David Goodway (born 1942) is a Britishhistorian and a respected international authority onChartism and onanarchism andlibertarian socialism.

Goodway was born in the English Midlands town ofRugby in September 1942. He studiedPhilosophy, Politics and Economics atCorpus Christi College, Oxford.^[1] His doctoral thesis was supervised by the renowned historianEric 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 ChartistGeorge Julian Harney and discovered that a considerable portion of Harney's personal library is held atVanderbilt University inTennessee.^[2][3] He taught at theUniversity of Leeds from 1969 to 2005.^[4]

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 ofJohn Cowper Powys.^[5] He has edited the correspondence between Powys and the American anarchistEmma Goldman.^[6]

He has also written widely about writers in the Britishleft libertarian tradition, such asWilliam Morris,Alex Comfort,Herbert Read,George Orwell,Colin Ward andMaurice Brinton - notably in his bookAnarchist 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,^[7] which safeguards the interest of the anarchist publisher theFreedom Press. He wrote an appreciation of the anarchist journalFreedom when it stopped regular publication after almost 130 years.^[8]

• London Chartism, 1838–1848 (1982)
• For Anarchism: History, Theory, and Practice (editor) (1989)
• Against Power and Death: The Anarchist Articles and Pamphlets of Alex Comfort (editor)(1994)
• A One-Man Manifesto and Other Writings for Freedom Press by Herbert Read (editor) (1994)
• Herbert Read Reassessed (editor) (1998)
• Talking Anarchy (withColin Ward) (2003, 2nd edition 2014)
• For Workers' Power: The Selected Writings of Maurice Brinton (editor) (2004, 2nd edition 2020)
• Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (2006, 2nd edition 2012)
• The Letters of John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman (editor) (2007)
• Nicolas Walter,The Anarchist Past and Other Essays (editor) (2007)
• John Cowper Powys, The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant and Other Essays (editor) (2008)
• Nicolas Walter,Damned Fools in Utopia and Other Writings on Anarchism and War Resistance (editor) (2011)
• The Real History of Chartism: or eight fallacies about the Chartist movement (2013)
• George Julian Harney,The Chartists were Right: selections from the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 1890-97 (editor) (2014)
• G.D.H. Cole,Towards a Libertarian Socialism: reflections on the British Labour Party and European working-class movements (editor) (2021)

• Website including unpublished writings by David Goodway