2013 marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the greatest works of modern British history, E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class. While a celebration of the emergence of collective class consciousness, this magnificent study is not without key personalities and individual inspirational figures, not least Thomas Paine of Thetford, an inveterate pamphleteer and veritable ‘citizen of the world’. 

Paine is the key individual catalyst instigating Thompson’s narrative. It was his great gift for communication his ‘intellectual vernacular prose’ – which broke through the elite and gentlemanly conventions of 18th political debate to render the message of natural rights and rational republicanism accessible to ‘members unlimited’, the strapline of the new Corresponding Societies of the 1790s (whose membership extended to those designated by Edmund Burke, Paine’s protagonist, as the ‘swinish multitude’). A great communicator rather than original thinker, it was citizen Paine who opened up the prospect of a new age of reason in which universal and natural rights (at least for men) would no longer be denied by privilege and the past, by spurious argument premised on dubious history, bogus constitutionalism, invented tradition or inherited superstition. 

Thompson’s interpretation underlined Paine’s importance in what was labelled by historians as the ‘Atlantic-Democratic Revolution’. In the 1960s, my undergraduate days, this exercise in comparative history breaking through the constraints of nation state historiography was as fashionable as Thompson’s history from below. In light of events in Syria which have prompted the US to remember France as its ‘oldest ally’, the Atlantic Democratic Revolution might come back into fashion again. 

Paine traversed the Atlantic world, personifying, as it were, the democratic revolution with its universal message, a motif which informed ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’, the alternative national anthem, as it were, of British republicans. Here, for example, are the first and fourth verses: God save great Thomas Paine, 

God save great Thomas Paine, 

His ‘Rights of Man’ explain 

To every soul. 

He makes the blind to see What dupes and slaves they be, 

And points out liberty, 

From pole to pole. Why should despotic pride Usurp on every side? 

Let us be free: 

Grant Freedom’s arms success, 

And all her efforts bless, 

Plant through the universe 

Liberty’s Tree. 

Having been apprenticed to his father’s trade of corset-making, he tried a number of other occupations (most notably serving as an exciseman in Lewes) before sailing for America in 1774, having recently separated from his second wife. Here he made his name with a pamphlet, Common Sense(1776) which, in advocating complete independence for the American colonies, argued for republicanism as the sole rational means of government the mostly widely distributed pamphlet of the American War of Independence, it has the strongest claim, the Dictionary of National Biography notes, to have made independence seem both desirable and attainable to the wavering colonists. Relishing the freedom of the new world (and its potential for commercial progress) Paine readily cast aside the restrictive and gentlemanly conventions of British politics, not least the exclusive tone of Whig ‘republicanism’, a form of ‘civic humanism’, premised on glorified models of classical antiquity and selective memories of seventeenth century constitutional struggles. Far from democratic, ‘republicanism’ of this order accorded political primacy to independent landowners. Guardians of the constitution, it was their duty to resist imbalance and corruption in the polity through civic virtue, by active participation in political affairs. Paine, however, was altogether more democratic and inclusive. Looking beyond the trivia of piecemeal constitutional renovation, he sought an end to executive tyranny and what we would now call ‘sleaze’ through the ‘virtue’ and common good of representative democratic republican government. Hence his enthusiastic response to the French Revolution, by which time he had returned to England. 

His democratic natural rights republicanism reached its most influential expression in his two-part Rights of Man (1791-2), prompted by the need to refute Edmund Burke’s critical Reflections on the Revolution in France. This was a publication sensation- on the most conservative estimate between 100,000 and 200,000 copies were sold in the first three years after publication. In the frenzied atmosphere of the early 1790s, Paine’s writings rendered a fundamental division between the gentlemanly ‘Friends of the People’ and the plebeian ‘Friends of Liberty’. His insistence on natural – as opposed to historicist or constitutional – rights broke through elite constraints, not least the identification of political rights with property rights. Indeed, his democratic republicanism mediated a genuinely radical value-system, oppositional in all its aspects. In calling for a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution, he sought a decisive break from the conventional ways and means of reformers such as petitioning. Regarded as a highly dangerous figure, he was forced to flee to France to avoid arrest for treason in 1792. Having been accorded honorary French citizenship, he gained election to the French National Convention but ceased to attend after opposing (to some surprise) the execution of Louis XVI and the fall of the Girondins, after which he himself soon fell victim of the Terror. During imprisonment, he began work on his Age of Reason (two parts, 1794-5), an ill- timed deist attack on organized religion. 

Thereafter his fame and fortunes declined. According to most accounts, he died in miserable circumstances in New York in 1809, having spent his last years in America often depressed, drunk and diseased – although some responses to my BBC history piece suggest otherwise. Ken Burchell contacted me from an email address, Paineite@gmail, to inform me that Paine’s financial worth at time of death was in the region of $15,000, that with a consumption of a quart of brandy per week he drank far less than either Washington or Jefferson and that he was no more depressed than any other elderly dying person. The fact is, Mr Burchell insisted, ‘prudish, evangelical, pro-temperance and most of all Federalist writers attacked Paine’s personal character in order to blunt his personal influence … just as they do today’. Paine’s legacy has certainly proved controversial and contested. 

