national convention. The convention met in London and then moved to Birmingham, England, where Chartist disturbances broke out. Lovett was arrested and sentenced to a year’s imprisonment. While in jail he and John Collins, a fellow Chartist, wrote Chartism: A New Organization of the People.
In 1841 Lovett established the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, to which he devoted most of his energies. After 1857 he wrote a number of textbooks for working-class students. His autobiography was published in 1876. Lovett died on August 8, 1877, in London.