In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer, 232 pages hardback, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-18044-2. 

This is a book about a book, and not just any book! The Sepher Torah (Old Testament) remains a Holy Book for three religions. True the Jews set more store by the Biblical commentaries of the Talmud, the Christians by the New Testament, and the Muslims by the Koran, but the Old Testament remains an important weapon in the armoury of religious ideology and the machinations of priesthood. 

Michael Walzer is not a theologian, he admits he has only a schoolboy’s knowledge of ancient Hebrew and a layman’s understanding of the history and archaeology of the ancient world. He is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and his aim is to examine the ideas about politics, the understandings of government and law that are expressed in the Hebrew bible. 

Israel, he tells us, was founded twice once as a kin group and once as a nation. Both times there were alleged covenants with the god YHWH. Yet the stories of these events were written long after the events not as history but as religious propaganda. The story of the covenant of Abraham with YHWH is an obvious explanation for the replacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice much of which was appropriated by the Levite priesthood. 

Walzer accepts that many Jews were in exile in Egypt although not actually employed as slave labourers building the treasure houses of the ruling class. He accepts they were led out by Moses and Aaron and after wandering in the desert set about conquering and stealing the land of their more advanced Canaanite neighbours in the process forging another covenant with YHWH. They were led by a mysterious religious artefact, the Ark of the Covenant supposedly containing the commandments given to Moses, which equally mysteriously vanished just as later the Christian Holy Grail would vanish. 

Archaeology suggests they were marginalised Canaanites who coalesced into twelve tribes and whose priesthood adopted the faith of YHWH. Moses allegedly the faith of what was a Kenite mountain and thunder god when he wed into the tribe in the Land of Midian, Yet the use of the plural Elohim in the first lines of Genesis suggests the Jews were originally polytheists. 

This is understandable considering the local goddess cults were more fun and far more sexy than the rather austere worship of YHWH. In Kabbalah there is a female figure, the Shekinah, who sits on the right hand of God. And in song the Sabbath is depicted as a bride eagerly awaiting the coming of her husband. 

For three hundred years the Jews were ruled by those mysterious figures the Judges, the Bible names twelve of them. Walzer writes that the whole of the Jewish intelligentsia, such as it was, was engaged in arguing about the law. In practice they were deciding what the content of the Sinai covenant should be and also legitimising their own role. Ultimately the Law, like everything else, was God’s. But with anything that in origin is really human there are contradictions and the Talmud refers to the contradictory works of Hillel and Shami as both being “the words of the living God.” 

After the prophet Samuel the failing of the rule of the Judges became obvious and the Jews adopted a monarchy which eventually split into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judea. These two kingdoms not only fought threatening foreign powers but often fought each other. The Jewish nation had been founded on the genocide of seven Canaanite nations, monotheism being a convenient ideological excuse for this. Polytheism was far more tolerant and multicentric. Now the Jews often found themselves conquered by more powerful, more technically advanced nations, many of them vanishing into the dominant population. Ten of the twelve tribes vanished as did the dynasty of the David kings. Jesus may well have laid claim to this, if he existed at all. 

As Walzer points out the Old Testament starts out as the history of a very dysfunctional family. The struggle continued except that now it is a struggle for a royal inheritance. The common people fade into the distance. 

The Bible has much to say about kingcraft and priestcraft but nothing about democracy or a republic, common terms in ancient Greek politics Not surprisingly Messianism, the hope for future redemption in which a messiah plays a leading role, became popular among the subjugated masses. Jesus either deliberately adopted or was painted into this role. In comparison to the Jewish savages, the Greeks were miles ahead! In political and philosophical terms we owe far more to them than to the Jews of antiquity. 

One may think all this is very ancient history but the past, even the past of a savage tribe of genocide! killers, affects the present. The British monarchy is obviously based on that of ancient Judea which in turn borrowed from the more civilised Egypt. The monarch doubles as head of church and state and on coronation is anointed with oil, the monarchy still commands the armed forces, the Prince of Wales is circumcised according to Jewish ritual and the monarch rules by the Grace of God and is defender of the faith. And there are strong links between Masonry, which sees its roots in the construction of the Temple by Solomon, and the monarchy. And Queen Victoria was a British Israelite, she thought the Anglo-Saxons were descended from a lost tribe. 

As humanity emerged from the long dark night of the Middle Ages, the ideas of religious and monarchical hegemony began to be challenged. Foremost among those doing this important work of demystification and enlightenment was Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, works still full of meaning for today’s troubled world. 

Marxist historians have written about ancient Egypt and Greece. It is high time their incisive dialectical analysis, the materialist conception of history, was fully applied to the ancient Middle East. 

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If I were granted three wishes, the first would be to be free of the physical ailments and afflictions which blight my life. The second would be to write like Christopher Hitchens and the third would be to write like Thomas Paine Although in our youth we were in rival Trotskyist groups, Hitchens and I share a number of heroes on the Left, the Pole Jacek Kuron, the Trinidadian CLR James and the Russian Victor Serge. We share an interest in George Orwell, although Orwell’s class origins are nearer to those of Hitchens than to mine. And for both of us Thomas Paine is a hero of heroes. 

Both Hitchens and Paine are in that fine tradition of English radical dissent which blasts the pretensions of autocratic rulers and canting priests. Both men were far from teetotal, it was exciting to see the allegedly alcoholic Hitchens lambastes the teetotal Catholic turned advocate of political Islam George Galloway MP. It would have been fascinating to down a glass or two with both men and talk long into the night. 

In his autobiography Hitch 22 Hitchens says little about Paine. He writes: “….I read Thomas Paine saying that to have played a part in two revolutions was to have lived to some purpose. This was the sort of eloquence I wish I could have commanded…” The idea of a time before kings and lords and bishops and priests, says Hitchens, can be found in Paine. 

Paine is dealt with at greater length in God Is Not Great, a work which ranks beside Paine’s Age of Reason as a demolition of religious orthodoxy. Hitchens writes of Paine, “…his memory has outlasted the calumnious rumour that he begged to be reconciled with the church at the end. (The mere fact that deathbed repentances were sought by the godly, let alone subsequently fabricated, speaks volumes about the bad faith of the faith-based).” He reveals that the Calvinist Abolitionist John Brown kept Paine’s works in his camp. 

The magnum opus by Hitchen’s on Paine is Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. Perhaps The Independent was indulging in hyperbole when it called Hitchens “a Tom Paine for our troubled times”, but there can be no doubt that he writes eloquently and sympathetically about his subject. 

Although he only got a third class degree from Oxford, his days were spent advocating socialism and his nights partying and swilling champagne with the middle class, Hitchens has a good knowledge of radical history. He writes at length about the Sheffield file maker and poet Joseph Mather. At a time when what Hitchens calls the “Hanoverian usurpation which endures on the British throne to this day” was adopting God Save The King as the national anthem, Mather penned a parody which began ” God save great Thomas Paine.” It is, says Hitchens, taught in no school and sung in no assembly. 

Hitchens discusses the tree of liberty, which Paine’s friend Thomas Jefferson held should be watered with the blood of tyrants. As a radical symbol particularly among the United Irishmen, Rights of Man was translated into Gaelic. He writes that Bums wrote a poem dedicated to the Tree of Liberty, and states that Bums best known poem For ‘a’ That “breathes with a mighty scorn for the conceits of heredity and the heredity principle, so comprehensively lampooned by Paine.” Bums wrote “The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, the man’s the gold for ‘a that.” Paine would have echoed this sentiment. 

Of Rights of Man itself Hitchens writes that it is “both a trumpet of inspiration and a carefully wrought blueprint for a more rational and decent ordering of society, both domestically and on the international scene.” 

Hitchens reminds us, as Paine stated, that monarchy has a tendency to over breed and inbreed. The spare children which are many are maintained at the public expense. Hitchens compares Burke’s “tear stained” evocation of Marie Antoinette with the hysteria surrounding the mysterious death of Diana Spencer, also in Paris. Hitchens asks ” which European royal house since 1791 has not lamented , like our very own Windsor’s, the ghastly problem of what to do with the proliferating, subsidized and under- achieving offspring? ” Perhaps they should be sent to doss under London Bridge on one of the government’s make work schemes. 

Chapter 5 of the book by Hitchens discusses Paine’s The Age of Reason, which he sees as a counterpart and completion. Paine 

wrote “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall.” Hitchens recounts that when Paine was writing part one of the book he did not have access to a Bible. Hitchens writes: “Paine was an engineer and amateur scientist, and stood on tiptoe to see as far as he could over the existing horizon.” 