Within my working life as an historian, there has been considerable change. There was a marked decline in his historiographical standing as the radical 1960s receded. By the time of Thatcherite Britain, mainstream historians were dismissing Paine and his autodidact artisan audiences in the Corresponding and radical societies as an insignificant minority, accorded disproportionately tendentious attention by Thompson and other ‘marxisant’ practitioners of ‘history from below’, ideologically predisposed to ignore the beer-swilling, male chauvinist, xenophobic, beer-swilling, flag-waving majority. Furthermore, the historical establishment insisted, ‘Painophobia’ the reaction proved by Paine – proved stronger than the radicalism he excited. Compelled to answer the democratic Jacobin challenge, conservative opponents of reform developed a convincing defence of the existing order: indeed, it was the conservatives who won the unprecedented battle for the popular mind in the 1790s, although here it was conceded that rhetorical strategy and propaganda device took precedence over ideology and intellectual argument. Burke had already set the tone, recapturing the language of nationalism for the conservative cause in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Vindicated by the subsequent course of events in France, Burke’s prescient pronouncements duly confirmed the supremacy of the accumulated wisdom of precedent and prescription over the wild (and un- English) fanaticism of Paineite abstract reason. Two particular aspects of Paine’s un-English fanaticism were seized upon by the conservative spin doctors of the time to telling effect: levelling and infidelism. 

While extolling Paine as a popular communicator, Thompson had also insisted that he provided the programme as well as the language to attract working people to politics. Paine provided the missing link between parliamentary reform and social and economic progress, drawing distressed workers away from spontaneous rioting into organized political agitation. As Thompson saw it, this was the great achievement of Part Two of The Rights of Man, published in February 1792, a volume which confirmed that Paine was much more than a talented populariser of advanced ideas, a megaphone for the enlightenment project against kingcraft, lordcraft and priestcraft. An original thinker far ahead of his time, he sought to redress poverty (seemingly endemic in advanced European societies) through an interventionist programme of welfare redistribution, including old age pensions, marriage allowances and maternity benefits. 

Stopping short of socialism, Paine transformed jurisprudential notions of social obligation the ‘soft’ right to charity into a theory of ‘positive liberty’ the ‘hard’ right to welfare, guaranteed by government and financed by redistributive taxation (a programme expanded in his later pamphlet, Agrarian Justice, 1796). Judged over the long term, Thompson was correct: Paine made a decisive contribution to the politicisation of discontent. At the time, however, it was the misrepresentation of his ideas rather than the inspiration they provided – which mattered more. The charge of ‘levelling’ or economic equality, promptly emerged as the crucial factor in the loyalist triumph over the radicals. Where Burke looked back to gothic feudalism and past glories, loyalist popular propagandists celebrated Britain’s commercial progress, the contemporary wealth of the nation threatened by the spoliation and anarchy of republican egalitarianism. In defending inequality and hierarchy, loyalists stood forward to save Britain from the pre-commercial ‘primitivism’ of natural rights republicanism. 

Paine’s inopportune avowal of deism in his Age of Reason (1794-5) enabled loyalists to add infidelism to the charges of primitivism and levelling. Here the propaganda victory of the loyalists over the godless republican levellers should not be attributed to superior argument but to what sociologists call ‘resource mobilisation’. Where loyalists triumphed was in quantity not quality. Untroubled by the authorities or lack of funds, loyalists deployed every medium and resource to spread the patriotic conservative message in popular and homiletic form among the lower orders, from parish pulpit to national organisation – Reeves Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers was the largest political organisation in the country. Many of the corresponding societies fell victim to this conservative onslaught, given physical form by Church and King mobs. The surviving societies judiciously excised the offending Paineite vocabulary of rational republicanism with its alien and revolutionary stigma. The violence directed against the radicals was recorded in the second verse of ‘God Save Great Thomas Paine’: 

Thousands cry ‘Church and King’ 

That well deserve to swing, 

All must allow: 

Birmingham blush for shame, 

Manchester do the same, 

Infamous is your name, Patriots vow. 

While radicals struggled to retain a public presence, loyalists chose to treat the crowds to an increasing number of patriotic demonstrations to celebrate royal anniversaries and victories over the French. The success of these free holidays and licensed street festivals at which effigies of Paine were often burnt – was not without irony, as I noted by way of conclusion in my BBC piece. In confronting Paineite democracy through such popular nationalist participation, loyalists had established what the radicals had failed fully to achieve, the extension of politics to a mass public. As subsequent events were to show, this public expressed its loyalty to the nation, not necessarily to the status quo. Patriotism indeed was soon to acquire a radical inflexion, upholding the rights of the freeborn Englishman. 

After the polarization of political rhetoric in the 1790s, the opening decade of the 19th century was a time of considerable flux and confusion as war, patriotism and reform were all reassessed and redefined. Once Napoleon’s imperial ambitions became apparent, the character of the war effort changed. Having previously opposed the war – an aggressive conflict against a neighbouring country which simply wanted to reform its internal system of government – radicals now came forward as ardent patriots at the head of recruiting and volunteering drives. 

Having redefined their role as guardians of national virtue, radicals began to attract a wide audience as a series of scandals suggested a connection between military incompetence and parliamentary corruption. Disaffected loyalists joined the radicals in condemnation of the depredations of the fiscal-military state. Among such converts were William Cobbett, the most prolific and influential radical journalist of the early 19th century, and Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire gentleman farmer turned radical orator. Defiantly independent, these former loyalists injected a mood of impatience and intransigence, insisting on the right of all to engage in constitutional protest, to attend meetings, sign petitions and demand nothing less than universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the ballot. While refusing to compromise their new radical principles in subservience either to the Whigs or to commercial interests, they studiously avoided adherence to Paineite rational republicanism. 

In typically English pragmatic and eclectic manner, natural rights arguments were subsumed or concealed within a patriotic appeal to history and precedent. Major Cartwright devoted a lifetime of study to uncover hallowed Saxon principles and practices of popular sovereignty, an original purity defiled by the ‘Norman Yoke’. Open and inclusive in procedure and programme, the mass platform which emerged after 1815 amidst the transition from war to peace without plenty, deliberately exploited ambiguities in the law and constitution, drawing upon the emotive rhetoric of popular constitutionalism and ‘people’s history’ in demanding restoration of the people’s rights. Radicals proudly claimed descent from ‘that patriotic band who broke the ruffian arm of arbitrary power, and dyed the field and scaffold with their pure and precious blood, for the liberties of the country’. The appeal to the rights of the freeborn Englishman was perhaps best expressed in poetic form: 

Shall Englishmen o’ercome each foe 

And now at home those rights forgo 

Enjoy’d by none beside? 

