Foundation Footnote: John De Morgan

Dated 1876, it shows some artfully posed rioters digging up the fences used to enclose Plumstead Common, then a developing town on the edge of London. I was told that the riot's leader was John De Morgan. Over the last twenty years I have been tracking down his life. A local journalist said of him that he "passed meteor like through our atmosphere but he was undoubtedly a remarkable man". Historians have variously described him as a "swashbuckling demagogue", a "democrat-messiah", an "adventurer", even a Victorian "eco-warrior".

It was possible to find out something about him in the 1870s, mostly in brief paragraphs and short footnotes, but his personal history was difficult to unravel, particularly after he went to the United States in 1880. Fascination, stubbornness and the internet mean that I have been able to bring him out of the footnotes, at least for his adult life, and I am now working on an extended biographical sketch.

He passed meteor like through our atmosphere but he was undoubtedly a remarkable man.

Born in Ireland in 1848 as John Francis Morgan, he claimed to have been involved in radical activities from the age of ten and to have studied at Cambridge. Returning to Ireland as John De Morgan, he became an elocution teacher and lecturer, but in 1872, as Citizen De Morgan, he established the Cork branch of Marx's International Working Men's Association. After a full-scale riot at a meeting he was sacked from his job. He fled to England to take up the life of a professional agitator, helping to set up the short-lived National Republican Brotherhood.

In 1875 he entered the two radical movements that were to make his national reputation. One was the cause of the Tichborne Claimant, but he first came to fame leading major demonstrations against the sale of urban common land to building speculators. He established the Commons Protection League and was involved in more than a dozen campaigns around England, two of which, Plumstead and Selston Commons, led to him being jailed. He also founded the Tichborne Propaganda Release Union and organised a notorious but unsuccessful march on the House of Commons on the Claimant's behalf.

During this period he attended hundreds of meetings, often before very large crowds, and gained a reputation as a powerful orator, if a somewhat shady character. He tried to support himself by journalism, for example as editor of the splendidly titled People's Advocate and National Vindicator of Right vs Wrong, but had to fall back on teaching and selling, at one stage becoming the agent for Rippingille's Patent Liquid Fuel.

Eventually he moved away from London and was elected to the Leeds School Board in 1879. An inveterate establisher of political organisations, he attempted to set up a national "people's party" under the banner of the People's Political Union. Always interested in standing for Parliament, he tried unsuccessfully to become a candidate alongside Gladstone in Leeds.

He appears, though, to have been overwhelmed by the difficulties of the professional agitator's life, and suddenly, tired, broke and despondent, he emigrated to the United States in 1880. He left behind his wife and children; the Mrs De Morgan he travelled with, actually Mary Schofield, was to live with him for the rest of his life.

In New York he resumed his life as a radical. He was appointed editor of House and Home, a weekly radical journal, and was part of the emerging populist movement, involved in an early, anti-monopolist People's Party. Paper and party folded in 1884 and for a while De Morgan disappeared from public view.

In 1887 he relaunched himself as a writer of dime novels, at first producing Rider Haggard parodies. He became hugely prolific in popular series such as Golden Hours, Brave and Bold and Boys of Liberty. The stories were mostly for the adolescent market and ranged from pseudo science fiction to colonial and American revolutionary war tales and straight adventure. It has been claimed that he influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs's development of Tarzan.

He kept up some political interests, generally on the fringes of the Democratic party, and twice stood unsuccessfully for office on the ticket of the land-tax reformer Henry George. He lived his whole American life on Staten Island, where he fought for a free ferry, a World's Fair and the independence of the island from New York. Always suspicious of mainstream parties, he retained a degree of independence and was much attracted to the fusion politics of the late 1890s, campaigning for the New York Citizens' Union. In 1901 he was appointed a Deputy Tax Receiver, a reward for his political service.

De Morgan now moved away from the dime novels, though his stories went on being published for many years and have recently been revived. He did occasional writing and journalism but seems to have left politics. He died on 1 May 1926, leaving one daughter by his American relationship.