William Lovett

William Lovett was a British activist and a leader of the Chartist movement, one of the leading London-based artisan radicals of his generation. Born in Newlyn in Cornwall, he worked in London as a cabinet maker, helped form the National Union of the Working Classes in 1831 and in June 1836 founded the London Working Men's Association. In 1838 he and Francis Place drafted the parliamentary bill that was the foundation of the People's Charter. Elected secretary of the first Chartist Convention in 1839, he was convicted of seditious libel over placards condemning the police and held in Warwick Gaol until July 1840. A moral-force Chartist who rejected violence, he then turned to education.