THE SOCIALISM WHICH first emerged in 19th century England was not an isolated phenomenon, but like all political movements had its roots in the past. Directly, it extended back to Chartism, and through this to Thomas Paine and his influential works, Rights of Man  and The Age of Reason.  Both books were censored under English law and anyone printing or selling them suffered imprisonment or transportation. 

Nevertheless, Paine’s works were still sold underground on a huge scale from the 1790s, when they were written, and through to the time of the Chartists. Ri ts of. Man was known as “the Chartists’ Bible.” And although Chartism and its direct aims died out, its ideals survived in the new field of socialism, influenced both by Marx and by Paine. 

Paine however was by no means the first or only 18th century radical either in politics or religion. Some would say the movement actively began with John fakes; others that Rousseau and his Social Contract  as being the original inspiration. Others point to the great influence, not only in France where it helped to aspire the French Revolution, of the group called the philosophes, and of Voltaire. Voltaire and Rousseau both came to England; and Jean-Paul Marat, when a young physician, lived here and proclaimed himself a follower of Wilkes. 

Actually in England some had started acting a century before. Those were the Levellers and Diggers of Cromwell’s time, and in particular John Lilburno, who in 1637 was tried and flogged for the distribution of what today we would call radical literature. “I am a free man, yea, a free-born citizen of England,” declared Lilhurne when brought before the Committee of Examination, and the literature of the Levellers poured out between the years 1645 and 1653. One of the writers, Richard Overton attacked not only the lack of a free press but suggested a Parliament freely elected by all men. Universal suffrage, no less! 

Early in the 18th century certain craftsmen and tradesmen were already banding themselves together to protect their interests. Tailors and weavers were particularly active in this way, and strikes were by no means unknown in the 18th century. As yet there were no Combination Laws to prevent this incipient form of trade union. 

That was lacking, and lacking almost entirely, was the average person’s right to any active intervention in Parliament. Very few had the vote, and none below a cert- ain income; while growing manufacturing towns, like Manchester, were still allowed no representation in Parliament at all. 

Freedom of the press and of speech wore the other major 18th century issues, and this was the basis of the notorious John Wilkes eruption and the”Wilkes and Liber- ty!” cry which soon echoed among crowds throughout England. Wilkes was Member of Parliament for Aylesbury He had an independent free spirit and disliked corruption in high places and at Court, and with his friend, the poet Charles Churchill, he started a journal called The North Briton,  which was a continual source of irritation to. the king and government. Wilkes was soon charged with “ceditious libel,” a censorship charge on which Thomas Paine read also later arraigned for writing Rights of Man. 

Wilkes did not wait for his trial: he took off for Paris as Paine did in similar circumstances some years later. After four years, however, Wilkes got tired of exile and announced his intention to return and stand for Parliament. Although he was arrested and tried for seditious libel, as expected, and incarcerated in the King’s Bench prison, he carried on from there by proxy a lively election campaign and was returned for Middlesex with an overwhelming majority. The government promptly declared his election was null and void. Two further elections were held, with the same result. After which the House of Commons announced that Wilkes’ rival candidate, who had polled only a few votes, was the new Member. 

All hell broke loose! “Wilkes and Liberty” crowds grew, and in spite of a military charge which killed some of them continued. Wilkes’ plight even stirred freedom- lovers across the Atlantic – the later architects of the American Revolution – who sent him letters of congratulation, hampers of food, and even live turtles. When released in 1770 he went on a triumphant tour, one of the towns he visited being Lewes in Sussex, where an Exciseman named Paine was living and working. Paine was already involved in Lewes parish affairs, sitting on the local Vestry which helped widows and orphans, and also attending meetings of the early form of Town Council. 

While in Lewes, Paine was persuaded by his fellow excisemen to write a pamphlet on their behalf, The Case of the Officers of Excise.  It was a clear plea for better wages, and it also set out certain principles about poverty and crime rarely made at that time. Ile who never was a hungered,” wrote Paine, “may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite….The rich, in ease, and affluence, may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait; but could they descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate….” 

Paine when he wrote his pamphlet was thirty-five years ago. He took the pamphlet to London and distributed it among Members of Parliament, and here met Benjamin Franklin, who had common scientific interests and gave him a letter of recommendation to his son-in-law in America. Paine’s long history as a supporter of the American Revolution, soon to break out, and of human and political rights, had begun. 