Degenerate race! Ah! then in vain 

Your birthrights sacred to maintain 

HAMPDEN and SYDNEY died! 

The great hero of the mass platform and advocate of ‘the cause of truth’, Orator Hunt was hailed in the north of England as ‘the intrepid champion of the people’s rights’. ‘The good old character of an independent country Gentleman was surely there in him’, a correspondent wrote to the Manchester Observer. 

I had almost compared him to an English Baron in the time of Magna Charta, but that Mr Hunt’s motives were so much more praiseworthy: he was not there as they met that worthless King at Runnimede, to advocate the rights of a few, but of all. 

Mobilised by Hunt, those without the political nation stood forward to demand radical reform in open constitutional manner and in Sunday best clothes, relying on the proud and disciplined display of numbers (marshalled by demobilised ex-servicemen) to coerce the otherwise inexorable government ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must. The popular format introduced by Hunt constitutional mass pressure from without for the constitutional democratic rights of all continued to inform radical agitation throughout the age of the Chartists. Radicals – renovators as they were initially called – looked to the mass petitioning platform to reclaim their rights, ignoring Paine’s key tactical prescription of a national convention to elicit the general will and establish a republican constitution. 

My work on Hunt and the mass platform thus led me to question Thompson’s claims about Paine and his breakthrough language of universal rational republicanism. As my research demonstrated, natural rights republicanism and conventions of the type prescribed by Paine did not feature in early 19th century radicalism. Instead, the crowds rallied to a populist platform of mass petitioning justified by history, the constitution and the rule of law, a potent blend of patriotic and national notions. While querying Thompson on the language of radicalism, I am not seeking to belittle Paine. Like Thompson, I recognise him as a seminal influence in English radicalism, the inspirational figure in the politicization of discontent. As Thompson noted, it was Paine who supplied the missing link, underlining the importance of politics to those enduring economic hardship. Thanks to Paine, spontaneous, backward-looking rioting was steadily replaced by forward-looking political agitation, a great advance which William Cobbett opined, the nation should acknowledge. 

The implacable opponent of ‘Old Corruption’, Cobbett gained much of his political education about The Decline and Fall of the English System of Finance from Paine’s critical insights into the operation of the ‘system’ (or ‘the Thing’ as Cobbett himself called it) which produced lucrative profits for political peculators and financial speculators at the expense of an intolerable and demand-stifling tax burden on the poor. To honour his mentor, Cobbett reclaimed Paine’s bones from their American grave and brought them back to England (they have since disappeared). 

Educated by Paine, later by Cobbett, 19th century radicals persisted in explaining inequality and exploitation in political terms even as the industrial revolution continued apace. Just as the war-inflated ‘funding system’ had been built on the base of political monopoly so it was political power that underpinned the capitalist system and denied the worker the right to the whole produce of his labour. The ranks of radical demonology grew throughout the age of the Chartists: alongside fundholders, sinecurists, pensioners and other tax-gorgers, there now sat cotton lords, millocrats (note the significant political terminology) and other capitalists, parasitic middlemen whose privileged and tyrannical position of unequal exchange stemmed from their monopoly of political and legal power. Whether directed against tax- eaters and/or capitalists, the radical demand was always the same: an end to the system which left labour alone unprotected and at the mercy of those who monopolized the state and the law. 

Paine’s influence was thus fundamental, albeit not in the way that we might suppose. There were periodic attempts to impose his rational republican formula in purist form, by those disillusioned by the cyclical pattern of mobilisation and collapse of the mass platform, with its vacillating crowds, blustering orators and populist idioms. One such was Richard Carlile, an incorruptible Paineite ideologue who in the aftermath of Peterloo and the collapse of the post-war mass platform subjected himself to a regime of ideological purification and physical Puritanism with comprehensive counter- cultural rigour. A trenchant critic of the empty bluster and personalized style of Hunt’s ‘charismatic’ leadership, Carlile subsequently displayed the worst faults of an ‘ideological’ leader, provoking innumerable schisms among the votaries with his dictatorial pronouncements on doctrine, so different in tone from the eclectic and undogmatic nature of popular radical argument. He insisted on strict conformity to the infidel-Republican Paineite formulary, the exegesis of which (at different times desist, atheist and spiritualist) he reserved for himself alone. In this intensely sectarian and ideological form, rational republicanism failed to engage with the general gut republicanism — the irreverence, scepticism and anti-authoritarianism — which often ran deep in working-class culture. 

No longer committed to the platform, mass agitation and volatile crowds, Carlile looked to the freedom of the press to promote the ‘march of infidelity’, the progress of scientific materialism against superstition, myth and ignorance, but here he found himself in unwelcome alliance with commercial pornographers and the like. Unlike the pornographers, however, Carlile and his ‘corps’ of supporters were libertarians not libertines. In the sanctity of their ‘temples of reason’, these votaries of Paineite republicanism, ‘zetetics’ as they were called, advocated contraception, female equality and free love, a programme of sexual radicalism articulated in the language of the liberal Enlightenment, of individual freedom and moral responsibility. Infidel, republican and sexual radical, Carlile, the doctrinaire individualist, was also the proselyte of orthodox political economy. His pioneer advocacy of birth control was motivated by Malthusianism as much as by feminism, by his conviction that distress was caused by the people themselves through bad and improvident habits and the ‘excess of their numbers in relation to the supply of labour that can employ them’. ‘You cannot be free, you can find no reform, until you begin it with yourselves… abstain from gin and the gin-shop, from gospel and the gospel-shop, from sin and silly salvation’. By the end of the 1820s Carlile stood widely divorced from popular radicalism, culture and experience, a lone opponent of collective endeavour. Interpreted – or rather misinterpreted in this way, Paine plays no part in the making of the English working class. 

