Irish Chartist leader, publisher of the Northern Star and organiser of the 1848 Kennington Common meeting
Born in 1796 into a prominent Irish Protestant family in County Cork, he was elected MP for County Cork as a Repeal candidate in 1832 and in 1837 founded the Northern Star at Leeds, which became the voice of Chartism. Touring mass meetings in the north of England, he became the movement's foremost leader and was sentenced to 18 months in 1840. In 1846 he founded the Chartist Cooperative Land Company to settle workers on smallholdings. Elected MP for Nottingham in 1847, he organised the Kennington Common meeting of April 1848 and presented a petition said to bear six million signatures, but when the procession was ruled illegal he asked the crowd to disperse; a Commons committee counted fewer than two million genuine signatures. After striking fellow MPs in 1852 he was confined to an asylum, and he died in London in 1855.
Career timeline
- 1832–1835MP for County Cork
- 1837Founded the Northern Star
- 1846Founded the Chartist Cooperative Land Company
- 1847–1852MP for Nottingham
- 1848Kennington Common meeting and petition
Irish writer sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour for “gross indecency”
Having sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel in 1895, he was himself prosecuted under section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.
A writer and playwright born to Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin, who read classics at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford. A central figure of Aestheticism, he wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and became London’s leading dramatist with society comedies such as The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). After his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry, father of his lover Lord Alfred Douglas, collapsed, he was sentenced in 1895 to two years’ hard labour for “gross indecency”. On release he left Britain, lived impoverished in France as “Sebastian Melmoth” and died of meningitis in Paris in 1900. He was posthumously pardoned in 2017.
Irish playwright, the leading pamphleteer of the Fabian Society and 1925 Nobel laureate in literature
Joining the Fabian Society in 1884, he wrote its first manifesto and edited Fabian Essays in Socialism, becoming the leading voice of gradualist socialism.
A playwright and critic born in Dublin who moved to London in 1876. Converted to socialism by Henry George and Marx, he joined the Fabian Society in 1884 and became the voice of its gradualism: achieving socialism by permeating parliament and the existing parties. He wrote more than sixty plays, including Arms and the Man, Pygmalion and Saint Joan, and won the 1925 Nobel Prize in Literature. He condemned both sides in the First World War, and in later life praised Mussolini and Stalin and came to favour dictatorship. He advocated eugenics. He died aged 94 in 1950.
Irish scholar of Middle East international politics and South Yemen
His 1985 LSE thesis on the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen and the 1990 book built on it are the standard study cited when assessing the South Yemeni socialist state's achievements and limits.
Simon Frederick Peter Halliday (1946–2010) was an Irish writer and scholar of international relations and the Middle East, born in Dublin. He read PPE at Queen's College, Oxford, took an MSc in Middle East politics at SOAS, and sat on the New Left Review editorial board from 1969 to 1983. His 1985 LSE doctorate on South Yemen's foreign relations became the standard study of the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, and he taught international relations at the LSE, as professor from 1985 until 2008.
Career timeline
- 1967Graduated in PPE from Queen's College, Oxford
- 1969Took an MSc in Middle East politics at SOAS, University of London
- 1969–1983Member of the New Left Review editorial board
- 1973–1985Fellow of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam and Washington
- 1974Published his first major book, Arabia Without Sultans
- 1985Awarded his LSE doctorate on South Yemen's foreign policy
- 1985–2008Professor of International Relations at the LSE
- 1990Published Revolution and Foreign Policy: The Case of South Yemen, 1967–1987
- 2002Elected a fellow of the British Academy