He was away thirteen years, in the meantime the radical movement in England grew. Wilkes in the end won his way back into Parliament and became not only an Alderman of the City of London but in 1774, the year Paine sailed for America, Lord Mayor. 

It was Wilkes who in 1776 put forward the first Motion in Parliament for a wider and more (steal representation. In 1780 a great protest meeting was held in Westminster Hall attended by Charles Fox, Wilkes, General John Burgoyne (the ‘Gentlemanly Johnny’ of Shaw’s play, The Devil’s Disciple, who after his army service in America became a very liberal M.P.) and other reformists demanding annual parliaments(they we then elected only every seven years) and universal suffrage. The same year a follower of Wilkes and later Paine, the radical parson, John Horne Tooke, helped to found the Constitutional Society. This was to revive and become an active element in the radical politics of the 1790s, when Paine came back to England and wrote Rights of ‘an in answer to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution. Similar societies proliferated and one of them, the London Corresponding Society, ran the first largely working-class society, led by a shoemaker, Thomas Hardy. 

This radical activity was very much linked with the dissenting movements in religion, and also the scientific discoveries which came in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. A Unitarian chapel was opened.in London in 1774,  with Franklin among the attenders. Another Unitarian present was Dr.Joeeph Priestley, the great economist and discoverer of oxygen, who was an active writer on liberty as well as chemistry and theology. In Loren, Paine had married into a Unitarian family. Radicalism spread to the dissenters because like the Catholics they had no political rights in the state; and the fight for their rights and civil liberties irrespective of religion, was a part of the 18th century Enlightenment and rebellion. 

In France it had been led by Voltaire, and the philosophes whom Wilkes knew in Paris included D’Alembert and Cideret, the editors of the great Encyclopedia of human knowledge which was one of the wonders of 18th century learning. Years later, the bookseller and writer Richard Carlile published Diderot as well as Paine, and served long terms of imprisonment for doing so. 

Rationalism was part of the Enlightenment, and when Paine wrote The Age of Reason he was only putting into his own original form the criticism of the bible and organised religion which had been going on increasingly throughout the century. “All natural institutions of Churches,” wrote Paine, “….appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and monopolise power and profit.” He thus almost literally anticipated Marx’s later famous phrase about religion being the opium of the people. 

Another rather radical society to which Priestley belonged was the Lunar Society of the Midlands, a kind of middle—class club formed partly of manufacturers such as the potters Josiah Wedgwood and Matthew Boulton, and the scientists and writers such as James Watt, inventor of the steam engine, and Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of the evolutionist Charles Darwin. At this time there was still hope that the Industrial Revolution might be used to benefit the workers as well as the management. 

William Godwin, author of Political Justice  (1798), actually believed that social justice would eradicate all crime. Dr. Richard. Price was another of this school, believing in the ‘perfectibility’ of man. It was his discourse hailing the French Revolution which sparked off Burke’s bitter rejoinder, “Reflections on the Revolution in France” or “Reflections on Behalf of the English Government,” as they might be called: for Burke received a pension for this work. Price was also an economist of long standing, whose Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty  had been a bestseller in 1776. He was well-known in America, where he received an Honorary Degree alongside George Washington. 

Dr. John Jebb, who died in 1786, was another Unitarian founder of English radicalism. “Equal representation, sessional Parliaments and the universal right of suffrage, are alone worthy of an Englishman’s regard,” he wrote. He was a real revolutionist, believing that reform would not come through Parliament but through “the active energy of the people.” Another was Major John Cartwright, who ruined his naval career by refusing to fight the Americans. 

The political principles at the base of the radical societies came largely from Rousseau. “It is contrary to the law of nature,” Rousseau had written, “that the privileged few should gorge themselves with superfluities, while the starving multi- tude are in want of the bare necessities of life.” This was in 1755, in a work called A Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.  A few years later his Social Contract  opened with a cry that went around the world: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” 

Godwin’s Political Justice  attacked government, imprisonments and transportations, private property and organised religion, but escaped suppression because it cost three guineas, which the government believed was far too dear for the book to reach the lower classes. Rights of Man sold cheaply, and reprinted by the revolutionary societies, was more dangerous. So was Paine’s practical analysis of the economical possibilities  of equality, education, the unionisation of workers and a welfare state. The government launched a campaign of vilification against Paine and in his absence (he had gone to France to take a seat in the National Convention) tried him for seditious libel, and won.