Hitchens writes that “Paine was a leading member of that British radical tradition that saw wars and armies as additional burdens on the people, and as reinforcements of existing autocracies. What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation? And what better way to keep unschooled and unemployed serfs in line than give the king’s shilling and put them into uniform… ” Hitchens seemed to endorse this view. He was on the 1966 CND march from Aldermaston. I too was on that march. He came into politics because of his opposition to the Vietnam war being recruited into the International Socialists, the forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers’ Party. The SWP is now an apologist for political Islam. 

Yet by the time of the First Gulf War despite his obvious detestation of George Bush we find Hitchens quoting his fellow Marxist Fred Halliday “You can oppose war, but only by leaving Kuwait in the hands of Saddam…you can be anti-imperialist but you will have to decide if imperialism is worse than fascism” as his defence of what was in essence an imperialist adventure. If Iraq grew carrots rather than produce oil, the West would not have been interested. 

Although he had broken with organised socialism, Hitchens still claimed to be a Marxist; still admired Che and Lenin. He had become an apologist for Western imperialism which differs from Saddam and his Ba’ath Party which disgraces the name of socialism as America disgraces the word democracy, only in quantity not in kind. It is as if Paine had joined the Church of Rome on the grounds it was somewhat better than Lutheranism! 

Hitchens was a man of many unresolved contradictions. How anyone could find Mrs Thatcher sexy is beyond me. And there are far better examples of the distillers’ art than Walker’s Black Label. But if his writing about Paine encourages people to read Paine’s works he will have earned his redemption. 

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English radical poetry has a long and honourable tradition dating back to at least the 17th century. Paine played a small but significant role in this tradition. He was a great influence on the Chartist movement which arose in the 1830s to demand the vote for working men. One of the leading Chartists was Deptford-born George Julian Harney. 

In the 1850s Harney produced two papers, The Red Republican, which was followed by The Friend of the People. An essential feature of both publications was a poetry for the people column. Some of the contributors such as Shelley, Walt Whitman, the French political writer Armand Carrel and Ernest Jones were well known. Jones wrote some of his poems in his own blood while in prison. Some used pen names such as Bandiera, Spartacus, John The Workman, Voteless Traveller and the initial R. Some seemed distinguished such as George Sydney Smith MP and the Rev. John Jeffrey. About some of them, like Sheldon Chadwick and George Hooper we know little or nothing. 

Although he appears to have contributed to neither of Hamey’s publications, a friend and prolific poet was John Bedford Leno. Leno was born in Uxbridge in 1826. He had very little formal education and was taught to read by his mother. He graduated from rural post boy to printers’ apprentice becoming works foreman. At one time he financed his out of work activities by gambling at which he was quite good. 

He came under the political influence of the Chartist Fred Farrell and set up a local branch of which he became secretary. Finishing his apprenticeship he took up various printing jobs. He claimed to have tramped a thousand miles and often supported himself by singing and reciting poetry. With £40 raised at a benefit concert he bought his own press. On this he printed the Spirit of Freedom and Working Man’s Advocate, which was edited by Gerald Massey. Eventually he moved to London where he set up shop in Drury Lane. There he met the Russian Revolutionary Alexander Herzen who persuaded him to print literature to be smuggled into Russia. Alas this never happened. Herzen was arrested by the Tsarist authorities and exiled to Siberia. In 1851 he became a member of a committee appointed to meet the Magyar revolutionary Lajos Kossuth. 

Leno helped form a group called the Propagandists which offered to give lectures to working men free of charge. Out of this emerged the Universal League for the Material Elevation of the Industrious Classes. Leno was the chair. This in turn led to the formation of the Reform League which again advocated the franchise for more working men. 

Leno took part in its demonstrations, the biggest since Chartist times, as did Charles Bradlaugh. Some of these turned into violent confrontations between the people and the police. The railings at Hyde Park were torn down and used as weapons against the police. Leno must have felt some sense of justice. On coming to London, one of his first experiences was to be battened by a plain clothes policeman at a demonstration. 

In 1864 he was part of a committee appointed to welcome to London the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi. Previously when the Emperor Napoleon III had visited, Leno had led the protests. During the 1868 General Election he was the agent for former Propagandist member George Howell who was contesting Aylesbury. But Liberal finance, while it kept independent working class candidates out of the contest, was not much for wealthy Tories who could afford to have their voters driven to the polls. 

In the 1870s Leno was a member of the Manhood Suffrage League and the Democratic and Trades Alliance Association consisting mostly of Soho tailors and shoemakers. Leno recited his poetry at many of the dubs which sprung up to cater for the political, educational and recreational needs of working people. In his old age and riddled with gout Leno was warmly welcomed by William Morris when he went to attend one of the socialist lectures held in Morris’s home in Hammersmith. Leno described this event as “an oasis in the desert of an old man’s life”. Writing in the Socialist League’s Commonweal he described himself as “an old socialist”. No longer able to work, he was financially supported by several Radical MPs and received a gratuity of £50 from the Prime Minister William Gladstone. Leno died in 1894. 

Gerald Massey had a poem The Red Banner published in the very first issue of The Red Republican and made several more contributions mostly to The Friend of the People. One poem was entitled Kings are but giants because we kneel. Over two issues The Friend of the People April 26 and May 3, 1851, reviewed his Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love published when he was just 22. The reviewer wrote: “Gerald Massey is a partisan of the right against the wrong-justice against oppression-liberty against tyranny-the suffering many against the pitiless few.” 

Massey was born near Tring in 1828. At a tender age he was put to work in the local silk mill for a shilling a week for twelve hours a day and more. When the mill burned down he took up the equally arduous job of straw plaiting. This afflicted him with ague. Later he secured more congenial employment only to lose it for attending the Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common in 1848. But he soon found more congenial work as secretary of the Tailors Association. Massey was a self-taught Egyptologist. He was one of the first to make comparisons between the myth of the Egyptian God Horus and the Christian myth of Yeshua Bar Yosif. Both were allegedly born of a virgin on December 25 (The Greek word for virgin in the New Testament is a mistranslation of the Old Testament Hebrew word which just means a young woman). Both raised the dead, both were crucified and rose again on the third day. His work opened the way for later investigations by secularists. 

William Morris was himself no mean poet — after Tennyson’s death he was seen as a potential poet laureate. Queen Victoria would not have been amused. Morris was invited to speak in Oxford by William Hines, a chimney sweep active in agricultural trade unionism, and founder of the Oxford and District Socialist Union. He published Labour Songs for the Use Of Working Men and Women, stating : “It is time labouring folk had their own song book. There is no other way of keeping up good fellowship and brotherhood between labouring folk than by song and music.” In 1887 the Socialist League had published Echoes of the Coming Day: Socialist Songs and Rhyme. It had been edited by Fred Henderson who became a leader of the Independent Labour Party. 

Sadly many of England’s radical poets have been hidden from history by neglect. It is time to rescue so that their calls to resist tyranny and fight for freedom can inspire new generations.

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Bradlaugh Contra Marx, Radicalism And Socialism In The First International. Deborah Lavin. 86pp. Paperback. London, Socialist History Society, 2011. ISBN 9 7809555 13848. £4.00. 

This is a fascinating glimpse into socialist and radical politics in the mid-nineteenth century. On the one hand there is Karl Marx, a Communist and political exile in London, on the other Charles Bradlaugh, who rose from humble origins to become the leading nineteenth century advocate of Secularism and a MP for Northampton. Both were political giants. In his day Bradlaugh was far better known than Marx, although while the National Secular Society, which Bradlaugh founded in 1866 is still going there is nothing of his prolific writings in print.* Although the cheap editions of Marx’s works produced in Moscow are no longer being printed, his work is still being published and in the light of the current economic crisis, his theories hotly debated. 

The First International, albeit short-lived – it lasted less than a decade, was the first attempt by the working class to organise on an international scale. Marx joined almost by accident, being invited to join as a delegate from Germany by Victor Le Lubez, a French exile and close friend of Bradlaugh, who was an active Secularist both in Greenwich and nationally. Marx quickly became a leading figure in the International. 

Ms. Lavin is an undoubted protagonist of Marx and seeks to undermine Bradlaugh as an heroic figure, indeed she rather over eggs the pudding and at times comes near to character assassination if not defamation. She shows that Bradlaugh’s role in the trial of himself and Annie Besant under the Obscene Publications Act for publishing and distributing the birth control pamphlet The Fruits of Philosophy was far less heroic than has been depicted. Besant was related to the Liberal Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, and Ms. Lavin alleges that he used his influence to ensure that Besant and Bradlaugh were not imprisoned. On the other hand, Edward Truelove, a former Chartist and the International’s printer, got four months for distributing the pamphlet.

Ms. Lavin decries Bradlaugh and Besant’s Neo-Malthusianism which was the sole cause of working class poverty as their prolongation in their reproduction. She accuses Besant of giving incorrect information in her birth control pamphlet, The Population Question. She does not mention Dan Chatterton who while working with the rather puritanical Maithusian League, advocated sex for pleasure. 

