David Goodway

He has also written widely about writers in the British left libertarian tradition, such as William Morris, Alex Comfort, Herbert Read, George Orwell, Colin Ward and Maurice Brinton - notably in his book Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward. In 2015, he became a member of the Friends of Freedom Press Ltd, which safeguards the interest of the anarchist publisher the Freedom Press. He wrote an appreciation of the anarchist journal Freedom when it stopped regular publication after almost 130 years.

Goodway has had a lifelong engagement with literature and in 1969 was a founder member of the Powys Society, which promotes the appreciation and study particularly of John Cowper Powys. He has edited the correspondence between Powys and the American anarchist Emma Goldman.

David Goodway (born 1942) is a British historian and a respected international authority on Chartism and on anarchism and libertarian socialism.

Goodway was born in the English Midlands town of Rugby in 1942. He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. His doctoral thesis was supervised by the renowned historian Eric Hobsbawm and formed the basis of his first book on the history of Chartism in London, London Chartism, an acknowledged classic work on the subject. He has had a long-running interest in the Chartist George Julian Harney and discovered that a considerable portion of Harney's personal library is held at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. He taught at the University of Leeds from 1969 to 2005.