In 1794 they instigated trials for treason against Horne Tooke, Holcroft, Hardy, Cartwright and eight others. In this case they failed for lack of evidence. But next year the government under Pitt repealed Habeas Corpus and soon afterwards the new Combination Laws prevented any congregations of workers, or indeed ordinary people, whatsoever. England became virtually a police state. 

The amazing thing is that despite this, the movement continued to flourish underground. So did the subversive literature. Pig’s Meat  was the title of one of the workers’ journals — one of many to describe lampoons on Burke’s notorious reference to the “swinish multitude” in his Reflections.  Over a century later Bernard Shaw wrote in his Preface to Man and Superman:  “Tom Paine has triumphed over Edmund Burke, and the swine are now courted electors.” 

Another democratic journal was Politics for the People, and yet another Tribune: a name resurrected by Aneurin Bevan and Jennie Lee when they founded the journal for which many left-wing politicians write today.  Even the radical poet, Robert Burns,’ The Tree of Liberty, took its title from a piece of the same name written by Paine. 

Burns was not the only poet to echo popular radical ideas. Much of William Blake’s elaborate poetic symbolism was invented as a cover for his radical ideas when these became subject to prosecution. And in the next generation Byron and Shelley, who was the son-in-law of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Women – carried on the radical tradition. “That great and good man”was Bhelley’s description of Paine, at a time when Paine was still reviled in his native country. 

What we owe to Paine, and those who kept his works in circulation in spite of per- secution, is incalculable. He first set working men on the way to genuine participation in government, and the poor on the path to the welfare state. He suggested family allowances, old age pensions, and set out economic schedules for these things. He attacked slavery almost on setting foot in America, almost a century before Lincoln, and attacked war as an outmoded form of settling international disputes. “The conquerors and the conquered are generally ruined alike.” 

All disputes, he said, should be settled by arbitration treaties. It was this idea or Paine’s that consciously inspired President Woodrow Wilson when he founded the League of Nations. The United Nations today is inherited from Paine’s suggestion. 

Basically, like all the greatest writers on liberty, Paine was a humanitarian. “My country is the world and my religion is to do good,” he wrote, and it is one of the inscriptions on the base of his statue in his native Thetford. Freedom, in Paine’s view, could not be dissociated from political morality, and he sounded a warning note which still carries a message: 

“He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression…”

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(Arising out of the last TPS Bulletin, Summer 1977)

AS ONE OF Paine’s biographers who did point out not only the dangers of the Excise service through public dislike and evasion of the duties (in particular the tea duties), and also the importance of Paine’s continued association with George Lewis Scott in showing his dismissal was not considered as on serious grounds, I welcome George Hindmarches article and most valuable further discoveries. They support my own theory, based also upon research into the Lewes parish records and the New Shoreham by-election of 1770, that Paine’s political and sociological attitudes were already well-formed before he went to America. The revelation of the widespread and semi-official nature of his attempts at Excise reform reinforces this. The evidence is partly circumstantial, but I am sure Mr. Hindmarch is right in his general thesis. 

I would disagree with him to some extent on the nature of the English so-called “mob” riots of the 18th century. Hogarth is not a reliable reflector, for his was, like Draohnsonla, a highly conservative and pro-establishment political point of view, as his savage anti-Wilkes cartoons demonstrate. Paine would have got a far fairer view of the North Briton controversy from the local Lewes journal, and must have been personally associated with Wilkes’ lawyer, Sergeant Glynn, in the New Shoreham election. It is even possible he met Wilkes when Wilkes was received with enthusiasm in Lewes on his tour the same year. More research, I believe, is still possible here into Paine’s English life generally. 

As for the Gordon Riots of 1780, the exhaustive researches of Professor George Rude (Paris and London in the 18th Century: Studies in Popular Protest) have demonstrated clearly that these were not only anti-Catholic but also political. No lives were taken by the rioters, and some of the houses between those of politically disliked non-Catholics such as Lord Mansfield. The burning of Newgate was at least partly to release political prisoners. Dickens’ description in Barn & Budge of the “sober workmen” drawn into the riots was therefore a true one; and Wilkes, as a magistrate, in helping to put them down lost the support of a number of City aldermen who were politically involved. 

