Charles Pearson (4 October 1793 – 14 September 1862) was a British lawyer and politician. He was solicitor to the

City of London The City of London, also known as ''the City'', is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county and Districts of England, local government district with City status in the United Kingdom, city status in England. It is the Old town, his ...

, a reforming campaigner, and – briefly –

Liberal Party The Liberal Party is any of many political parties around the world. The meaning of ''liberal'' varies around the world, ranging from liberal conservatism on the right to social liberalism on the left. For example, while the political systems ...

Member of Parliament for

Lambeth Lambeth () is a district in South London, England, which today also gives its name to the (much larger) London Borough of Lambeth. Lambeth itself was an ancient parish in the county of Surrey. It is situated 1 mile (1.6 km) south of Charin ...

. He campaigned against corruption in

jury selection Jury selection is the selection of the people who will serve on a jury during a jury trial. The group of potential jurors (the "jury pool,” also known as the ''venire'') is first selected from among the community using a reasonably random metho ...

, for penal reform, for the abolition of

capital punishment Capital punishment, also known as the death penalty and formerly called judicial homicide, is the state-sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for actual or supposed misconduct. The sentence (law), sentence ordering that an offender b ...

, and for

universal suffrage Universal suffrage or universal franchise ensures the right to vote for as many people bound by a government's laws as possible, as supported by the " one person, one vote" principle. For many, the term universal suffrage assumes the exclusion ...

. Pearson used his influence as City Solicitor to promote improvements to transport communications. Initially, he proposed a central railway station for the City, accessed by tunnel, that would be used by multiple railway companies enabling workers to commute to the City from further away. When this plan was rejected, Pearson promoted an underground railway connecting the capital's northern termini. The resulting

Metropolitan Railway The Metropolitan Railway (also known as the Met) was a passenger and goods railway that served London from 1863 to 1933, its main line heading north-west from the capital's financial heart in the City to what were to become the Middlesex su ...

was the first underground railway in the world and led to the development of the extensive

London Underground The London Underground (also known simply as the Underground or as the Tube) is a rapid transit system serving Greater London and some parts of the adjacent home counties of Buckinghamshire, Essex and Hertfordshire in England. The Undergro ...

network and the rapid expansion of the capital.

Early life

Pearson was born on 4 October 1793 at 25 Clement's Lane in the City of London, the son of Thomas Pearson, an

upholsterer Upholstery is the work of providing furniture, especially chair, seats, with padding, Spring (device), springs, webbing, and textile, fabric or leather covers. The word also refers to the materials used to upholster something. ''Upholstery'' com ...

and feather merchant, and his wife Sarah. Robbins 2004. After education in

Eastbourne Eastbourne () is a town and seaside resort in East Sussex, on the south coast of England, east of Brighton and south of London. It is also a non-metropolitan district, local government district with Borough status in the United Kingdom, bor ...

, he was apprenticed to his father but instead studied law and qualified as a

solicitor A solicitor is a lawyer who traditionally deals with most of the legal matters in some jurisdictions. A person must have legally defined qualifications, which vary from one jurisdiction to another, to be described as a solicitor and enabled to p ...

in 1816. Wolmar 2004, p. 8. In 1817, he was released from his

indenture An indenture is a legal contract that reflects an agreement between two parties. Although the term is most familiarly used to refer to a labor contract between an employer and a laborer with an indentured servant status, historically indentures we ...

by the Haberdashers' Company and married Mary Martha Dutton. The couple had one child, Mary Dutton Pearson, born in 1820.

City career and campaigning

In 1817, Pearson was elected a councilman of the

City of London Corporation The City of London Corporation, officially and legally the Mayor and Commonalty and Citizens of the City of London, is the local authority of the City of London, the historic centre of London and the location of much of the United Kingdom's f ...

for

Bishopsgate Bishopsgate was one of the eastern gates in London's former defensive wall. The gate's name is traditionally attributed to Earconwald, who was Bishop of London in the 7th century. It was first built in Roman times and marked the beginning o ...

ward and served in that role from 1817 to 1820 and from 1830 to 1836 as well. He served as chairman of the City board of health from 1831 to 1833. In 1839, he gave up his extensive private practice and was appointed City Solicitor, holding that office until his death.Pearson's income in the late 1830s was in excess of £2,400 and his annual income as City Solicitor in the early 1840s was approximately £2,110 – Pearson 1844, pp. 200-201. Despite his comfortable upbringing and his high social status, Pearson was a radical, and throughout his life he fought a number of campaigns on progressive and reforming issues including the removal from the Monument inscription blaming the

Great Fire of London The Great Fire of London was a major conflagration that swept through central London from Sunday 2 September to Wednesday 5 September 1666, gutting the medieval City of London inside the old London Wall, Roman city wall, while also extendi ...