Ms. Lavin describes Bradlaugh’s role in the struggle over the oaths question, he wanted to affirm his loyalty to Queen Victoria, her heirs and successors rather than swear a religious oath, as more accidentally than deliberately heroic. Bradlaugh was a leading republican, but Ms. Lavin does not address the conflict between Bradlaugh and John De Morgan, a former member of the Cork branch of the International, in the republican movement of the 1870s. 

She writes that Marx’s daughter Laura says that he went to hear Bradlaugh speak in the 1850s and seeing him as a muddleheaded radical possibly capable of reform. In any event, Marx did his utmost to keep professional atheists out of the International, in particular the Holyoake brothers who were opponents of Bradlaugh. Here I think he was wrong, George Holyoake was a pioneer co-operator, when he died nearly four-hundred co- operative societies subscribed to erect a building in his memory. He could have brought many co-operators and Secularists into the International. 

Bradlaugh was a leading member of the Reform League which had been formed in 1866 to advocate the extension of the franchise to more working class men. It staged some of the most militant demonstrations since Chartist times which Ms Lavin compares to the anti-poll tax demonstrations of the 1990s and more recent student demonstrations against rises in tuition fees. During one, demonstrators tore down the railings in Hyde Park and used them to defend themselves from police baton charges. She shows that the leaders of the League were bought by the Liberals to mobilise newly franchised workers behind Gladstone and keep independent working class candidates out of the contest. Although initially opposed by the Liberals, Bradlaugh eventually became an official Liberal Party candidate. 

The first International was wrought with conflict between Marx’s communism, English trade unionists who in essence remained Liberals, followers of the French anarchist Proudhon and supporters of the Russian anarchist Bakunin. All of these came together to support the Paris Commune of 1871, which was drowned in blood by the forces of reaction. Although Bradlaugh was a Freemason and the French masons supported the commune, he opposed it. This led to a fierce clash between him and Bradlaugh in the pages of the Eastern Post. 

The International, however, was in a bad way and by 1872 it was in effect dead. At its Hague conference its general council was moved from London to New York. Bradlaugh now tried to form his own international. From 1877 this was muted in his weekly National Reformer. He had wanted to call the new body The International Workingman’s Association, the original name of the International, but it was decided to call it the International Labour Union. Among its supporters were the Rev. S. Headlam and the anti-socialist trade unionist Edith Simcox, one of the first female delegates to the Trades Union Congress. The ILU began to slip out of Bradlaugh’s control. It supported the cotton workers’ strike against a pay cut and when George Howell attacked Marx, Harriet Law, who had been involved in the original International, offered Marx space to reply in her Secular Chronicle. After that the ILU faded out of existence. 

Marx died in 1883 and the following year Henry Hyndman formed the Democratic Federation. He debated with Bradlaugh and while many seem to think Bradlaugh won, but within months two of the triumvirate which led the NSS, Annie Besant and Edward Aveling, had become socialists. 

Ms. Lavin has long been working on a biography of Aveling and if it is as good as this work is it will be well worth the wait. 

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The Foots and The Poets, Derek Summers (ed.). London, Jarndyce, 2010, Paperback, 123 pages; ISBN 978-1-900718-75-2. 

Plato wanted poetry banned in his republic. Like many totalitarian reactionaries he saw poetry as essentially subversive. This book shows the relationship between poetry and three generations of a family which if not subversive were at the very least politically radical. 

The first subject is Isaac Foot, the son of a Plymouth carpenter who qualified as a solicitor and became the Liberal MP for Bodmin. An avid reader, he collected 70,000 books. He also admired the Civil War parliamentary Oliver Cromwell and his Latin Secretary, the blind poet John Milton. He founded the Cromwell Association and kept a commonplace book full of quotations from Milton. The book contains several of Milton’s works in poetry and prose although sadly not his poem in praise of the executed regicide Sir Henry Vane. In his biography of his father, written with Alison Highet, Michael records Isaac’s love of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas Hardy and R.L. Stevenson. 

The youngest of Isaac’s children was the late Michael Foot MP for Plymouth Devonport and then Ebbw Vale, editor of Tribune and leader of the Labour Party in the 1980s. Michael converted from Liberalism to Socialism when he saw poverty and unemployment in Liverpool where he worked as a shipping clerk. Michael was not only the biographer of Aneurin Bevan but also studies of Byron and Jonathan Swift. 

Another source of inspiration was the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx’s cousin. Heine was not only a poet but also a political philosopher. In his On The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, published in 1834. He maintained that the German philosophical revolution, which culminated in the work of Hegel, was the prelude to a political democratic revolution. Included in the selection of Heine’s writings in the book is his poem / Don’t Believe In Heaven. ” I don’t believe in the devil,/ In Hell or its counterpart:/ I believe in your eyes only/And in your devilish heart.” There is also his celebration of a Luddite-style uprising by the weavers of Silesia.

Michael was also interested in more recent poets, Among them was Adrian Mitchell. When proposed for the position of Poet Laureate, he wrote a poem on why he wanted the monarchy abolished. Mitchell first read his poem To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam) at an anti-war rally in 1964 and revised it to include subsequent conflicts. Other modern poets who interested Michael included Tony Harrison, Derek Walcott and U. A. Fanthorpe, “Her poetry is one of the delights of the age,” said Michael. 

Michael had an interest in the radical essayist William Hazlitt and in the poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth’s sonnet to Milton and his sonnet to Toussaint L’Ouverture, the former slave who overthrew the rule of the French slave owners in Haiti, are included in the book. Wordsworth may seem a strange choice. He at first supported the French revolution, “But Europe at that time was filled with joy/France standing on the top of golden hours/And human nature seeming born again”, but later became reactionary. Some would call him a class traitor. 

The last Foot is Paul, Michael’s nephew, one of the more intelligent and attractive members of the Socialist Workers’ Party. He was another convert from Liberalism to Socialism, Socialism, not of the social-democratic, but of the Trotskyist kind. At public school he met Richard Ingrams, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, and wrote for it for several years. For 14 years he wrote for the Daily Mirror and later edited the SWP’s paper Socialist Worker. 

Paul’s hero was the romantic poet Percy Shelly, an atheist who was seen as a precursor of Socialism. Paul wrote two books on Shelly and a number of pamphlets including work on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and the miners’ leader A. J. Cook. The book includes selections from Shelly’s Masque of Anarchy which was inspired by the events in St. Peter’s Field in Manchester. Thousands of radical reformers gathered to listen to Henry Hunt only to be cut down by the sabres of the yeomanry. It calls for resistance by the oppressed and exploited: “Shake your chains to earth like dew/Which in sleep had fallen on you/ Ye are many, they are few.” 

The book contains a useful biography of source books and further reading.

There are those who disparage poetry, who dismiss it a so much romantic waffle, but as this book shows it can excite and inspire the struggles which still need to be fought. 

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Two Cocks On The Dunghill, William Cobbett and Henry Hunt: Their Friendship, feuds and fights. Penny Young. Twopenny Press, South Lopham, Norfolk, 2009. 384pp Paperback, ISBN 978-0-9561703-0-9. £17.95 

There have been numerous biographies of William Cobbett, but only one of Henry Hunt although Hunt was no less an important and prominent figure in early 19th century Radicalism. And this is out of print. This is not an attempt to write another biography of Cobbett or Hunt. Rather it is an explanation of their often troubled relationship. 

Cobbett was in essence a self-educated ploughboy. Hunt came from the landed gentry, his family owned or rented 3,000 acres. A spell of six weeks imprisonment in 1800 following a dispute over the killing of pheasants brought Hunt into contact with the radical lawyer Henry Clifford. He came out of prison a convinced radical. 

There was continual trouble between Cobbett and Hunt, the cause of much being Cobbett’s wife Nancy. Hunt having married Ann Halcomb, the daughter of a publican in Devizes, had become enamoured of Catherine Vince and eloped with her, while Cobbett was usually highly conventional in such matters. Out of character he made excuses for Hunt. Nancy on the other hand greatly disliked this female aristocrat and referred to her as “the whore on horseback”. The differing personalities of the two women reflected their class origins. When Cobbett first met his wife she was scrubbing out a wash tub, whereas Mrs Vince would have had servants to do her laundry. Nancy was a good cook and could make delicious home-brewed beer. Cobbett urged the English people to abandon drinking stewed tea and return to making home made ale. Mrs Vince would have drunk wine. 

When Hunt and Cobbett first met they didn’t hit it off, but as Hunt contributed to Cobbett’s Political Register they grew closer. Hunt developed into a formidable political speaker being dubbed Orator Hunt, a phrase originating with the radical poet turned Tory Robert Southey. 