One reason for anti-Catholic feeling was the proposed Catholic Relief Bill, In granting civil rights, would make Catholics eligible for tiro army, thus helping to prolong the now unpopular American War. There was also the usual resentment against poor Irish emigrants undercutting wages.

James Betka in his review of Eric Loner’s book, Tom Paine and Revolution in America, is equally wrong in suggesting Hogarth’s notorious Gin Lame illustrates the life of London’s ‘Everyman.’ The dregs of the poor, especially as depicted by the cartoonist, are never representative of the main body even of a working class, and the weavers, tailors and other artisans who formed committees. Throughout the 18th century were, like Paine’s Excise petitions, part of incipient trade unionism, and their protest not always as riotous as the government liked to present. 

There is still such that might be learned about influences on Paine while in London as well as Lewes, but Professor Betka’s theory that Paine was largely repeating (or indeed had read) the many sources among political writers he mentions seems to me untenable, and certainly unproved. He denied reading even Locke, and his own style in general is very different from the North Briton, whose scurrilous tone he probably did know well. Basically, although be makes mistakes on the English radical movement (naming Major Cartwright as the most “revolutionary’ of its exponents and not seeming aware of the far more radical Dr. John Jebb), and overstates the case of Paine’s artisan connections as opposed to his middle class ones, I believe Professor Loner is right that Paine did forge a literary style direct enough to reach the people, both American and English, in a way his political theorist or satirist predecessors had never done, some cartoonists accepted. The proof is not only the widespread sale and influence of Common Sense, but the way Rights of Man, far more than the works of any other 18th century writer, penetrated the London revolutionary societies, including the working-class London Corresponding Society, and the later Chartist movement. 

The point is Paine was a born writer, with the clarity of expression and picturesque grasp of imagery missing from most writers of political and economic theory, and I suspect Professor Betka’s own prose and economic analyses would have been largely unintelligible to him. 

Of course it is true that any writer, in particular a political writer, assimilates and reflects the ideas current in his time; and the influence of those In the 18th century, as I have often pointed out, reached right back to the Levellers and English deists, as well as the French philosophers, Paine’s originality in presenting and developing these ideas, with practical suggestions as to their implementation, and imaginative us of language still remain. 

It is a pity if Professor Betka’s review of some of Loner’s theories prevents Paineites from reading Loner’s book, for it does, for the English reader, present many little-known facts about Paine’s Philadelphia associates and environment that could not but have had sane influence on his attitude and American writings. The references to Paine, as Professor Betka points out, hardly justify his prominent position in the book’s title, but Erik Loner has presented an interesting, well-researched social background picture which cannot be ignored in Paine’s development, any more than his English backgrounds can be ignored. 

Professor Betka himself makes an often-repeated but quite unprovable assumption when he says only Paine’s “English enemies” called him “Tom.” Late in the 19th century, a British socialist workman objected to the diminutive as deliberately downgrading Paine’s status as man and writer, and thus seems to have started this myth; but there is evidence at least some friends in his own time used “Tom* affectionately, and indeed it is inconceivable that anyone christened Thomas, at any period in this country, could avoid this. 

As my own book on the Pre-Raphaelites, reviewed in the same issue of the Bulletin, points out, although Paine’s works seem to have by-passed later middle class socialist writers such as Ruskin and Carlyle, and William Morris shoved no particular awareness of him, some knowledge of Paine’s works probably reached Morris in the end, through old Chartists who attended his lectures at working class meetings, and through Walter Crane, his Kelmscott Press assistant. Crane had been an apprentice of the Chartist engraver, W.J. Linton, who in 1842 wrote a brief life of Paine. 

I cannot agree with J.A. Hadwick that Morris was essentially a “middle-class” socialist: his Marxist dedication was total and he associated with working-class socialists on their own level, in a way that divided him from the Fabians and other intellectuals in the rising Labour movement. Dr. E.P. Thompson and Morris’ latest Marxist biographer, Jack Lindsay, as well as associates of Morris at the time, make this quite clear.