Eschewing ideological schisms and the like, mainstream popular radicals never denied the inspiration provided by ‘immortal’ Thomas Paine, but they ensured that his memory was preserved within a patriotic pantheon in which the universal rights of man were subsumed within the historic and constitutional rights of the freeborn Englishman, the charter of the land. The citizens of the world was honoured as British patriot.

The post Thomas Paine, the Rights of Man and the Rights of the Freeborn Englishman  appeared first on .

Literary Walks In Bath, Eleven Excursions in the Company of Eminent Authors. Andrew Swift & Kirsten Elliott. Bath, Akeman Press, 2012. xii & 320pp. Illustrated. Paperback. ISBN 978-9560989-3-1. £15.00. 

Last year I spent a week on holiday in Bath, a picturesque and historic Somerset city whose roots reach back to pre-Roman times, but achieved national, if not international, fame in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a spa town, the water of which was reputed to be particularly efficacious, a belief that attracted to the city the great and good, and the not so great and good, all anxious to partake of its water, or be seen in the company of the famous in British society. As well as this side of Bath’s story there is its rich literary heritage, and it is this side of the town’s story on which the authors concentrate. 

Both authors are well qualified to write on the town for they have long experience in conducting walking tours of the city, as well as authoring several other books on it, or aspects of it. Reading this book left me wishing that I had it when I stayed in Bath as it would have made my time there much more rewarding. However, this said, what has it to do with Thomas Paine, who, to my knowledge, never visited it? Well while there is nothing in the book that indicates he ever did, what it also brings to the fore in chapter seven, which is entitled, ‘The Rhythm of Tom Paine’s Bones’, are details of the interest in and reaction locally to Paine’s ideas, as is indicated in the chapter’s sub-heading, “Radicalism and Repression in Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror'”. 

What the chapter relates offers is a tour of the places in the city associated with individuals known for their support either for Paine and/or his ideas. It commences with Henry Hunt, who in 1817 is said to have addressed between twelve and twenty thousand people at a gathering in Orange Grove, though the Bath Chronicle put the figure at five hundred, the purpose of the meeting being to agitate for universal suffrage. 

The military, so the authors note, kept a watchful eye on the crowd but did not, as they also point out, act as they did at St. Peter’s Field in Manchester two years later. Others who were to address meetings in the bath included Henry Vincent the Chartist, who also called for universal suffrage. The authors offer an account of the life of Paine that extends over two pages and includes a portrait of him. This leads to a discussion on Paine’s critic Hannah More, who has a commemorative plaque on a building in Great Pulteney Street, where she had lived. Her attacks on Paine’s ideas are covered in reasonable detail, in the course of which the author’s support for Paine becomes evident, although they make the mistake of calling his book Rights of Man, The Rights of Man. They go on to notice the city prison in Grove Street “where many of Paine’s supporters, and others fighting for their rights ended up”. Details are also given of the numerous occasions near Bath where locals hung or burned Paine in effigy, while membership of the Loyal Bath Association which had a membership of seven thousand, although, they note, that many of those who signed up had done so at the behest of their employers and for them not to have done so would have entailed their dismissal and denunciation to the authorities. 

John Thelwall, who had assisted in the formation of the London Corresponding Society is buried in Bath and details are given as to how to find his grave. The chapter, a truly fascinating and informative read, even if you do not visit the city, also offers an explanation for the chapter’s title, it comes from a song, described as “stirring”, by Graham Moore, “The Rhythm of Tom Paine’s Bones”, though they add the thinking behind the song’s title “is a convoluted and bizarre one. They will by citing a tribute by Robert Ingersoll to Paine and the words of Graham Moore that Paine can still provide inspiration for those fighting new threats to the Rights of Man. 

Those interested in radicals and radicalism will also find the previous chapter: ‘Rebels and Romantics, Catharine Macaulay, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Mary Shelley & Percy Bysshe Shelley’, a productive read. Of those in the title the least known is Catharine Macaulay, and the authors devote considerable coverage to this remarkable woman, a republican, supporter of the American colonists in their struggle for independence, who writing to Washington on events in France, in which she referred to “all friends of Liberty on this side of the Atlantic are now rejoicing for an event which in all probability had been accelerated by the American Revolution”. Mary Wollstonecroft wrote of Catharine Macaulay that she had been the woman of the greatest abilities undoubtedly this country had ever produced. 

Literary Walks in Bath is not a dull repetition of the common place, but a scintillating tour of the city’s literary heritage, and in many respects of Britain’s, doing so in eleven detailed chapters. The authors have as well as a detailed knowledge of their city but an in-depth literary knowledge. They write well and are not beyond humorous anecdotes. It’s a wonderful book from which I emerged with a greater increase in my knowledge on aspects of Britain’s literary heritage than I had before I read it. Do I have any criticism, strangely yes. I would have liked an index.

The post BOOK REVIEW: Literary Walks In Bath appeared first on .

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.

The post Poetry For The People  appeared first on .

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. 

The post BOOK REVIEW: Bradlaugh Contra Marx, Radicalism And Socialism In The First International appeared first on .