In 1816 Hunt was invited by the Spenceans (followers of Thomas Spence who advocated public ownership of land) to speak at a meeting at Spa Bath Fields (today’s Mount Pleasant sorting office) What Hunt wasn’t told was that the aim of the meeting was to spark off a revolution. Hunt spoke from the window of the Merlin’s Cave pub, but despite his efforts to convince the crowd that violence was futile, that evening doting broke out. A second meeting led to the looting of gun shops which the Tory press blamed Hunt and Cobbett. A third meeting passed off without incident. 

However, the government continued with its programme of repression. Hunt spoke in Bristol. ” We want no tumults, no riots, we want only our rights”, he proclaimed. Fearing imprisonment, he had already served two years in Newgate, Cobbett decided his best course of action was to leave for America. In March 1817 he set sail for New York. Hunt was furious that Cobbett had not told him he was going. Other radicals moved to fill the space vacated by him. In his Black Dwarf, Thomas Wooler mercilessly criticised Cobbett, whereas Hunt still chose to defend him. 

Cobbett urged Hunt to come to America. One attraction, he wrote, was the land had no Wilberforces. Both regarded Wilberforce as leader of the “canting saints”, while Wilberforce saw Hunt as “the tool of worse and deeper villains” and Cobbett as “the most pernicious of all.” 

In 1818 there was to be a General Election. Hunt decided to contest the Westminster Seat. At a meeting in Covent Garden his political opponent Thomas Cleary read a letter from Cobbett written ten years earlier which described Hunt as riding round the country with a whore and urged people to have nothing to do with him. Hunt wrote to Cobbett urging him to come home and to deny having written the letter. In the event Hunt came bottom of the poll with just 48 votes. 

In August 1819 at least 60,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Square, Manchester to be addressed by Hunt. Hardly had he started to speak when the Salford and Manchester yeomanry charged the crowd with sabres drawn. At least eighteen people died and over six hundred were injured. Hunt escaped with a cut hand. He was arrested and charged with treason, later changed to seditious conspiracy. In the Political Register, Cobbett began to distance himself from Hunt. 

Relations between the two men (Cobbett was now back in England having brought with him the remains of Thomas Paine, these were lost after his death) continued to cool as Hunt was brought to trial. On May 15 he was sentenced to two and half years in Leicester Prison, which was one of the worst in England and it was clear the government’s aim was to kill him or so ruin him in body and spirit he mould no longer be a threat. Beyond o recording Hunt’s name in the list of the imprisoned Cobbett said nothing about this. In his Memoirs, Hunt expressed bitterness and resentment about Cobbett’s flight to America, about how he had neglected and deserted him since his return, about the role played by Mrs Cobbett, blaming her for the collapse of their friendship. 

From inside the grim walls of lichester, Hunt conducted a campaign against the terrible conditions and the mistreatment of prisoners including the sexual abuse of female prisoners. Beyond advertising Hunt’s A Peep Into Ilohester Goal, Cobbett did nothing to help. Instead he set out on the series of journeys which became known as his Rural Rides. Hunt was released on October 30, 1822, to widespread demonstrations, but Cobbett said not a word about this in the Political Register. Hunt resumed his life with Mrs Vince and set up a business making substitute coffee from roasted rye. 

Towards the end of January, 1823, Hunt appeared again briefly in the Political Register, however, as Ms Young puts it, Cobbett wanted to be “top cock on the dunghill”. This soured his relationships with other radicals referring to them mostly to criticise and undermine them, an exception being Richard Carlile from whose imprisonment Cobbett made political capital. In the Political Register for November 15, 1823 he referred to Peterloo but did not mention Hunt. 

Hunt had taken up the issue of Catholic emancipation knowing that the English government would bribe the Catholic clergy to stop them objecting to the loss of people’s voting rights (the government proposed to raise the property qualification) In the Political Register for April, 1825 Cobbett devoted pages to supporting Hunt’s actions. 

In 1826 Cobbett decided to stand for parliament and organised a meeting to raise funds at The Freemason’s Tavern in Great Queen Street. Crowded to overcapacity, the meeting ended up being held in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Hunt was there and the crowd demanded he speak. Cobbett was livid and got his own back in court two weeks later. The jury found Cobbett not guilty of libel and Hunt was ordered to pay £25 costs. 

However, following Cobbett’s defeat at an election in Preston the two men again edged towards reconciliation. Both were to meet at a meeting in Covent Garden. Nancy threatened to commit suicide if Cobbett went, but he ignored her threat and when she learned hr had attended she cut her throat with a knife. Although serious the wound was not fatal. 

A political dinner at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand ended in a fist fight but brought Cobbett and Hunt closer together. For the next eighteen months the men were good friends. They set up an organization, the Radical Reform Society to agitate for annual parliaments, universal suffrage and vote by ballot. While Cobbett was willing to compromise and if needs be dilute, Hunt stuck firmly to his principles. Cobbett also objected to Republican speakers like Hunt’s friend John Gale Jones being invited to address meetings. Once more relations between the two men soured. The situation turned bizarre when Nancy Cobbett thought that Cobbett’s secretary had rid himself of his drunken and adulterous wife so he could have a gay affair with Cobbett, an extreme homophobe. The accusation indicates Nancy’s state of mind. 

Both men would achieve their ambition of being elected to parliament, although Cobbett lost his seat for opposing the Reform Bill of 1832 which he thought didn’t go far enough. Having suffered two strokes, Hunt still toured the north including Manchester early in 1834. He died on February 13, 1835. Cobbett some weeks later in June. Had the two been able to overcome their differences, had Hunt led a more regular life and Cobbett been able to address what were undoubtedly his wife’s mental health problems, the course of radical history in the first part of the nineteenth century may have been somewhat different. 

Two Cocks On The Dunghill is illustrated with some very interesting contemporary cartoons and two colour plates. But it suffers from a multitude of typographical errors, proof, if it was needed, that manuscripts should be thoroughly proof read before going to the printers. Nevertheless, it remains a valuable contribution to early nineteenth century political history. 

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Transoceanic Radical: William Duane, Nigel Little. London, Pickering and Chatto. ISBN 9781851969296. Hardback, 230pp. £60.00 

Thomas Paine called himself a citizen of the world and as if to sustain this claim was an active revolutionary in Britain, France and America. If any one of his contemporaries deserves the title more it is William Duane. While for reasons of political expediency he often described himself as an American, his life and political activity took in Canada, America, India, Ireland and Britain. He was one of the first internationalists. 

Duane’s roots were in Ireland, in Clowns!, County ‘Tipperary, though he was born in St John’s, Newfoundland, which would have made him a British subject. This was then disputed territory between Europeans, native Americans, British and French. His family returned to Ireland then returned to America, settling in the area around Lake Champion, upper New York. His political opponents said he was not entitled to American citizenship as his family had left America again before the Declaration of Independence. 

Little writes: ” …William Duane appeared by 1795 to be a perfect version of Thomas Paine’s “citizen of the World”. By the early 1800s he had become an American citizen. But his vision of citizenship was heavily influenced by Painite radicalism. Cut loose from the British Empire, this “Citizen of the World” contributed to attempts to finish the project of nation-building that Paine had begun in the 1770s.” 

In 1765 he lost his father and after having wandered around in America he and his mother returned to Ireland. In 1779 he married Catherine Corcorariet, a member of the. Church of Ireland, despite his Catholic family’s opposition. Duane broke with Catholicism and became a Deist, which in turn led him on to Painite radicalism. To support his wife, he took a job as an apprentice printer on the Hibernian Advertiser. Its owner, a Freemason, was known for his Whig and reformist Ideas. Some of these must have rubbed off onto Duane. 

In 1782 Duane with his family moved to London and he became a journeyman printer. He also began to write as a parliamentary reporter and journalist. 

Beset by financial problems, Duane was approached in 1786 by Philip Young, the principal proprietor of the India Gazette with an offer to become editor of his Calcutta newspaper. British India was then ruled by the East India Company which made no effort to understand the Indian people, but sought to exploit them at every turn. Duane’s family returned to Ireland and to finance his passage to India Duane enlisted as a private in the EIC’s army. Many of the officers in the army were mercenary adventurers while many of its troops were displaced Radicals. Not a few United Irishmen served in it including Wolfe Tone’s brother, William. Mutiny was always a real threat to the establishment. The job with the India Gazette did not materialise and on being discharged from the EIC’s army, Duane became editor and manager of the weekly Bengal Journal. 

The role of Freemasonry in the American and French Revolutions is well known and in India Duane became an active mason. Indian masonry was split between the wealthy gentlemen who opposed the French Revolution and the more radical artisans who supported it. This theme of class conflict between gentlemen willing to compromise principles and uncompromising artisans runs all through Duane’s political activity. 

