Joseph Parkes

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Joseph Parkes (22 January 1796-11 August 1865) was an English political reformer.

Born in Warwick, in Unitarian Whig circles, Parkes was educated at Warwick grammar school, Dr Charles Burney's college in Greenwich and Glasgow university. Moving to London in 1817, Parkes developed an association with the Philosophical Radicals. In 1822 he established a Birmingham solicitor's practice specializing in election law. In 1824 he married Elizabeth Rayner, the granddaughter of Joseph Priestley. Parkes was an advocate of legal reform (writing a History of the Court of Chancery in 1828) and active in the local efforts for parliamentary reform. Although he initially opposed the formation of the Birmingham Political Union, and remained less radical than Thomas Attwood, the BPU's founder, Parkes worked with it during the period of agitation for the Reform Act - acting in effect as an intermediary between radicals and whigs. In 1833 Henry Brougham appointed Parkes secretary of the commission on municipal corporations; he combined this work with a successful Westminster practice as a parliamentary solicitor. Co-proprietor of the Birmingham Journal from 1832 to 1844, Parkes also wrote leaders for the Morning Chronicle and Times. In 1847 ill-health prompted retirement to work on literary projects: a memoir of Sir Philip Francis, whom Parkes believed to have authored the Letters of Junius, was posthumously (1867) completed by Herman Merivale. Parkes died in London.