Catholics The Catholic Church (), also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.27 to 1.41 billion baptized Catholics worldwide as of 2025. It is among the world's oldest and largest international institut ...

, the abolition of packed special

jury A jury is a sworn body of people (jurors) convened to hear evidence, make Question of fact, findings of fact, and render an impartiality, impartial verdict officially submitted to them by a court, or to set a sentence (law), penalty or Judgmen ...

lists for political trials, and the overturning of the ban on

Jew Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, religion, and community are highly inte ...

s becoming brokers in the City. Wolmar 2004, p. 17. Pearson 1844, pp. 26-27. Pearson was in favour of the disestablishment of the

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the State religion#State churches, established List of Christian denominations, Christian church in England and the Crown Dependencies. It is the mother church of the Anglicanism, Anglican Christian tradition, ...

and opposed

. Politically, he supported

and electoral reform to balance the sizes of parliamentary constituencies. He unsuccessfully attempted to break the local monopolies developed by the gas companies, calling for the distribution pipework to be owned collectively by the consumers. Pearson was a Liberal and was elected at the 1847 general election as a Member of Parliament for

. Craig 1989, p. 12. His campaign was prompted by a desire to promote his penal reform campaign in parliament. He resigned his seat in 1850 thorough the mechanism of accepting the

Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds The Chiltern Hundreds is an ancient administrative area in Buckinghamshire, England, composed of three ancient hundreds and lying partially within the Chiltern Hills. "Taking the Chiltern Hundreds" refers to one of the legal fictions used to ef ...

Campaigning for an underground railway

Recognising the increasing congestion in the City and its rapidly growing

suburb A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan areas jobs are located with some being predominantly residential. They can either be denser or less densely populated ...

s, Pearson published a pamphlet in 1845 calling for the construction of an underground railway through the Fleet valley to Farringdon. The proposed railway would have been an atmospheric railway with trains pushed through tunnels by compressed air. Although the proposal was ridiculed and came to nothing (and would almost certainly have failed if it had been built, due to the shortcomings of the technology proposed), Pearson continued to lobby for a variety of railway schemes throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Harter 2005, p. 503. Proposed Central Railway Terminus

In 1846, Pearson proposed with the support of the City Corporation a central railway station for London located in Farringdon that was estimated to cost £1 million (approximately £ today). The station, to be shared by multiple railway companies, was to be approached from the north in a covered cutting wide. Pearson's aim in promoting this plan was to facilitate the improvement of the social conditions of City workers by enabling them to commute into London on cheap trains from new residential developments of good quality, cheap homes built outside the capital. The 1846 Royal Commission on Metropolitan Railway Termini rejected the proposal, preferring to confirm a limit around the centre of the capital into which no new railway lines could be extended. In 1854, a select committee was set up to examine a number of new proposals for railways in London. Pearson made a proposal for a railway connecting the London Termini and presented as evidence the first survey of traffic coming into London which demonstrated the high level of congestion caused by the huge number of carts, cabs and omnibuses filling the roads. Wolmar 2004, p. 22. Pearson's commentary on this was that:

the overcrowding of the city is caused, first by the natural increase in the population and area of the surrounding district; secondly, by the influx of provincial passengers by the great railways North of London, and the obstruction experienced in the streets by omnibuses and cabs coming from their distant stations, to bring the provincial travellers to and from the heart of the city. I point next to the vast increase of what I may term the migratory population, the population of the city who now oscillate between the country and the city, who leave the City of London every afternoon and return every morning.Commons Select Committee on Metropolitan Communications, 1854-5 – quoted in Wolmar 2004, p. 22.