Duane got himself into trouble for an attack on Colonel Canaple, the Royalist leader who had fled to Calcutta following a revolution in French India. Instead of apologising as ordered Duane berated Canaple about the rights of the press and the rights of man. For this Duane came near to being deported. 

Duane now published a new paper The World which publicised the grievances of officers in the EIC’s army. With the outbreak of war between Britain and revolutionary France in 1793, the authorities resolved to deport Duane to Britain. Held below decks on the ship he arrived back in Portsmouth and made his way to London. 

Back in Britain, he was reunited with his family, joined the London Corresponding Society, one of forty Jacobin societies founded in the wake of the French Revolution, and contributed and edited to its press attacking the EtC in print. Little writes: “If Duane had been French one would have seen him in the ranks of the sans- culottes, working like Marat on a paper like the Am! De People…” Fifty years on, The Chartist George Harney would take the name Friend of the People for one of his papers. Duane chaired a mass LCS demonstration against the war but when Pitt’s government passed repressive legislation against seditious meetings and treasonable practices Duane thought it wise to depart to America. 

In America he made his living as a jobbing printer and writer. In 1796 under the pen-name Jasper Dwight he wrote an attack on the then President George Washington accusing him of being a quasi-king using the ideology of Federalism to set up a quasi- monarchy. He criticised Washington’s view of Paine saying that while he upheld the religion of Christ he negated the rights of man by owning slaves. The pamphlet was published and sold in the offices of Benjamin Franklin Bache’s paper The Aurora. It brought on him the ire of William Cobbett. Himself a political exile from Britain, he was then an anti-radical and author of vicious attacks on Paine who he damned as an ‘Infidel anarchist”. Later he tried to make amends by returning Paine’s bones to Britain where they became lost. 

Duane went to work for Bathe and when Bathe died of the yellow fever, which also took Duarte’s wife, he took over the paper and later married Bache’s widow. He became deeply embroiled in the bitter feud between the pro-British Federalists and the revolutionary democratic Republicans. When Cobbett attacked the United Irishmen Duane argued that their rebellion in 1798 had much in common with the American War of Independence. 

In 1799 Duane was arrested after a riot broke out after he had gone to St Mary’s Catholic Church to gather signatures on a protest against the Alien Friends EMIT. Brought to trial, he was found not guilty. That year a rebellion broke out amongst German- speakers against Federalist tax policy. Duane supported them. For this he was beaten up by the pro-Federalist McPherson’s Blues militia. In retaliation Duane took part In the formation of the Republican Philadelphia Militia Legion. 

In 1800 Thomas Jefferson was elected President and this ended the persecution of Duane by the government during which time he had been imprisoned for a month for libel. Duane established a correspondence with Jefferson which lasted for twenty years and wrote that Afro-Americans should be incorporated in the American Army and Native Americans should be represented in Congress. The Republicans suffered a split into Quids and Democrats on the class lines mentioned above. 

In 1812 Britain and America went to war and the British burned Washington but were roundly defeated in the Battle of New Orleans in Louisiana, which Napoleon had sold to the United States in 1803. Sadly he never built a golden statue of Paine there or anywhere else. Duane became a colonel in the American army and wrote military manuals. He had at last become an American citizen in 1802, although his opponents had accused him of rape and murder in Ireland. 

Duane opposed Federalist big government and therefore opposed a central banking system and a standing army. America suffers both from the Federal Reserve and an Army which rivals that of ancient Rome as a symbol of imperialist oppression.He argued for an elected judiciary. 

Duane befriended many Latin American revolutionary miles and visited Columbia in a bid to obtain payment for arms supplied to Columbia revolutionaries. Suffering great poverty, at 69 he became a protonotary of the Supreme Court for the eastern district of Pennsylvania. He was nominated as a candidate for Congress, coming fourth in the election. He also became a kind of mentor to the Working Men’s Party, which was heavily influenced by Robert Dale Owen. It was one of the first attempts at working class organisation in America and the Priestess of Beelzebub Frances Wright was involved in it. He wrote a tract on money Notes on Gold and Silver. He continued printing The Aurora until a lack of subscribers forced him to stop. He died on November 24, 1835. 

Today George Bush is a worse despot than Washington ever could have been and his America plays the role once played by the British Empire. Blair could have fit easily into the role of Pitt, and his repressive legislation in the so-called war on terror reminds one of the measures taken to silence the friends of revolutionary France. Little’s biography is superb radical history and highlights a man who played a leading role in the struggle for liberty in three continents. Sadly, its high price may prevent many of today’s radicals obtaining it. 

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Thomas Paine His Life, His Time and The Birth of Modem Nations. Craig Nelson. 398pp, Profile Books, London, 2007, hardback, illustrated, ISBN 1 86197 638 0. £20 

Why, one wonders, has Craig Nelson moved from writing travel books and an account of a wartime American bombing raid on Japan to a biography to a biography of Thomas Paine. It’s not as if there is a shortage of such works, indeed the bibliography lists several from the pioneering writings of Rickman, Cobbett and Conway to more recent books by Aldridge, Ayer and Keane. Nelson’s book adds nothing new to our knowledge of Paine’s life and work but it does contain a massive amount of information and opinion about the Enlightenment era. It is not bedside reading but if you have plenty of time it fully rewards the effort of reading it. 

Some of the facts that Nelson records are inspiring such as American militia charging into battle shouting the famous lines from Common Sense: ‘These are the times that try means’ souls”. Nearly two centuries after it was penned, American veteran opponents of the Vietnam War would call themselves winter soldiers, another quotation from Paine. Paine’s efforts as a propagandist for American independence far outweighed his efforts as an infantryman. 

Other facts are of little interest to political historians, although found the presentation of a chamber pot by Louis XVI to the duchesse Polignac de Sevres illustrated with an engraving of Franklin, who described Paine as his adopted political son and the circulation of pornographic drawings of Marie Antoinette rather amusing. 

Nelson records Paine’s bitter opposition to slavery. Paine wrote in African Slavery in America: “Our traders in men…must know the wickedness of the slave trade, if they attend to reasoning or the dictates of their own hearts…” Five weeks after its publication the first abolitionist organisation in America, the Pennsylvania Society for the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage was formed. What humbug is displayed by the British ruling class, Elizabeth Windsor presiding at a ceremony to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade when the British aristocracy and the Anglican Church made a vast fortune out of it, the slaves of the Anglicans were branded with the word “society”. Paine would have supported the Africans such as Nanny of the Maroons (now a national heroine in Jamaica) who revolted against slavery. Slavery was abolished in Pennsylvania in 1780 but millions remained in bondage in the other states. 

Nelson sees Paine very much as a product of the 18th century enlightenment and he contrasts the plebian coffee houses and taverns of America with the aristocratic salons of pre-Revolutionary France. The revolutions of the enlightenment raised an important question which still remains unanswered. Is it inevitable that revolutions aimed at liberating humanity and building a better world always end with the enslavement of the people by new and worse tyrannies? The American and Russian revolutions created so much hope only to end with the rule of corrupt plutocratic oligarchies. 

Paine took a positive view of Native Americans and while secretary to the United States Council of Safety negotiated new treaties with Iroquois leader Last Night. Paine thought that the English government had but half the sense this Indian had. The Iroquois confederation of six tribes was governed by the Great Law of Peace. Many of its ideas would later be found in the American Constitution. By the end of the 19th century the Native Americans had been the victims of legalised robbery and genocide, an impoverished remnant living as second class citizens in their own land. 

Paine was a scientist as well as a revolutionary and Nelson relates how he and Washington experimented with igniting gas bubbles stirred up from the bottom of a muddy river. He tells us that Joseph Priestley, who fled to America to escape the Church and King mob, invented seltzer by capturing the gas released by a Leeds brewery. 

Nelson devotes an entire chapter to The Age of Reason which Paine wrote while imprisoned as a victim of the Terror during the French Revolution and which led to his denunciation as a “dirty little atheist”. Paine made it clear that he believed in one God and hoped for happiness beyond this life. He did not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish, Roman or any other church. Like many advanced Frenchmen and Americans Paine was a deist. While Paine’s religion of doing good was better than that of the established Protestant and Catholic churches as an atheist I find belief in any God irrational and unproven. However in an age of fundamentalist fanaticism and jihad suicide bombings The Age of Reason should be translated into Arabic and Urdu and widely circulated in the Islamic community. But I fear its publishers would suffer a worse fate than the Englishmen who were imprisoned in the 19th century for publishing it. In his later life Paine would become a regular contributor to The Prospect published by the blind Presbyterian turned deist Etihu Palmer. 

Nelson is nothing if not an opinionated writer. He describes Rousseau as an “…expert on parenting who abandoned all of his children; the deist who proclaimed all other deists as infidels.” He describes Jane Austen as writing “a good skewering”. In my view her twee tales could be marketed as a cure for insomnia. 

