however, an honest-hearted man, possessed of great courage and persevering in his conduct. In his usual demeanour he was mild and kind, and entertained kindly feelings towards every one whom he did not sincerely believe was the intentioned enemy of the working people; but when either by circumstances or his own morbid associations he felt the sense, he was apt to indulge in, of the evils and wrongs of mankind he was vehement in the extreme. He was half an Owenite, half a Hodgskinite, a thorough believer that accumulation of property in the hands of individuals was the cause of all the evils that existed.[1]
And again:
He is a tall, thin, rather melancholy man, in ill-health, to which he has long been subject, at times he is somewhat hypochondriacal; his is a spirit misplaced.[2]
Lovett was therefore a man of a not unfamiliar revolutionary type. His was an impulsive and sensitive spirit which felt the wrongs and sufferings of others as keenly as those inflicted upon himself, liable to the extremes of melancholy and of enthusiasm; an intellectual revolutionary differing from his more reckless colleagues in possessing an austere morality, unswerving honesty and courage, and a better insight into the difficulties and dangers which beset the path of the reformer. Lovett was no orator: sensitive and diffident, and endowed with but a weak voice, he did not shine in assemblies of any size. As adviser and administrator he was invaluable. He was a more competent guide than leader. He lacked the will to impose himself upon followers, and disdained to gain a precarious authority by exercising the arts of a demagogue, for which rôle, indeed, he lacked nearly all the qualifications. In fact Lovett carried his democratic ideas to the extreme of repudiating leadership altogether[3]—an idea which he perhaps owed to Hodgskin who, we are told by Place, was an anarchist. This, unfortunately, was neither good theory nor good practice. Good leadership was exactly what the working people wanted in those days. Leaders they had and Lovett was the best of them.
Henry Hetherington was eight years older than Lovett. He was a compositor by trade and had spent a little time abroad in Belgium. He, like Lovett, was educated in the radical and Owenite traditions, and was a thoroughgoing free-thinker. He is described by Place as an honest-hearted fellow who was
- ↑ Additional MSS. 27,791, p. 67.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 241.
- ↑ Linton (James Watson, p. 41) says Lovett was "impracticable."