I hope, too, Miss Hadrick in her generous review of my book does not really intend to suggest that I maintain the Pre-Raphaelite mid-Victorian revolt was the first in the world of art. Both my book on Paine and this new one, Artists and Writers in Revolt, mention Blake’s radical rebellion. He was, of course, a major influence on the Pre-Raphaelites, who did much to revive his reputation, as they also revived that of Keats. 

Finally, Gordon Hone is wrong to perpetuate the legend that Paine “fled” from England in September, 1792, and was thereafter offered the Calais deputyship in the new French Convention. In fact, as Rickman’s biography and French evidence make clear, Paine was offered four deputyships, of which he chose Calais, and the French government representative Audibert came over to England to accompany him. There is no indication at all that these offers were made to help Paine avoid the December trial, In fact the French districts also voted deputyships to Dr. Joseph Priestley and other known foreign sympathisers with the Revolution. It does appear the English police agents got wind of Paine’s intended departure and naturally tried to stop him; they turned up at Rickman’s house after he had gone.

As I remarked in my biography, Paine, confronted with the French offers, made a sensible choice in accepting in all the circumstances. There is no evidence at all that he would otherwise have attempted to avoid the trial; and indeed later he expressed doubts about the wisdom of his decision, for it did ultimately affect his reputation in England. 

With regard to Paine’s imprisonment in the Luxembourg, this was not as a direct result of his voting (with many others) against the execution of Louis XVI but because after the outbreak of war with England all British subjects were incarcerated as enemy aliens (Mary Wollstonecraft’s American lover registered her at the American Embassy as his wife so that she could avoid this). Paine then and later based his appeal on the strong protest that he was no longer a British but an American subject: a fact denied by the then royalist American representative in Paris, Paine’s enemy Gouverneur Morris. When James Monroe succeeded Morris, Paine’s release was soon obtained; but later in America he was once infamously denied the right to vote because he was not, it was claimed, an American citizen! 

It is necessary to make this clear because the English claim that Paine was a “traitor” had no substance in Paine’s own mind. He always, after emigration in 1774, looked on himself as an American citizen. Once the War of Independence was ended no other English emigrant who had fought in the War, to my knowledge, was accused of being a “traitor” to his country of origin. But Paine was a dangerous political writer and the ‘traitor” myth is maintained in certain Establishment historical circles to this day, although the official accusation even at his trial was merely of “seditious libel” (i.e. a censorship matter).

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Of all the radical writers who knew Thomas Paine, the one whose work is among the least known or read today, but whose career was the most Varied and Striking, was Thomas Holcroft: Newmarket stableboy, schoolmaster, actor, playwright, novelist. Paris Correspondent for the Morning Herald, acknowledged mentor of William Godwin, victim of the 1794 treason trials and diarist whose entries for the year 1798 provide a fascinating picture of London celebrities, the frequentors of Debrettes, and rumours about Napoleon then freely proliferating about London.

All the admirers of Paine must know that Holcroft, with William Godwin and Thomas Brandl Hollis, helped to see Rights of Man through the press while Paine was in France and greeted the arrival of the book from the printers with the histrionic and indeed, in its way, prophetic ‘Hey for the New Jerusalem! The Millenium! And peace and eternal beatitude be until the soul of Thomas Paine’. It is less well known that Holcroft, even before Lanthenas whose translation of Part 2 of Rights of Man Bonneville published in Paris in 1792, may have provided the link between Paine and Nicolas de Bonneville that ended in Paine’s lodging with the French editor of Bien Informe for five years, from 1795 until his return to America in 1802.

Holcroft was born in December, 1745, the year Culloden, and was thus almost nine years Paine’s junior Baptised at St. Martine-in-the-Field’s, he was the son of a London shoemaker of somewhat feckless application to his trade, which ended in his becoming a peddler roaming the English countryside, and not helping his fortunes by an enthusiasm for the racecourse which he transmitted to his devoted son…’ The whole scene was like enchantment’, Holcroft wrote in his Memoirs fifty years later of a visit to Nottingham races in 1756 when as a boy of ten he watched a match between two horses, Car less and Atlas, then considered the greater: since Plying Childers (still famous today in books on racing, And a legend of forty years before when the boy Holcroft tasted the delights of the Nottingham course) (Holcroft, Thomas. Life and Memoirs. Edited by E.Colby. 1925.). In 1757 at the age of under twelve, he entered a stable near Newmarket, to whioh:bown his father had been drawn as by a magnet, and in fact the ‘whole of his Memoirs are devoted to his life there (he wrote them virtually on his deathbed, and his life story was continued by William Hazlitt”).