One subject Nelson doesn’t address is the influence of Freemasonry on the American Revolution. Paine was of too humble an origin to be a mason but Washington He was initiated into the Fredericksburg Lodge in 1752. The Masonic eye in the pyramid symbol appears on Federal Reserve notes. It was said that the execution of Louis Capot was revenge for the execution of the medieval Templar Jacques De Molay. Paine narrowly escaped execution himself, no thanks to his former close friend Washington. 

Sadly Paine, largely rejected and even deprived of a vote by the America he had helped create, spent the last two years of his life as an invalid afflicted by bouts of fever and dropsy. He died on June 8, 1809. He was placed in a mahogany coffin and buried in New Rochelle having been refused a plot in New York’s Quaker cemetery. His tombstone proclaimed: ‘Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, died June 8 1809, aged 74 years.” A year later Cobbett and his son removed the remains to England. When the bankrupt Cobbett died in 1835 they became lost. Some of his writings suffered the same fate. A collection which came into the hands of Benjamin Bonneville was destroyed by fire. 

But Paine’s ideas and influence lived on. Craft weavers in Leeds opposed to the dark satanic mills of the industrial revolution 

gathered in a Thomas Paine hall. Welsh radicals met in secret to read his books which they had hidden under rocks. In Sheffield God Save Great Thomas Paine was sung to the tune of the National Anthem. The Chartists lauded him, when his name appeared in George Hamey’s Red Republican it was printed in capitals. Secularists named their children for him. Paine birthday events were widely popular on both sides of the Atlantic. 

In America was an influence on such various persons as the Feminist Susan B Taylor, the Socialist Eugene Debs and the reformist Democrat President Franklin Rossevelt. Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican Party, was converted to deism by reading The Age of Reason. He wrote a pamphlet extolling Paine’s views which his friends tossed into the stove. Even the bumbling third rate movie actor Ronald Reagan could quote Paine correctly although I suspect Paine would have been with the Black Panthers who led Californian students in chanting: “r** Ronald Reagan.” 

Not one of the golden statues of Paine proposed by Napoleon has ever been constructed. When in the early 1960s a group of Americans commissioned a statue to be constructed by Charles Wheeler and erected in Thetford, local reactionaries opposed this. The chair of the women’s section of the British Legion exploded: “Tom Paine, the philanderer and an unmitigated scamp, is the last man Thetford should honour.” The Tory deputy mayor wanted an inscription about Paine’s conviction for treason be engraved on the base. Happily this move was defeated. Out of this incident the Thomas Paine Society was formed. It exists to this day to promote the legacy of Paine’s revolutionary democracy. But it always needs more active members. 

This is a big book and will require considerable effort to read it. But the effort should prove worthwhile.

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Text of a talk given at the Thomas Paine Society AGM, November 4, 2006 in Conway Hall. 

The advertised title of this talk/article is something of a misnomer. It will go well beyond South London and will include the 20th as well as the 19th century. 

Described by T. E. Uttley of the Daily Telegraph as “that evil man Tom Paine”, Thomas Paine was for generations of radicals, secularists and republicans an example and an inspiration. My first port of call was the Great Harry public house in Woolwich. On the walls there is a pictorial display about Paine and Cobbett, which rightly says that Cobbett married the daughter of a sergeant stationed in Woolwich. It also claims that Paine had a staymaker’s shop in Woolwich High Street, but I’ve been unable to find any evidence of this. What is certain is that from the 1830s the area became a centre of radicalism and secularism. 

The link between the Jacobin Corresponding Societies of the late 18th century and the Chartists of the mid 19th century was the tailor Francis Place. While awaiting the birth of his child, Place read Paine’s The Age of Reason. So impressed was he by the book that he sought out its owner who persuaded him to join the London Corresponding Society. Place remarked that Paine and Burke had made every Englishman a politician. In 1796 Place decided to produce a cheap edition of The Age of Reason, feeling sure he could sell 2,000 copies through the LCS. The printer Thomas Williams was sentenced to a year’s hard labour for producing a seditious and blasphemous libel. In 1819 Place offered to help Richard Carlile who had been imprisoned for publishing The Age of Reason. Place wrote for Carlile’s Republican, which he produced from behind bars. The Republican for February 22, 1822 reported a gathering in Stockport to celebrate the natal day of Mr Paine “whom Englishmen ought to consider the greatest man their island ever produced.”

By the mid 1830s Place was a member of the Chartist London Working Men’s Association which had been formed by Dr James Black. In the London Mercury of March 4 1837 Bronterre 0′ Brien reported a meeting of 4,000 democrats in the Crown and Anchor in The Strand. (The tavern had been the scene of a celebratory dinner for the radical Unitarian Jerimiah Joyce on his acquittal on a charge of treason. As a member of the Society for Constitutional Information he had been involved in the distribution of 200,000 copies of Paine’s Rights of Man at the low price of 6d. It was later a meeting place for supporters of the 1832 Reform Act): He wrote that Henry Vincent had given ” a capital spicy hash of Paine’s exposure of Blackstone’s old humbug about the checks of our nicely balanced Constitution.” One London Chartist group named itself for Paine, others took the names of Wat Tyler and William Wallace. 

O’Brien, editor of The Poor Man’s Guardian and biographer of Robespierre, had read and admired Paine’s Agrarian Justice in which “the contrast of affluence and wretchedness…like dead and living bodies chained together” is attributed to the landed monopoly. In a speech made in Glasgow he said “Read Paine…and a host of others and they will tell you labour is the only genuine property.” For making a similar speech in 1840 O’Brien was imprisoned for seditious conspiracy. In prison he was allowed to read only the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. 

A dose associate of O’Brien was George Julian Harney. Born in Deptford (the local Chartists met in the Earl Grey pub in Straightsmouth, Greenwich), he went to sea at 14 and on his return became printshop boy at the Poor Man’s Guardian. Harney organised the East London Democratic Association described by Dr David Goodway as a Painite Club. With a membership of 4,000 it had a strong base in the impoverished Spitefields silk weavers. Hamey edited several Chartist publications, the best known of which is the Red Republican in which appeared the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto. Whenever Hamey mentioned Paine’s name he printed it in capitals. The issue for October 5, 1850 carried an article on Paige’s trial in 1792 for publishing “his admirable and unanswerable attack on Kingcraft – Rights of Man.”

At numerous Chartist dinners and banquets (such events were less likely to attract the attention of the authorities than overtly political meetings) Paine’s name was toasted with great gusto. 

As Chartism declined as a national force many members joined secular societies. The Greenwich and Deptford Secular Society was formed by Victor Le Lubez, a freemason and member of the First International, in 1862. In 1865 secularists in nearby Woolwich and Plumstead held a tea party and soiree to celebrate Paine. Such events were quite common. Bradlaugh’s National Reformer for February 19, 1871 carried a report of a meeting in Liverpool ‘e had an address from Mr Watts on Paine” On January 31 there had been a ball and soiree in the New Hall of Science, Old Street, to celebrate Paine’s birthday. The proceeds went to the Secular Sunday School Fund. The Association of Eclectics in Glasgow had celebrated Paine’s birthday on February 2. The meeting was enlivened by songs and recitations. The National Reformer for February 4, 1872 reported an address on Paine’s birthday given to the South Staffordshire and East Worcester Secular Union. 

Some secularists named their children after Paine. The National Reformer of July 20, 1873 reported that a Mr and Mrs Coates of the Manchester Secular Institute had named their son Thomas Paine in a ceremony conducted by Harriet Law. The leading Hastings secularist and republican Alfred King also named his son Thomas Paine. Sadly the boy died as an infant. 

Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner’s The Reformer published in its issue for May 15, 1897 a previously unpublished letter from Paine to Thomas Jefferson with a commentary by Moncure Conway, Paine’s biographer. 

The Bradford secularist and socialist J. W. Gott published a monthly The Truthseeker to promote mental freedom and social progress. A special issue carried a cartoon of Paine surrounded by the symbols of his struggle for liberty. The August 1902 issue had a quotation from Paine on its front page and a “marvelously cheap” edition of The Age of Reason was advertised price 6d. Gott was the last Englishman to be imprisoned for blasphemy, his imprisonment led to his premature death. 