An edited and revised version of the Eric Paine Memorial Lecture, March 5, 2011

The fourth sort or classe amongest us, is of those which the olde Romans called capite censij proletary or operce, day labourers, poore husbandmen, yea marchantes or retailers which have no free lande, copiholders, all artificers, as Taylers, Shoomakers, Carpenters, Brickemakers, Bricklayers, Masons, &c. These have no voice nor authoritie in our common wealth, and no account is made of them but onelie to be ruled, not to rule other, and yet they be not altogether neglected. For in cities and corporate townes for default of yeomen, they are faine to make their enquests of such manner of people. And in villages they be commonly made Churchwardens, alecunners, and manie times Constables, which office toucheth more the common wealth, and at the first was not imployed upon such lowe and base persons. Wherefore generally to speake of the common wealth, or policie of Englande, it is governed, administred, and manied by three sortes of persons, the Prince, Monarch, and head governer, which is called the king, or if the crowne fall to a woman, the Queene absolute, as I have heeretofore saide: In whose name and by whose authoritie all things be administred. The gentlemen, which be divided into two partes, the Baronie or estate of Lordes which conteynethl5i barons and all that bee above the degree of a baron, (as have declared before): and those which be no Lords, as Knightes, Esquires, and simple gentlemen. The thirde and last sort of persons is named the yeomanrie: each of these hath his part and administration in judgementes, corrections of defaultes, in election of offices, in appointing tributes and subsidies, and in making !awes, as shall appear heereafter. 

– Sir Thomas Smith, De Republic Anglorum (1583)’ (An electronic version is reproduced here: https://www.constitution.or_g/eng/repang.htm)

‘if we wilt suffer ourselves to examine the component parts of the English Constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies, compounded with some new Republican materials’ 

‘First. — The remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king. 

Secondly. — The remains of aristocratical tyranny in the persons of the peers. 

Thirdly. — The new Republican materials, in the persons of the Commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776). (The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. P. S. Foner, (2 vats., New York, 1969) i, 7.) 

These two quotations are from two authors seemingly poles apart in time, politics and personality: one, Sir Thomas Smith, the Elizabethan diplomat, renaissance scholar and loyal servant of the crown, the other Thomas Paine, former stay-maker, revolutionary pamphleteer and literary thorn in the side of the English monarchy. But, in the course of this article, I hope to demonstrate that Sir Thomas Smith and Thomas Paine shared more than a first name in common. (Others have noted the potential parallels between Paine’s ideas and the ‘Commonwealth’ literature of the sixteenth century, see A. McLaren, ‘Commonwealth and Common Sense: John Hales, Tom Paine and the Early American Republic’, unpublished paper delivered at the University of Liverpool Early Modem Virtual Research Group Seminar, April 2008. for info see htto://www.liv.ac.uk/history/research/cultures of counseliseminars.htm)

Thomas Paine’s thought and writing has often been presented as distinct from the mainstream of late eighteenth-century English radicalism: his frank republicanism, the relative absence of historical or classical allusions in his prose, and his clear Francophilia are all seen as marking him out from the more Whiggish political philosophy of either the artisan-led London Corresponding Society or the more middle-class Revolution Society. (See for example M. Philp, ‘The Fractured Ideology of Reform’ in Philp ed.,) It is certainly hard to image Paine endorsing the idea of an Anglo-Saxon ‘ancient constitution’ enshrining British liberties or extolling the importance of the revolution of 1688 as numerous declarations from the LCS did. (For pertinent quotations see my A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, rebels and revolutionaries — the men and women who fought for our freedom (London, 2010), p. 238.) According to this account, this difference became only more marked as war with revolutionary France tainted Painite radicalism with treasonable overtones. (See on the Anglo-Saxon symbolism of post-Waterloo radicalism, P. A. Pickering, “Class without words: Symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present 112, (1986), 154-5; for a more mixed picture J. A. Epstein ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 122 (1989), 75-118.) Paine here appears as a stylistic and intellectual aberration whose subsequent influence was felt only amongst the ‘ultra-radical’ fringes in the later 19th century.’ (Even here, lain Macalman sees the enduring influence of domestic intellectual and religious traditions, Radical Underworld, Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 1795-1840 (Cambridge, 1988), pt II.)

However, here I will suggest that Paine’s ideas were actually closer to more established strains in English political thought than is usually recognised. 

***

The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge, 1991), pp.50- 77. J. R. Dinwiddy noted that the most thoroughgoing criticisms of the British Constitution came from those, such as Paine, who were ‘exogenous to the English political scene’, Radicalism and reform in Britain, 1780-1850 (London, 1992), P. 173. 

***

To return to that quotation from Sir Thomas Smith, Smith’s work is a valuable example of what the distinguished historian of Elizabethan England, Patrick Collinson, memorably labelled ‘monarchical republicanism’. A seeming oxymoron — how can you have a republic that is also ‘monarchical’? But for an Elizabethan gentleman like Sir Thomas Smith, there was no contradiction. England was a ‘commonwealth’, to use the vernacular term most often substituted for the Latin republics, which contained elements of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. In his analysis of the English state, if not in his assessment of the efficacy of the arrangement, Smith was in agreement with Paine. For Smith and for many other 1681 and 17thC thinkers, a ‘commonwealth’ was defined primarily not by the form of government which was, significantly, potentially subject to alteration but by its end, the service of the ‘common weal’, the public good. The point was reiterated by Paine in Rights of Man pt. 2 chap. 3: 

“What is called a republic is not any particular form of government. It is wholly characteristical of the purport, matter or object for which government ought to be instituted, and on which it is to be employed, Res -Publics , the public affairs, or the public good”. (Foner, 1, 369.) 

So Smith and Paine were agreed that a ‘commonwealth’ or republic was defined not by a form of government but by that government’s end, the public good. However, it is worth stating here that it is not the intent of this paper to make an ultra- revisionist argument (and thereby send the membership of the Thomas Paine Society into a collective apoplectic fit) that Paine was really a closet monarchist. As Paine went on to state in Rights of Man monarchy categorically could not be the form of government of a true commonwealth because the end of monarchical rule was to serve the interests of a hereditary ruler not the public good. But I do want to suggest here that ‘monarchical republicanism’ may, in a variety of ways, have influenced Paine’s intellectual development and vision of both society and government. 