They are of great interest historically to anyone: interested in racing and training methods, especially as in view. of Holcroft’s eventual fame in totally different directions, they are little known in racing circles today, (‘Heavens!, they were really tough in those days. I cannot help wondering what some of our modern horses — or trainers — would think about the sort of methods used’ was a typical comment – from John Oaksey — when I sent a few extracts to one or two racing writers).

It should be explained the toughness: applied to the prolonged-hours (beginning at 2.30am – in summer) of training horses and the style of training details, not to cruelty as such indeed Holoroft, who adored horses all his life, paints a picture of stables and trainers singularly free from bribery and inconsideration, and (a revealing touch from a boy who had known only the life of the eighteenth century poor) he is more enthusiastic about the meals and treatment of the ‘lads’ than are some writers of social conscience in the pages of Sporting Life today. When he fell from a difficult mare he was nursed back to health in the home of his employer with genuine kindness and although he lost his job he soon found an even more celebrated trainer, under whose guidance he became a first-class and valued rider. Once again his enthusiasm points the changed conditions of his life:

‘Now I was warmly clothed, nay, gorgeously, for I was proud of my new livery, and never suspected that there was disgrace in it; I fed voluptuously, not a prince oh earth perhaps with half the appetite, and never-failing relish; and instead of being obliged to drag through the dirt after sluggish, obstinate, and despised among our animals, I was mounted on the noblest that the earth contains, had him under my care, and was borne by him over hill and dale, far outstripping the wings of the wind.’

In the interim he mentions being briefly at the stables housing the thirteen, racing horses owned by the Duke of Grafton, who was the ‘squire’ of Paine’s home town, the ‘rotten borough’ of Thetford, but he gives us no recollections of the young ‘Sporting Duke’, afterwards so-maligned by Junius, and owner of the 1810 Derby winner, Whalebone (possibly named, I have suggested in my biography of Paine, in commemoration of the notorious Thetford staymaker’s son), Holcroft, nevertheless, had brains and vision beyond the scope of his fellow stableboys. While at Newmarket he began to read voraciously, starting with Gulliver’s Travels, and intent on improving his education he went to study in his spare time with a schoolteacher named Langham, who was also the local maker of leather breeches. Langham was so impressed by his quickness that he gave him free lessons, and Holoroft soon outstripped his master. Having a good treble voice and a feeling for music, he also sang in the.choir at one of Newmarket’s two churches (this love of music he retained all his life, and as late as 1784 he took the tenor part in the Handel celebration at Westminster Abbey).

In many ways, Holcroft was never to experience again times as happy and, within their limits, affluent as those at Newmarket. He left in 1760 to follow his ‘rolling stone’ father to London, and perhaps with a sense already of wider and more literate horizons. He had begun by being only horsestruck; he was soon stagestruck too, and although for ten years he scraped a living as a shoemaker and schoolmaster, by, 1770, at the age of twenty-four, he had turned strolling player and was acting in Dublin with the great veteran actor, Charles Macklin, whose fame had been partially eclipsed by David Garrick but who lived to an enormous age, still churning out performances the length and breadth of England and Ireland, including a celebrated ‘Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. It is estimated that he was still acting at well over ninety.

Holcroft never made much headway as an actor; as with so many with intellectual interests and accomplishments, he was best at characters requiring the assumption of old age or characteristics outside the sweep of emotion which is always a major factor in carrying the really great actor to the top of his profession. But he had taught himself several foreign languages and made an expert study, too, of vocal and instrumental music and it was through this that he at last succeeded, in 1776, in getting an engagement at Drury Lane under Sheridan’s management, at 20 shillings a week. As many of the plays performed had incidental music, he was able to sing in the choruses as well as to play very small parts. Only when Sheridan saw him play a character called Mungo, was he impressed enough to raise his salary to 25 shillings.

