A lot of work goes into writing essays on this site and I thoroughly enjoy it. I’m currently working an essay on Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831) which will, when finished, I predict, total more than 6,000 words. Indeed, the average word count for a single essay now goes up to at least 5,000 words (such was the case with my essay on Juana Manso’s Mistérios del Plata).

Sometimes, however, I like to write shorter things. Hitherto, this has mainly been notes I’ve made on paper while reading a novel or a play or a biography. So I’ve decided to start a new ‘series’ on this website (which will also allow me to post more frequently):

Notes from the Library

It will be filled with short reflections on stuff I’ve read, written in a more informal style. So here we go with a few brief comments on the life of Thomas Cooper, a Chartist activist from Gainsborough who during the 1870s wrote an autobiography which he titled The Life of Thomas Cooper written by Himself, published by Hodder and Stoughton and which gives us a glimpse into this remarkable man’s work.

One of the things that struck me whilst reading his autobiography was his honesty at the outset as he dealt with the problems inherent in writing an autobiography:

“Coleridge (in his “Literaria Biographia”) thinks it “probably that all thoughts are in themselves perishable; and that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive it would only require a different and apportioned organization—the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial—to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence.”[1]

How amazing it would be, Cooper mused, if we could trace our every single thought over our whole lifetimes. Yet he knew that such a thing wasn’t possible and that autobiographies shouldn’t necessarily be relied on to tell the whole truth, and this was one such question which bothered him as an autobiographer when he remarked:

What were the exact motives for the performance of certain actions in our lives, we often cannot state unerringly in our later years. It is not simply because memory fails that we cannot give the veritable statement; but because the moral and intellectual man has changed. We no longer think and feel as we thought and felt so many years ago; and, perhaps, we wonder that we did some things and spoke some words we did and spake at certain times. We are inclined to set it down that our motives then were what they would be now. We see the past, as it were, through a false glass; and cannot represent it to ourselves otherwise than as something like the present.[2]

What a wonderful quotation!

“We see the past, as it were, through a false glass”—how many of us, if tasked with writing our autobiographies, would have to concur with Cooper’s sentiment. A deeply religious man, he is of course drawing upon Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians who said

“For now we see through a glass darkly” (1 Corinthians 13: 12 King James Version)

The ‘glass’, in both Saint Paul’s and Cooper’s writings being, of course, a mirror rather than a drinking glass. Saint Paul said that though he understands the ways of God only imperfectly at present, but that he will eventually come into full knowledge of God:

“…but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.  And now stays faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (Ibid).

What hope does Cooper have, however, for fully knowing himself? Will we ever truly know ourselves? He cannot, of course; he can only hope for truthfulness and completeness in what he writes, and this he promises the reader.

Of course, none of this is to say that an autobiography aims to tell lies. The word ‘autobiography’—originally coined by Robert Southey in 1809—describes

“A kind of narrative that aspires truthfully to relate the story of an individual life” (emphasis added).[3]

Cooper fulfils the aspiration admirably; his autobiography is a rich treasure for anyone studying the life of a man who was an inspiration for many others in his own lifetime.

References

[1] Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper written by Himself (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), 2.

[2] Cooper, 2–3.

[3] David Carlson, ‘Autobiography’, in Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History, ed. by Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann (London: Routledge, 2009), 175–191 (175).