In What I Remember (1888) Thomas Adolphus Trollope describes John Doherty as "a furious radical." Francis Place recalls him as "a very extraordinary, rigid, intolerant, wrong-headed, persevering man," while Major General Bouverie reported to the Home Office how "The minds of the operatives are worked up to a fresh state of excitement by the weekly Tracts ... written by a man of the name of Doherty.... [A] clever man and ... decidedly a very mischievous one." Doherty's mischief was achieved in several spheres. He was a trade-union activist and leader, a radical printer and bookseller, and a radical journalist who from 1828 through 1834 edited seven periodicals concerned primarily with factory reform and trade-union organization.

He was born in Buncrana, County Donegal, sometime in 1798 or close to that date. At the age of ten he started work in a cotton mill in Buncrana. He was a cotton spinner in Larne, near Belfast, before...