Before looking at its potential relevance to Paine, we need to unpick what Collinson means by ‘monarchical republicanism’. For Collinson there are essentially two types of monarchical republicanism — one representing a theory about the state and what it was for, the other, a fitting description of how, at a local level, the Elizabethan state actually operated. 

As historians are now recognising, the theory of ‘monarchical republicanism’ had a long shelf-life. It is still mostly associated with the Elizabethan period and the schemes of William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, for a temporary English republic leading to an elective monarchy, should the Queen fall victim to illness, old age or a Catholic assassination attempt. In these schemes, hatched as early as the 1560s, the political vacuum caused by the Queen’s death would be filled by the Privy Council and a recalled Parliament, acting as a de facto government. A long–term republican vision was completely absent from these schemes — the goal was for the Privy Council to act effectively as a sixteenth- century interview panel, judging appropriately blue-blooded (and Protestant) candidates for the vacant throne. However, as Collinson notes, these schemes still involved radical constitutional alterations, essentially setting preservation of the Protestant religion above observing the line of succession (a point to be revisited with revolutionary consequences in the 1688-9) and transforming England from a hereditary to an elective monarchy. It also had more sustained implications in the sixteenth century in terms of its emphasis upon the need for rulers, especially female rulers, to listen to (predominately male) counsel and govern for the public good. ((P. Collinson, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Elizabeth 1’ Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, LXIX (1987), pp. 394-424 reprinted in J. Guy ed., The Tudor Monarchy (1997) and Collinson, The Elizabethans (2003). For earlier schemes see the work of Steven Alford, The Early Elizabethan Polity: William Cecil and the British Succession Crisis 1558-1569 (Cambridge, 1998) and Alice Hunt, ‘The Monarchical Republic of Mary Historical Journal, 52 (2009), 557-572 available here https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/151567/1/AHunt MonarchicalRepublic. pdf)) The incipient radicalism of ‘monarchical republicanism’ was brought out in the seventeenth century. Variations on this form of thinking can be found in the Levellers’ proto-constitutions, the Agreements of the People, and in the late seventeenth-century writings of the ‘Harringtonian’ Henry Neville in his Plato Redivivus (1681) – a work which called for a limited monarchy supporting a religiously tolerant state. (See G. Mahlberg, ‘Henry Neville and the Toleration of Catholics during the Exclusion Crisis’, Historical Research 83:222 (2010), pp. 617-34; idem, Henry Neville and English Republican Culture in the Seventeenth Century: Dreaming of Another Game. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009)) In both the Levellers’ and Neville’s view, there could be a place for a hereditary monarch as a head of state but this monarchical element would be grafted onto a largely ‘republican’ structure: under both the Levellers’ and Neville’s schemes the king’s prerogative powers would be severely circumscribed while the rights of citizens (especially freedom of conscience) would be constitutional protected against encroachment from either the legislature or the executive. (It is worth stating here that the Levellers’ commitment to monarchy was expedient at best. At other points, Levellers writers expressed deep hostility to the monarchy, an early example of this being Richard Overton and William Waiwyn’s A Remonstrance of Many Thousands of Citizens (1646),p. 5: ‘The continual oppressors of the nation have been kings’. For an electronic version see here: https://www.constitution.org/levieno lev 04.htm) 

The same ideas, as Rachel Hammersley has shown, were also part of the intellectual make-up of the radical Whig ‘commonwealthsmen’ of the early 18thC, as Robert, viscount Molesworth stated: 

‘A true Whig is not afraid of the name of a Commonwealthsman…queen Elizabeth, and many other of our best princes, were not scrupulous of calling our government a Commonwealth, even in their solemn speeches to parliament. And indeed if it be not one, I cannot tell by what name properly to call it: for where in the very frame of the constitution, the good of the whole is taken care of by the whole (as it is in our case) the having a king or queen at the head of it, alters not the case.’ (Quoted in R. Hammersley, The English Republican Tradition and Eighteenth-Century France (Manchester, 2010).p. 15.)

Of course, Thomas Paine did differ from these authors — his advocacy of republicanism was clear and consistent from the publication of Common Sense (1776) onwards. But, even so, he could seemingly engage with this monarchical republican tradition 

in his most famous English political work, Rights of Man pt 1. ‘civil government is republican government. All that part of the government of England which begins with the office of constable. and proceeds through the departments of magistrate, quarter- session, and general assize, including the trial by jury, is republican government. Nothing of monarchy appears in any part of it, except the name which William the Conqueror imposed upon the English, that of obliging them to call him “their Sovereign Lord and King”.’ (Foner, 1, p. 326.) 

To what extent he had been directly influenced in this section of Rights of Man by previous English political works in this vein is not clear. Paine’s mature political thought has usually been presented as the shared inheritance of American and French republicanism. though work on his reading by Caroline Robbins and A. Owen Aldridge suggests an author equally well-read in literary classics. British history and seventeenth and eighteenth century English political thought. (A. O. Aldridge, Thomas Paine’s American Ideology (London, 1984), C Robbins, ‘The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine (1737-1809). Some Reflections upon his Acquaintance among Books’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 127 (1983), pp. 135-142.) Aldridge sees some echoes of Leveller writing in Paine’s American works, though no evidence of direct influence or quotation. The water is muddied further by the work of J. G. A Pocock and, much more recently Rachel Hammersley, which reminds us that both French and American republicanism was itself in debt to the writings of English Commonwealthsmen like Thomas Gordon and Robert Molesworth (quoted earlier). (For Hammersley see earlier refs for Pocock see The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975))

