Gravener Henson [SEP] date of death
Gravener Henson
John Gravener Henson, (1785 – 15 November 1852) was a workers' leader from Nottingham, England, and a historian of the framework knitters. E. P. Thompson saw him as one of three outstanding figures in the early English working-class movement.
Early life.
Henson was born in Nottingham in 1785, the son of James Henson and Mary, née Gravener. The only hint of his religious sympathies occurs in a brief acknowledgement to the Wesleyan sect in his writings, which might indicate that
E. P. Thompson thought that because Gravener Henson was involved in all the workers' activities of the time, he was most likely involved with Luddism, and that the roles of machine-breaker and Parliamentary petitioner were not incompatible. R. A. Church and S. D. Chapman, however, felt that the two roles could not have coexisted, and that Henson stood for the more sophisticated approach of the urban radicals, contrasting it with the cruder behaviour of their rural cousins, and that Nottingham, unlike the countryside around it, was