George Jacob Holyoake:

London 1892/1906

6th impression, third edition.

With his journal The Reasoner, which he published over fifteen years from 1848 onward, George J. Holyoake, was to become the most popular journalist of the Chartists’ moral force fraction. Of  major historic significance is  his foundation of the Secular movement. Holyoake was seven years Linton’s junior and a follower of Robert Owen’s co-operative movement. After the failure of their journal The Cause of the People in July 1848, Linton and Holyoake continued to join together in the editing of the Chartist paper, The Leader, which Kineton Parkes calls “one of the most notable of all the journalistic enterprises of the century. (...) When Mr. Linton devoted his energies to this matter, it was with the hope and intention of establishing a paper which should be at once the organ and nucleus of a republican party in England, and be open also for truthful accounts of republican views and republican doings throughout Europe.”

After a dispute on the political directions of this paper with other co-editors Linton retreated. But the struggle for control of the Leader also damaged the friendship between Linton and Holyoake. “They were both histrionic men, eager for fame. With comparable journalistic abilities they were locked in ill-concealed rivalry. Holyoake was a smoother, less impetous being than Linton, readier to ingratiate himself with influential personages.” (Smith)