Many of the proposed schemes were rejected, but the Commission did recommend that a railway be constructed linking the termini with the docks and the

General Post Office The General Post Office (GPO) was the state postal system and telecommunications carrier of the United Kingdom until 1969. Established in England in the 17th century, the GPO was a state monopoly covering the dispatch of items from a specific ...

at St. Martin's Le Grand. A

private bill Proposed bills are often categorized into public bills and private bills. A public bill is a proposed law which would apply to everyone within its jurisdiction. A private bill is a proposal for a law affecting only a single person, group, or are ...

for the

between Praed Street in

Paddington Paddington is an area in the City of Westminster, in central London, England. A medieval parish then a metropolitan borough of the County of London, it was integrated with Westminster and Greater London in 1965. Paddington station, designed b ...

and Farringdon received assent on 7 August 1854. Although not a director or significant

shareholder A shareholder (in the United States often referred to as stockholder) of corporate stock refers to an individual or legal entity (such as another corporation, a body politic, a trust or partnership) that is registered by the corporation as the ...

of the new company,Pearson owned only fifty shares in the Metropolitan Railway – Wolmar 2004, p. 32. Pearson continued to promote the project over the next few years and use his influence to help the company raise the £1 million of capital needed for the construction of the line. He issued a pamphlet, ''A twenty minutes letter to the citizens of London, in favour of the Metropolitan Railway and City Station'', encouraging investment and he even persuaded the City of London to invest on the basis that the railway would alleviate the City's congestion problems. Wolmar 2004, p. 32. Once the railway was in operation, the City sold its shares at a profit. Wolmar 2004, pp. 30–32. By 1860, the funds had been collected and the final route decided. Work on the railway started; taking less than three years to excavate through some of the worst

slum A slum is a highly populated Urban area, urban residential area consisting of densely packed housing units of weak build quality and often associated with poverty. The infrastructure in slums is often deteriorated or incomplete, and they are p ...

s of Victorian London and under some of the busiest streets. Pearson died of dropsy on 14 September 1862 at his home at West Hill,

Wandsworth Wandsworth Town () is a district of south London, within the London Borough of Wandsworth southwest of Charing Cross. The area is identified in the London Plan as one of 35 major centres in Greater London. Toponymy Wandsworth takes its name ...

, and did not live to see the opening of the Metropolitan Railway on 10 January 1863. He had refused the offer of a reward from the grateful railway company, Wolmar 2004, p. 40. but, shortly after the railway's opening, his widow was granted an annuity of £250 per year. He was buried at West Norwood Cemetery on 23 September 1862.

Legacy

Transport writer

Christian Wolmar Christian Tage Forter Wolmar (born 3 August 1949) is a British journalist, author, railway historian and Labour Party campaigner. Wolmar 2004, pp. 8-9. Michael Robbins considers that "without Pearson's constant advocacy–his gadfly conduct, which he managed to combine with holding high office in the City of London–the Metropolitan Railway, the first of its kind in the world, and the nucleus of London's underground system, could not have come into existence when it did." When it opened, the Metropolitan Railway had a significant impact on street traffic, particularly cabs and omnibuses but these quickly recovered to near their former levels, despite the Metropolitan Railway also carrying over 9 million passengers in its first year of operation. Simmons 2002, p. 282. The Metropolitan Railway and the network of underground lines that grew from it was the first in the world and the idea was not adopted elsewhere until 1896 when the

Budapest Metro The Budapest Metro (, ) is the rapid transit system in the Hungary, Hungarian capital Budapest. Opened in 1896, it is the world's second oldest electrified underground railway after the City and South London Railway of 1890, now part of the Lon ...

and the Glasgow Subway were both opened. Without Pearson's promotion of the idea of an underground railway when he did it is possible that transport developments at the end of the 19th century developments, such as electric trams and vehicles powered by

internal combustion engine An internal combustion engine (ICE or IC engine) is a heat engine in which the combustion of a fuel occurs with an oxidizer (usually air) in a combustion chamber that is an integral part of the working fluid flow circuit. In an internal comb ...

s, might have meant the underground solution was ignored. Wolmar 2004, p. 9. The expansion of the capital that the underground network and its suburban surface extensions enabled was considerable and rapid and helped the population of what is now

Greater London Greater London is an administrative area in England, coterminous with the London region, containing most of the continuous urban area of London. It contains 33 local government districts: the 32 London boroughs, which form a Ceremonial count ...

to increase from 3,094,391 in 1861 to 6,226,494 in 1901.1861 data – 1861 Census: England and Wales. 1901 data – 1911 Census: England and Wales. Recompiled in

References

Bibliography

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External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pearson, Charles 1793 births 1862 deaths British railway pioneers People associated with transport in London Liberal Party (UK) MPs for English constituencies UK MPs 1847–1852 History of the London Underground Burials at West Norwood Cemetery Deaths from edema 19th-century English businesspeople