The London Corresponding Society (LCS) was a federation of local reading and debating clubs that in the decade following the French Revolution agitated for the democratic reform of the British Parliament.

Characterising it as an instrument of French revolutionary subversion, and citing links to the insurrectionist United Irishmen, the government of William Pitt the Younger sought to break the Society, twice charging leading members with complicity in plots to assassinate the King.

In the last decades of the 18th century the percolation of Enlightenment thinking and the dramas of American independence and the French Revolution stimulated in Britain, as elsewhere in Europe, new clubs and societies committed to principles of popular sovereignty and constitutional government.

In the north of England the Non-Conformist, principally Unitarian, currents in the new disenfranchised mill towns and manufacturing centres, supported the Society for Constitutional Information (SCI).

This had been founded by, among others, Major John Cartwright, author of Take Your Choice (1776) which called for manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, annual elections and equal electoral districts.

At the first meeting of his "Correspondence Society" on 25 January 1792, Hardy led seven friends in a discussion that determined that "gross ignorance and prejudice in the bulk of the nation was the greatest obstacle to obtaining redress" from the "defects and abuses that have crept into the administration of our Government"; and that to remove that obstacle it should be the aim of those subscribing:to instil into [the public] in a legal and constitutional way by means of the press, a sense of their rights as freemen, and of their duty to themselves and their posterity, as good citizens, and hereditary guardians of the liberties transmitted to them by their forefathers.

[9] In promoting the new society, Hardy and his friends rode a wave of popular political engagement lifted by the two-part publication (March 1791, February 1792) of Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.

Selling as many as a million copies, Paine's reply to Edmund Burke in defence of the French Revolution (and of Dr. Richard Price) was "eagerly read by reformers, Protestant dissenters, democrats, London craftsman, and the skilled factory-hands of the new industrial north".

[14] In contrast to some of Whig-establishment reform clubs, the organisation allowed all subscribers to participate in open debate, and to elect members to leadership positions such as tithing-man, divisional secretary, sub-delegate, or delegate.

The height of its popularity in late 1795 it may have had between 3,500 and 5000 member organised in 79 divisions[18][19] In contrast to the SCI with its annual 4 guinea subscription, in levying just a penny a week the LCS opened its proceedings to workers of almost every condition.

Barristers such as Felix Vaughan and attorneys like Joseph Gerrald (who had practiced law in Philadelphia, and there associated with Paine) were especially useful given near continuous entanglement of members in court proceedings.

[23] While it counted among its members men like Thomas Spence and Dr William Hodgson (The Female Citizen) [24] who did advocate political rights and equality for women, the LCS appears to have been a male fraternity.

[27] In Belfast (where civic outrage had defeated plans to commission vessels for the Middle Passage) Equiano was hosted by the leading United Irishman, publisher of their Painite newspaper the Northern Star, Samuel Neilson.

[34] This was delivered, and (with considerable Church and aristocratic patronage) circulated widely, in a short three-penny pamphlet Village Politics: Addressed to All the Mechanics, Journeymen, and Day Labourers in Great Britain (1793).

Written by Hannah More as "Burke for Beginners", it is an imagined conversation in which a mason learns from a blacksmith that to declare for "Liberty and Equality" is to associate with "levellers" and "republicans", rogues who hide from him the simple truth that if everyone is digging potatoes on their half acre no one would be available to mend his broken spade.

But for having to address the "frantic" notions of "alarmists", it claimed that those who would "restore the House of Commons to a state of independence" would never even conceive "so wild and detestable a sentiment" as "the equalization of property".

It was sufficient to observe that it was from the "partial, unequal, and therefore inadequate Representation, together with the corrupt method in which Representatives are elected;" that "oppressive Taxes, unjust Laws, restrictions of Liberty, and wasting of the Public Money, have ensued.

In London, Hardy and Margarot's successor as chairman, John Baxter, undaunted, had drawn up addresses to "the friends of peace and parliamentary reform" and to "His Majesty" calling for an end to the war against France.

When the evidence running to four printed volumes failed to impress in the case of Hardy, the courts were unable to take seriously the charges against his associates: Horne Tooke jeered at the Attorney-General and clowned in the dock, and the Lord Chief Justice slept through the prosecution's summary against Thelwall.

The LCS bookseller John Smith provocatively renamed his shop The Pop Gun, and sold a pamphlet that explained that the government required three instruments: 1) soldiers ("by profession slaughterers"), 2) clergymen (who "hallow with the sanction of Divinity state robbery"), and 3) lawyers (who "thrive on misery" and are the "tyrants of property").

Invoking the presence of "a traitorous and detestable conspiracy ... formed for subverting the existing laws and constitution, and for introducing the system of anarchy and confusion which has so fatally prevailed in France", in May 1794 Parliament had allowed the Privy Council to direct detentions "any law or statute to the contrary notwithstanding"[51] In the summer of 1795, weariness with the war combined with failed harvests to trigger renewed protest—including an attack on the Prime Minister's residence in Downing Street.

The social historian G. D. H. Cole noted that only "the broadest-minded Unitarian could tolerate it, and the dissenters [the Non-Conformists] who till then had been consistent if timid recruits to the reform movement, were henceforth as horrified as the bishops themselves".

[19] Prominent among them was Richard Lee, a bookseller reputedly expelled from the LCS for refusing to stock Paine's newest work and yet subsequently prosecuted for publishing the regicidal handbill King Killing, and Edward Iliff's A summary of the duties of citizenship, written expressly for the members of the London Corresponding Society.

[58] The government's closure of peaceful avenues for reform agitation, and the prospect of French assistance, encouraged a radical rump to consider the threat implicit in the Copenhagen Fields address: to achieve universal male suffrage and annual parliaments by physical force.

[63] Presenting himself as an emissary of the United Irish executive in Dublin, Coigly met with leading members of the LCS, among them the Irishmen Edward Despard, the brothers Benjamin and John Binns, William Henry Hamilton,[64] and Alexander Galloway who had succeeded as the Society's chairman when, in protest against the violent turn in rhetoric, Francis Place resigned.

[66] Yet the disillusionment with France was widespread and by the time of Coigly's arrest the majority view was that the entire business of coordinating with the Directory and the United Irish was a destructive diversion.

The Central Committee of Delegates suspected that the government exaggerated the threat of a French invasion, but agreed that in the event members would join their local, government-approved, militias.

Together with parallel raids on corresponding societies in Birmingham and Manchester, a total of 28 persons were arrested, among them Thomas Evans, Edward Despard, John Bone, Benjamin Binns, Paul Le Maitre, Richard Hodgson and Alexander Galloway.

In The Making of the English Working Class (1963), in which he proposes to "rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand-loom weaver, [and] the 'utopian' artisan ... from the enormous condescension of posterity", E. P. Thompson identified the London Corresponding Society as a key incident in the emergence of a "working-class consciousness" in England.

[71] At the same time, it is suggested that the LCS demonstrated, as Hardy had wished, that the working class was "capable of civility, rational thought, informed debate, and peaceable assembly".