Although Holcroft was obviously already interested in writing for the theatre before, Sheridan engaged him as a an actor he had a farce (oddly, to Paineites, called The Crisis) to Mrs. Sheridan to read and his own years of poverty must have got his mind in politically questioning directions, there is little doubt the association with Richard Brinsley Sheridan helped to consolidate both Holcroft’s radical interests and ambitions as a dramatist. ‘Sheridan had been drawn to politics long before he started to write ‘plays’, writes his most recent biographer, and there exists fragments of various political essays which were written at Anna St. Ives, in Holcroft’s own words, was intended ‘to develop (Holcroft’s own spelling) certain general principles by exhibiting imaginary characters’ and to depict ‘the vices and distresses which are generated by the existing institutions of society’. Ibsen or Shaw could not have put it more clearly. Hugh Trevor, a novel in two parts published in 1794 and 1797, continued this doctrinaire philosophy of novel-writing. Crabbe Robinson once wrote that Holcroft’s novels had been a mental introduction to the reception of Godwin’s Political Justice (which, in 1793, could well have been true of Anna St. Ives).

Holoroft was very active in the Constitutional Society, sitting on its committee and at one time edifying its members, but also probably much holding up its business, with a dissertation on the human mind, which continued until the meeting broke. (Brown, P.A. ie French Revolution Histo. a 1918 (republished by Cass, 1965)) He shared with, and indeed perhaps helped to form in Godwin a strong sense of human perfectibility; and with Shaw – at least the Shaw of Back to Methuselah – he believed mind was all-important, and could conquer anything. His mind cast an unconscious shadow on the future in another theatre direction, for in his play The Deserted Daughter, he anticipates Pirandello’s moral theme, in Six Characters in Search of an Author, about a father who encounters his own daughter in a brothel (J.B. Priestley also used it in his play, Johnson Over Jordan). He also had his censorship problems; there was a trying bother over the line in Love’s Frailties, ‘he was bred to the most useless, and often the most worthless, of all professions, that of a gentleman’. Paine would undoubtedly have relished this.

When, in 1794, the Government decided to try and put a stop to the growing revolutionary societies and arrested most of Holcroft’s associates on a treason charge, Holcroft, knowing his turn would come, turned the tables of public sympathy by courageously giving himself up. Thomas Erskine, the great lawyer who had defended Paine in 1792, immediately offered his services free of charge, and Holcroft in fact was never brought to trial. He was released when it became clear to the Government (which had been grossly misled by its spies) that none of the accused could be proved guilty of the charge on any evidence. Holcroft resented his release without official ‘pardon’, as it cast a shadow on his name that he had no means of repudiating, unlike those who had actually been brought into court; and in fact his political enemies so powerfully attacked his works from then on that eventually he took to a pseudonym, thus achieving his only play success thereafter.

Yet although his fortunes were fading he remained bravely in London among his friends, frequenting Debrett’s (which was virtually a social club as well as booksellers) and recording in his Diary meetings and comments of considerable interest. His visitors in 1798 included Mrs.Reveley (once courted by Godwin and later a friend to his daughter Mary and Shelley in Italy) at a musical evening devoted to Mozart and Haydn; James Barry the painter (whose attractive young self-portrait is in the Tate Gallery close to where I write this); and a child pianist prodigy, John Field, who later became famous in Russia as an antecedent of Chopin in the composing and playing of Nocturnes. Benjamin Disraeli’s father (still calling himself D’Israeli), the painter Richard Wilson, Horne Tooke, Benjamin Franklin, Sir Joseph Banks, James Boswell (‘a pompous egotist, servile, selfish, and cunning’) flit across his canvas, and he pins down Tooke (who turned his coat twice to desert two former allies, John Wilkes and Thomas Paine) like a butterfly with a reference to a discussion of the’misapplication of his powers, the sacrifice of wisdom and virtue to the pitiful triumph of the moment’ (Miss Banks also takes tea with Tooke’s two natural daughters, living with him at Wimbledon and known euphemistically as ‘the Misses Hart’). William Sharpy the engraves of Romney’s portrait of Paine, who had been introduced into the Constitutional Society by Horne Tooke, is shown to be an eccentric believer in the ‘Grand Millenium’s ‘The earthquake is still to happen, and the peaceable, even if uninspired, are all to be saved’, as Holcroft puts it. ‘Last summer he retired to a lonely place…..and there he himself had been absolutely favoured with a revelation, communicating to him personally, beyond all doubt, the revolutions that are immediately to happen’. One can imagine what would have been the reaction to all this the author of The Age of Reason!