The obvious difficulty with seeing Paine as a ‘monarchical republican’ is his unequivocal attachment to republicanism and his hostility to monarchy. The Commonwealthsmen of the early eighteenth century had been at pains to point out (whether for reasons of self-preservation or out of genuine intellectual commitment) that while they saw intellectual value in republican works such as Algernon Sidney’s Discourses, they did not share that author’s views on monarchy or the legitimacy of the regicide of 1649. After 1776 at least, Paine appears to have held no such reservations. Not only did he attack George Ill as a ‘bad king’ (to use the terminology of 1066 and all that), in Common Sense styling him as the ‘Pharaoh of England’ and ‘the Royal Brute of Britain’, he laid waste to the institution itself. (Foner, I, 25, 29.) For Paine, as Gregory Claeys has noted, hereditary government was tyranny because the principle imposed rulers on future generations without their consent. (G. Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought (London, 1989), p. 72) Paine’s clearly stated antipathy to ‘mixed government’ (as in the British case, King, Lords and Commons) — ‘A mixed Government is an imperfect everything, cementing and soldering the discordant parts together by corruption’, Rights of Man pt 1, Conclusion — was also at clearly odds with the ideas of the ‘Commonwealthsmen.’ (Foner, I, 339.) 

Yet, even given these differences and the difficulties in tracing Paine’s intellectual influences, there are still reasons for thinking that Paine’s intellectual development owed something to this English tradition of ‘monarchical republicanism’. As stated earlier, Collinson identified two types of monarchical republicanism: crudely put monarchical republicanism in theory and monarchical republicanism in practice. As evidence of the latter, Collinson singled out the parish of Swallowfield, in the sixteenth century in Wiltshire but now part of Berkshire, whose chief inhabitants produced their own articles: 

`To the end we may the better & more quietly lyve together in good love & amytie to the praise of God and for the better servynge of her Majesty’ (Quoted in M. J. Braddick, State formation in early modem England c 1500- .1700 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 73.)

The articles themselves were partly drawn up to help resolve the anomalous position of Swallowfield —a parish for administrative purposes in Wiltshire but geographically in Berkshire. This was not a local constitution creating a petty democracy within a monarchy — the articles were clear about the need to maintain social distinctions within the parish, any ‘malapert’ poor who upbraided their betters were to be firmly reprimanded. But it was a document that looked to local co-operation and civic participation to ensure the smooth running of the community without recourse to the heavy-handed instruments of the law. At Swallowfield, then, the name of the Queen, through the operation of her courts, was, as far as possible to be left out of things, just as Paine said it routinely was in the operation of English government in the eighteenth century. (For Swallowfield see Braddick, State Formation, pp. 73-6.)

Swallowfield was an exceptional case, but recent histories of the ‘politics of the parish’ in early modern England have attempted to broaden out this picture of local autonomy and self-government to the nation in general. Mark Goldie produced an important but controversial paper in which he described parish office-holding as the ‘unacknowledged republic’ within the English state. For Goldie, it was office-holding in early modem England (exemplified by Smith’s sub-yeoman class of ale-conners and parish constables) rather than elections (more often than not really the ‘selection’ of MPs by local magnates) which constituted the genuinely participatory element of civic society at this time. (M. Goldie, ‘The Unacknowledged Republic: Office Holding in Early Modem England’, in Harris ed., The Politics of the Excluded c. 1500-1850 , (Basingstoke, 2001) pp. 153-194.) 

Paine, while at Lewes, had first-hand experience of serving in this ‘unacknowledged’ English republic. Since the first hostile biography of Paine appeared in 1791, commentators have noted that Paine sought to reinvent himself as an individual who had only become a writer in America, therefore drawing a veil over his life in England prior to emigration in 1774. However, as A. Owen Aldridge pointed out, many of the ideas in Common Sense and in later works such as Rights of Man pt 2, had previously been aired in his early anonymous contributions to the Pennsylvania Magazine. Prior to this, he had already in England, in the Case of the Officers of the Excise (1772), produced a work that was much more than a merely sectional document, addressing broad themes of poverty and • corruption. More important than these early writings was his work in Lewes as a vestryman and juryman. The transfer to Lewes was significant because of the more open nature of the borough in comparison to his birthplace, Thetford, a town safely in the pocket of its aristocratic patrons, the Graftons. So his experience in Lewes between 1768 and 1774, as detailed in recent work by Colin Brent, George Hindmarch and Paul Myles, much less being one of ‘almost unrelenting failure’, was of exactly the sort of open, active civil society that he would later idealise in Common Sense and associate much more broadly with America. (E. Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (2nd edn., Oxford, 2005), p. 3.) Here, as Colin Brent has aptly put it, in ‘England’s republican government’, was that free human society which he contrasted with that ‘at best necessary evil’, government. (C. Brent, D. Gage and P. Myles, Thomas Paine in Lewes 1768- 1774: A Prelude to American Independence (Lewes, 2009), quoted at p. 14; C. Brent, ‘Thirty something: Thomas Paine at Bull House in Lewes, 1768- 1774 — six formative years,’ Sussex Archaeological Collections, 147 (2009), 153-168.;G. Hindmarsh, The Case of the King of England and his Officers of the Excise (Privately published, 1998))

For Paine it was not a centralist monarchical state which held together society, ‘So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is the dissolution of society, that it acts by a contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together. All that part of its organisation which it had committed to its government, devolves again upon itself, and acts through its medium.’ (Foner, I, 358) 

Rather it was an excess of ‘government’ which led to ‘riots and tumults’, ‘If we look … we shall find, that they did not proceed from the want of a government, but that government was itself the generating cause; instead of consolidating society, it divided it; it deprived it of its natural cohesion, and engendered discontents and disorders, which otherwise would not have existed.’ (Foner, 1, 359)

There remain problems with viewing Paine’s experiences in England, especially Lewes, as well as his English intellectual inheritance as demonstrating the influence of ‘monarchical republicanism’. As noted by Ethan Shagan, much of theory of monarchical republicanism actually cut against the vision of England as a nation of thousands of self-governing, autonomous, parish or borough mini-republics. For many theorists, the drive was for the state to obliterate administrative anomalies like Swallowfield which threatened the reach and uniformity of central administration. (E. Shagan, ‘The two republics: conflicting views of participatory local government in early Tudor England’ in J. F. McDiarmaid ed., The Monarchical Republic of Early Modem England: Essays in Response to Patrick CoMason (Aldershot, 2007), ch. 1.) Similarly, for Paine, England’s ‘rotten boroughs’ contaminated even that part of the state which was supposedly representative of the people, the House of Commons, by denying representation to large sections of the country (notably manufacturing towns such as Manchester) and leaving the rest open to the corrupt influence of aristocratic patrons. 