1909 was the centenary of Paine’s death. The National Secular Society held various events to mark the event. The Freethinker January 31, 1909 reprinted an article from the Toronto Secular Thought by Michael Monahan which pointed out that Paine was 5 inches taller than President Roosevelt who had called Paine ” a dirty little atheist”. The issue for February 7 carried an advertisement for an edition of The Age of Reason published by the Edinburgh Rationalist Club. The March 7 issue reprinted an article from the Brighton Herald which claimed that Paine’s jawbone had come into the hands of a Mrs Wilkinson of Liverpool. It was claimed a member of her family had buried it in an Anglican churchyard. Branches of the NSS held open air meetings on Paine. Bethnal Green branch held in Victoria Park addressed by F. A Davies. There were two lectures in Birmingham Bull Ring and one in Liverpool by H Percy Ward, a former Wesleyian preacher who had been secretary of the British Secular League. The main event was a meeting in St James Hall, Great Portland Street. Speakers included Herbert Burrows, Harry Snell, Chapman Cohen and G W. Foote. Watts reprinted Conway’s biography of Paine for the Rationalist Press Association. It sold for half a crown. The Times of June 8 published an article on Paine calling him the greatest of pamphleteers. 

1937 was the bicentenary of Paine’s birth, The Freethinker for January 31 was a special Paine issue with a portrait on the front page. At the time illustrations in the radical press were rare. Chapman Cohen spoke at NSS branch meetings in Liverpool on Paine The Pioneer. The’ Man That shook The World and on Clapham Common W Kent spoke. NSS members were urged to step up their sales of The Age of Reason. It sold for 4p, Ingersoll’s Oration On Paine cost 2d. The West London branch sold both at Hyde Park. The Freethinker for March 14 published an article on Paine and Bourgeois Myths by Jack Lindsay. Another article by H. Cutner was entitled The Apostle of Liberty. A bicentenary dinner at which 200 people were present was organised in the Holborn Restaurant, High Holborn. Tickets were 8 shillings and Cohen took the chair. Evening dress was optional. The BBC refused to make a broadcast about Paine but a meeting was held in Thetford with the Mayor in the chair. 

In 1965 F. A. Ridley, who had edited The Freethinker , was writing about Paine in the Independent Labour Party’s weekly, which he had also edited. On a different level Harvey’s brewery of Lewes makes an excellent Paine ale and in the original Star Trek series a star ship was named for Paine. Another was called Potemkin.

2009 will provide many opportunities to celebrate Paine but best of all would be the final victory of his struggle against kingcraft and priestcraft.

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Jeremiah Joyce, Radical, Dissenter and Writer; John lssitt. Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2006. 202pp. Hardback. ISBN 0 7546 3800 9. £55.00 

Frightened by revolutionary events in France, the Hanoverian state moved to counter any threat from British Radicals. An obvious target was Thomas Paine. But having been elected as a deputy to the French National Convention he departed for France before the authorities could catch up with him. It was rumoured that he had been warned by the poet and artist William Blake. One who they did catch up with was Jeremiah Joyce who was arrested in May, 1794, detained in the Tower of London and charged with “treasonable practices”. At best he faced transportation to Botany Bay, at worst the gallows. 

Like Paine, Joyce came from the artisan class, his father being a master wool comber. He was born in Cheshunt, a centre of religious dissent . He was apprenticed to the highly skilled trade of glass painting and moved to London. Joyce’s radical politics were fuelled during his time as an apprentice, which on completing at the age of twenty-one he became a freeman of the City of London. In his spare time he was an apprentice minister. In 1783 he became a Unitarian. That year Joseph Priestley had published History of Early Opinions concerning Jesus Christ which advocated Unitarianism as the true theology. Unitarianism had some support amongst tradesmen. and shopkeepers but was too cold and too polite to appeal to the urban or rural poor. 

In 1786 Joyce went to Hackney College, Priestley being a tutor there and William Godwin and William Hazlitt were students. Despite a bursary and money received on his father’s death, Joyce had to work at cataloguing books in the College library. The College offered a better quality of education than that offered by the universities. The course for students of divinity lasted five years but Joyce left after three and a lie and did not become a minister but became instead the tutor to the son of Lord Stanhope, a radical aristocrat and brother-in-law of the Prime Minister William Pitt. It was 1789, the year of the French Revolution. 

Stanhope, who called himself “citizen”, acted as a conduit for communications between the French revolutionaries such as Paine’s friend de Condorcet; they shared a fondness for mathematics, and English Radicals. Joyce joined three Radical societies. 

The Revolution Society was formed to celebrate the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 when James II was replaced by William of Orange. They met on November 4, William’s birthday. Joyce and his elder brother Joshua were proposed as members in 1790. In 1788 it declared that “all civil and political authority is derived from the people” and “the abuse of power justifies resistance”. 

The Unitarian Society was a theological body which advocated freedom of religion and kept its political agenda largely concealed. A leading Unitarian was Joseph Priestly, a philosopher and scientist nicknamed Old Phostogen. In 1791 Birmingham, where he lived and worked, was wracked by three days of rioting by a drunken, reactionary Church and King mob. Priestley’s library and laboratory were destroyed and a Unitarian meeting house burned down. Like Paine, Priestley was elected to the French National Convention but declined as he was emigrating to the United States. 

In February 1794 Joyce preached a sermon at the Essex Street Unitarian Chapel. He described the Scottish Radicals who had been convicted and transported to Australia as “some who are already suffering for their attachment to principles which they believed would tend to the happiness of the world”. It became his first published work, issued when he was behind bars. 

In 1792 he had joined the Society for Constitutional Information, becoming heavily involved in the distribution of Radical literature and with his brother distributed 500 copies of Paine’s Letter to Mr Secretary Dundas. The Society distributed 200,000 copies of Rights of Man. The literate population at the time was 4 million. Joyce became the secretary of a joint committee between the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society. He wrote a letter to the Society of the Friends of the People seeking their aid in organising a convention “for the purpose of obtaining… a full and equal representation”. Joyce was a steward at a dinner of the Corresponding Society when the band struck up the French revolutionary songs Ca Ira and The Marseillaise. 

On May 12, 1794 the secretaries of the Society for Constitutional Information and the Corresponding Society were arrested. Joyce was arrested on May 14 at Lord Stanhope’s home. He was imprisoned in the Tower of London. Among those who came to see the prisoners exercise was a young Robert Aspland who would later edit the Monthly Repository to which Joyce would contribute. In the 19th century, Aspland’s son Robert Aspland Cooper became a leading secularist and republican in Norwich. He stood as a Republican candidate in local elections. 

Joyce was removed from the Tower to Newgate. From there he was taken to the Old Bailey. When asked “How will you be tried?”, he answered “By God and my country”, that is, he opted for a jury trial. While held in Newgate, Joyce published An Account of the Author’s Arrest for Treasonable Practices. The print run of 1,000 copies sold out in a few days. 

The lawyer Thomas Erskine conducted a defence campaign for the defendants. The government’s case, exposed as contrived and badly directed, collapsed. Joyce was brought to the bar on December 1. The Attorney General announced that he did not propose to proceed and Joyce was acquitted. He returned to Stanhope’s home in Chevening, near Sevenoaks in Kent for a celebration to which 400 people had been invited. The event went on all night. A public celebratory dinner of 1300 was held in the Crown and Anchor tavern in The Strand. 

Shaken by his experience Joyce decided to present a lower political profile and devoted himself to writing on such scientific matters as the microscope and the telescope. However, he continued to support the Scottish Radicals who had been transported to Australia. They had organised a convention of reform societies at which delegates from the United Irishmen were present and recommended Paine’s writings. Three of them were accused of plotting to murder the captain of their transport ship the Surprize. Joyce organised, edited and introduced a pamphlet The Narrative of the Sufferings of T.F. Palmer and W. Skirving during a Voyage to New South Wales, 1794, on board the Surprize Transport. Palmer was minister to a Unitarian congregation in Dundee, the evidence against being a pamphlet he had produced on Paine’s ideas for the Dundee Friends of Liberty. Joyce added Stanhope’s protest against the convictions in the House of Lords in an address to those awaiting transportation from the Society for Constitutional Information. Also including an extract from Skirving’s log recording the flogging of two girls to force them to confess taking part in the conspiracy. To publish such material in England at war with France and where Pitt’s government was taking repressive action against Radicals was a dangerous occupation. The French sent a warship to rescue the prisoner but the transport managed to escape. Palmer served his seven years and died on the way home. Skirving became a farmer and died on his farm. 

Joyce married Elizabeth Harding. They had six children. He left Stanhope’s employment in 1799 and moved to Camden becoming a friend of William Godwin the author of Political Justice. Godwin had abandoned Christianity and become an avowed atheist. From 1814 to 1815 he taught mathematics at Aspland’s Unitarian Academy and secured a ministry at the Rosslyn Hill Chapel. He died in 1816 and was buried in Cheshunt churchyard. Robert Aspland wrote a substantial memoir in the Monthly Repository that Joyce “displayed his earnestness chiefly when exposing the misrepresentations of sophists and the calumnies of bigots. He was tolerant of all but baseness and hypocrisy.” 