At Debrett’s he meets Erskine and records the great lawyer’s opinion that ‘it was wrong to give up agitating the question of reform without doors, i.e. out of the House of Commons. He had before remarked that the people had lost all spirit, which I denied, and, on this occasion, reminded him that the leaders of the people had abandoned them in a cowardly manner, and then had called the people cowards’. He adds that Sir Francis Burdett is inquiring into the number of persons imprisoned on suspicion, and their treatment, meaning to state the particulars to Parliament. (Burdett, a distinguished radical Member of Parliament, four years later, in 1802, joined Rickman in seeing off Paine to America at Le Havre.) Erskine, as a lawyer, has great talents, quick conceptions, acute feelings, and uncommon power over juries, he is far from ranking in the first class’s which in view of Erskine’s offer of his services without fee four years before, seems perhaps a little ungrateful.

It is revealing of the rumours besieging London in 1798 that on 26th July he heard ‘Buonaparte and his whole fleet were taken’ (a rumour which proved wishful thinking) and on 14th. December records ‘the assassination of Buonaparte the subject at Debrett although the next day this, too, ‘was much questioned at Debrett’s’. Among references to other friends or acquaintances of Paine, he reports on 15th, November ‘Johnson the bookseller sent to the King’s bench Prison for selling Wakefield’s pamphlet°, and also ‘Read at Debrett’s, in the papers, the manly behaviour of Tone, tried at Dublin, and cast for high treason’. (Dr. Gilbert Wakefield, a classical scholar, had published a pamphlet replying to one by the bishop of Llandaff on the French Revolution. He was sentenced to imprisonment in the common goal of Dorchester for two years,, and died fourteen weeks after his liberation. Llandaff, who also crossed swords with Paine, had tried in vain to prevent Wakefield’s being prosecuted, ‘thinking the liberty of the press to be the palladium of the Constitution’ (Rae. Wilkes, Sheridan, Fox)) It was the year of the great Irish rebellion of 1798, in which Paine’s friend Lord Edward Fitzgerald also lost his life, and the Irish question, then as now persistently obtrudes.

By 1799 his funds were so depleted that he had to sell his fine collection of pictures and his library (he was a connoisseur of taste in both, and his Diary includes the acquisition of surprising items, such as ‘the bible in Welsh, Polish, Danish and Swedish likewise Novelle di Salernitano (scarce) and other books’). The loss of the library cost him bitter pangs. He left for Hamburg and voluntary exile in Europe until 1802. In Paris, as Professor Aidridge’s researches have recorded, he again met Paine, but in October 1802 he returned to London. (Aldridge, A.O. Man of Reason. The Life of Thomas Paine. Cresset, 1959. It would be interesting to know if he lodged again with Bonneville, with whom Paine was then living) Success eluded him and in 1807 he was forced to sell a new collection of books and pictures. He died in poverty on 23rd, March 1809, the same year as Paine.

His life had been overshadowed by personal tragedies. The first two of his three wives died young, and in 1789, the year which should have been a beacon for all lovers of liberty and equality, his sixteen-year-old eldest son, in some slight family altercation, had run away with £40 and tried to sail on a vessel to America. His anxious father, ready to forgive all, had found the ship through police efforts, but as he was descending to the cabin to fetch his son, the boy threatened to shoot himself if taken. Believing, as most parents would, this was merely adolescent histrionics, Holcroft had continued to descend, only to hear his son fire the pistol. When he reached him the boy was dead. This tragedy shattered his life, and for a year he scarcely went out of doors.

Francis Place, years later on the death of James Stuart Mill, wrote: ‘He was all the time as much of a bright reasoning man as ever he was, reconciled to his fate, brave and calm to an extent which I never before witnessed, except in another old friend, Thomas Holcroft, the day before and the day of his death’. Holcroft, like Sheridan, had known poverty, and like Sheridan at the end he returned to it. Neither man forgot that it is the poor that must help the poor. As Holcroft’s little Song of Gaffer-Gray has it:

‘The poor man alone,

When he hears the poor moan,

Of his morsel a morsel will give,

Well-a-day.’

It was a philosophy Paine, too, understood.

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