Thomas Walker (1749-1817), Was a Manchester Cotton Merchant and Political Reformer, Whose

Thomas Walker (1749-1817), was a Manchester cotton merchant and political reformer, whose circle of correspondents included numerous radical politicians and business leaders of his day, but whose active involvement in politics was limited to a few years in the early 1790s. The archive under consideration here comprises one of two bound volumes of letters sent to Walker c.1790-1805 – 160 pieces, bound in alphabetical order, covering A-R. The whereabouts of the second volume (S-Z), which included letters from Wilberforce and was known to Blanchard Jerrold in 1874, is now unknown and unlikely to be reunited with the present volume.

There are 14 letters from the anti-slavery campaigner Thomas Clarkson, seven from Thomas Cooper, five from Charles James Fox, and two from Thomas Paine. But the bulk of the collection is made up by single items of correspondence from more minor figures representing Walker’s twinned worlds of business and reform. Walker’s active role in radical politics came to end in the mid 1790s, and his business collapsed in 1799, and while the present correspondence shows his continued role as sounding-board for the great and the good, it is not one that can be seen as directly linked to the the progress of the radical movement or to the history of industrialisation.

Notwithstanding the value of individual items – the Thomas Paine letters in particular – and the insights the letter-book provides into Manchester politics at the turn of the nineteenth-century, it is not our opinion that it can be regarded as of the ‘outstanding significance’ for the study of political history that the Waverly criteria demand.