John lssitt is to be praised for rescuing from undeserved obscurity one of Britain’s lesser Radicals. But one cannot but wonder how many more rest uneasily in its dark shadows.

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Tom Paine, The Life of a Revolutionary. Harry Harmer. 122pp. Haus Publishing Ltd, 2006. ISBN 1 904950 24 8. £18 

Could this be the same Harry Harmer who was a South London contact for Republic in the 1980s? Why having written on Martin Luther King, the Labour party and slavery he chooses to write a biography of Paine when there are already enough of them to fill a small library I can’t imagine. Unless it is his way of thanking his father who introduced him to Paine. The book adds nothing new to our knowledge of Paine’s life and ideas, but having said that for anyone who is not familiar with them it is •a useful short introduction if somewhat expensive for a work of 122 pages. 

It seems odd that Paine who came from a Quaker background should have chosen to go to sea as a privateer and saw violence against the French. Perhaps it was more exciting than being a staymaker, a job Paine obviously found boring. Not that being an exerciseman was much better. And it was only with his departure for America that Paine’s life as a revolutionary started. Paine never profited from his revolutionary writings and the proceeds from their sale went to good causes. The profits from the sales of his 1796 The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance, The American Foreign Affairs Ministry bought 1,000 copies, went to relieve the dreadful plight of debtors in the Newgate Prison. 

Paine was no socialist as Harmer points out, he supported private property and the market and thought that trade would bring peace but he could be seen as a pioneer of the welfare state that would be introduced by the post-war Labour government. He advocated a retirement age of 60 with a pension of £10. At a time when Blair’s government complains that it can’t afford pensions and wants to make us all work until 68, Paine still seems far in advance of his times. Curiously like his friend Franklin Paine developed a pre- Marxian labour theory of value. 

Harmer makes much of Paine’s drinking habits and seems to lend substance to the view that Paine was something of a sot. Harmer writes that towards the end of his life Paine was consuming a quart of brandy in an evening. Today this seems excessive (would Paine have been served with an ASBO?) but in an era when the ruling class was pickled with claret and port and the poor drowned their sorrows in gin, as depicted in Hogarth’s famous drawing, this was normal. 

Paine was capable of making both close friends and bitter enemies. When Paine produced his plans for a French naval invasion of England and the overthrow of its government one of the few to support him was Napoleon fresh from his victories against the Austrians in Italy. Napoleon advocated building golden statues of Paine in every city and claimed to keep a copy of Rights of Man beside his pillow. But when Napoleon became a dictator Paine was denounced as a “butcher of liberty”. Among the guests at a banquet to celebrate the French victory at Jemappes were the poet Wordsworth and Edward Fitzgerald who had Paine made a member of the United Irishmen. 

Again like Franklin, who had once owned household slaves, Paine advocated the abolition of slavery. But the economies of powerful states like Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia, where Christian priests found biblical support for slavery, depended on slavery and they were powerful enough to stop Paine. It took nearly another century and a bloody civil war to end slavery. Paine also took a positive view of the Native Americans who in the l9th century were subjected to genocide. 

If Paine had not been a revolutionary he could have made a success as a bridge builder or a maker of smokeless candles. Sentenced to death in his own country for his attack on the Hanoverian monarchy in Rights of Man ( King George is said to have read a copy in a bookshop in Windsor ) imprisoned in France and all but abandoned by his friends in America such as Washington Paine was reviled on his return to America for his attack on organised religion in his The Age of Reason which was wrongly seen as atheist. He was refused a vote in an American election because it was alleged he was not an American citizen although without him America would never have existed. Even near to death his home was invaded by clergymen but he made them take away their “Popish stuff” His funeral was poorly attended although one wonders who the coach load of Irishmen who travelled from Greenwich were. After his death his remains removed to England by Cobbett vanished. But it is Paine’s revolutionary democratic ideas, not his bones that were, and still are, important. The America of the born again former alcoholic and imperialist warmonger Bush is not the America of Paine. 

If you have little time this book is useful. But if you want more detail there are many other books to read. However, the book does have many good suggestions for further reading on Paine, the American and French Revolutions.

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Anarchist Ideas And Counter-Cultures In Britain, 1880-1914. Matthew Thomas, Ashgate Publishing Limited, £47.50 ISBN 0 7546 4084 1 

When Thomas Paine wrote: “that government is best which governs least” he was expressing an idea later held by anarchists who believed that the government is best which doesn’t govern at all. Unlike Spain, where in the 1930s the CNT/FAI was a mass working class movement, Anarchism in Britain has always been a minority within the Socialist Minority. However, its history is nonetheless interesting and Mr Thomas sets out to explore in some depth the history of British Anarchism from the revival of interest in Socialism in the 1880s to the outbreak of World War in 1914. 

Mr Thomas sees the event, which sparked off the rise of Anarchism in Britain as the result of a defence campaign of the German Anarchist editor Johann Most who was being threatened with prosecution by the British government. In the East End of London, these people formed the Labour Emancipation League. The LEL had affiliated to Henry Hyndman’s Socialist Democratic Federation and when it split, the LEL went into the Socialist League of William Morris. The relationship between Morris and the Anarchists in the Socialist League was always difficult particularly when some advocated “propaganda by deed”. Foolishly, the Anarchists removed Morris from his job as editor of the SL paper Commonweal which without him went into decline. 

In 1886, the Russian Anarchist Peter Kropotkin came to live in Britain and founded the paper Freedom, which is still published. In East London, large numbers of Jews found refuge from Tsarism and they published Arbeter Fraint, a Yiddish language Anarchist paper. 

Mr Thomas next looks at attempts by Anarchists to educate themselves other than through the state-provided system. In East London, the 13-year-old Nellie Ploschansky set up a Sunday School in the Anarchist club premises in Jubilee Street and this despite the opposition of the local Rabbi. It is interesting just how young some of the Anarchists were. When the Rossetti sisters set up an Anarchist paper The Torch, one was 16 and the other 13. Amongst the educational material available was a poem by William Morris. There were other Socialist Sunday Schools too, the first being set up by Mary Gray of the SDF in 1892. The socialist educationalist Margaret McMillan used these schools as a forum for her advanced ideas. Classes in Esperanto, which was seen as a future international language were popular. One is, of course, reminded of the later work of AS Neill at Summerhill. 

The Anarchists not only set up schools they also tried to establish self-managed communities, little islands of libertarian socialism in a vast ocean of capitalism. The failure of an earlier generation of followers of Utopian socialists such as Fourier and Owen to establish such communities should have been a dire warning. Some of these communities were influenced by the religious ideas of Tolstoy. It is debatable if Tolstoy can really be considered an Anarchist. Other communities had their roots in such religious bodies such as the pacifist Croydon Brotherhood Church. The numbers involved in such communities were small and some socialists saw them as a diversion from the class struggle. Some tried to set up not agricultural communities but urban producer co-operatives. It was probably inevitable that such enterprises would fail. In the 1960s, there were again attempts to establish such communities and again they would mostly fail. 

The next two chapters are devoted to Anarchism in the world of labour looking firstly at the new unionism amongst the unskilled such as dockers in the late 19th century and anarcho-syndicalism in the early part of the 20th century. Some of the ideas impacting on Socialists in this period, the Socialist Labour Party was founded in 1903, were those of the American Marxist Daniel DeLeon rather than those of European Anarcho-Syndicalism which would be so influential in Spain and France. 

The American Industrial Workers of the World were also influential at this time and there were various attempts to set up a British IWW. Various approaches to this question were taken by various individuals such as Guy Aldred who tried to combine Marx and Bakunin 

Tom Mann, once a leading light in the ILP, set up an Industrial Syndicalist Education League. He would end up in the Communist Party along with many members of the SLP. 

The penultimate chapter looks at Anarchist ideas on the politics of gender. Because it advocated the franchise, Anarchists were critical of the Suffragette movement. However, it should be noted that Sylvia Pankhurst’s group which became the Workers’ Socialist Federation would share many of the Anarchists’ criticisms of the outcome of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Many of the questions of relations between the sexes and the place of women in society are still very much live issues. 

In his final chapter, Mr Thomas draws his conclusions stating that Anarchism deserves more consideration than has hitherto been the case. The book is not without problems. JW Gott’s The Truthseeker publishing a discussion on Nietzsche does not make it anything like an Anarchist paper. Also Mr Thomas should know better than to misquote the title of Dan Chatterton’s paper twice. 

It is almost inevitable that Mr Thomas’s book will be compared with John Quail’s The Slow Burning Fuse (1978). I think that Quail’s book, while it has less information, is written with much more sympathy with its subject. Also, Quail’s book was a cheap paperback. The high price of this book is more likely to keep it in the hands of academics, whose main interest in political movements is furthering their careers, rather than in those of today’s generation of political activists who could make better use of the information it contains.

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