Yet, fundamentally, Paine’s view of civic society continued to tally with his own lived experience. Constitutions existed in microcosm in voluntary associations such as the Lewes Headstrong Club of which Paine was a member. These self- generating, bottom-up forms of political association demonstrated that high taxation existed not because society required it but because these revenues were necessary to prop a parasitic court and the vast war machine that it directed. In his regard for England’s ‘associational culture’, Paine was, again, in line with much contemporary, polite opinion. (Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800, the origins of an associational world (Oxford, 2002)) As Paine saw it, it was this ability to create clubs and societies to serve a number of social needs that demonstrated that the English were perfectly capable of governing by themselves for themselves. (See for example Foner, 1, 359: “In those associations which men promiscuously form for the purpose of trade, or of any concern, in which government is totally out of the question, and in which they act merely on the principles of society, we see how naturally the various parties unite”)

The posthumous celebration of Paine would prove his own point. In the nineteenth century, radical clubs and societies across Britain would toast the ‘Immortal Paine’ in displays of radical sociability and conviviality which reinforced the political potential of this national trait of ‘club-ability.’ (For some interesting reflections on radical sociability see Christina Parolin’s, Radical Spaces: Venues of popular politics in London, 1790-c. 1845, (AN Li E-press, 2010) available as an electronic book here https://epress.anu.edu.au/apos/bookworm/view/Radical+Spaces % 3A+Venues +of+popular+polltics+in+London,+1790%E2%80%93c.+184512021/ch01.xtrtini) In conclusion, we remember Paine now, as radicals did in the nineteenth century, because he was distinctive — there have been few, if any, English political figures whose republicanism has been so strident and yet who have managed to communicate such a radical ideology (in an English context) to such a wide audience. But that distinctive philosophy and style was not solely the product of his American experiences. England shaped Paine the republican not only because of what he might have read (even between the lines of more orthodox texts), but also because of what he did and how he lived.

The post Thomas Paine and Monarchical Republicanism  appeared first on .

Paine is well known as a writer. His Rights of Man is an incisive critique of monarchy and a passionate advocacy of republican democracy; his Age of Reason from a deist standpoint undermines religious orthodoxy. He is far less well known as a poet. This article seeks to place him in the tradition of English Radical Poetry and compare his work with some of his contemporaries and some of those who came after him. 

In 2005 the Freethought History Research Group and the Thomas Paine Society took the bold step of republishing Miscellaneous Poems Of That Noble of Nature, Thomas Paine, which had first been published by James Watson around 1840. This is a collection of 16 poems of various quality, they deal with subjects ranging from love to the death of General Wolf, and his troubled relationship with George Washington. His best is the Liberty Tree, a song to be sung to the tune of The Gods Of The Greeks. Paine writes : ” But hear o ye swains Ctis a tale most profane)/How all the tyrannical powers/King, Commons and Lords, are uniting amain/To cut down this guardian of ours/From the east to the west blow the trumpet to arms/Through the land let the sound of it flee/Let the far and the near all unite with a cheer/ In defence of our Liberty Tree”.*This pamphlet can still be had from either organization at £2 plus postage.

If English Radical Poetry can be said to have a beginning it is in the work of John Milton ( 1608-1674 ). He was a strong supporter of Cromwell and the Commonwealth and Cromwell’s Latin Secretary of Foreign Tongues. Apart from being a poet he was also a pamphleteer. In 1649 he wrote The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, ” It is lawful”, wrote Milton, “for any who have the power, to call to account a tyrant, or wicked king, and after due conviction, to depose and put him to death…” In 1660 he wrote The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth. But the Establishment, fearing a revival of the revolutionary democratic ideas of the Levellers, had already decided to restore the Stuart monarchy. Milton withdrew from public life and went into hiding. He could have easily suffered the fate of Sir Henry Vane who was executed for regicide. 

In 1667 Paradise Lost was published. This epic poem was written ostensibly from an orthodox Anglican viewpoint but Blake and Shelly felt Milton showed great sympathy for the devil who was seen as an archetypal rebel. Shelly wrote, “Milton stands alone in the age which he illumined.” Blake created illustrations for Paradise Lost and wrote Milton: A Poem. 

William Blake ( 1757-1827 ) was an engraver and poet who was a friend of Shelly and Paine. It is said that it was he who alerted Paine that the authorities were seeking to arrest him on a charge of seditious libel. As it was, Paine was already en route to France having been elected a deputy to the National Convention. Unlike Paine, Blake was not an Enlightenment deist. He was a religious mystic influenced by Emmanuel Swedenborg. His views were not those of orthodox Christianity with its promise of heaven for the rich and hell for the sinful poor, but of a new millennium with sexual and racial equality and justice for all. “My business”, said Blake, “is to create Jerusalem.” In 1791 Blake wrote The French Revolution, A Poem in Seven Books. He is firmly on the side of the revolutionaries. In his Proverbs Of Hell, he wrote Prisons are built with stones of law, Brothels with Bricks of Religion, and “As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys”. Such views bring him near to the anti-clerical millenarian sects of the 17th century. For Blake, “The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction”. 

In the ranks of the tigers of wrath was Percy Shelly (1792-1822). Born into a Whig family, he was expected to inherit the family baronetcy. He was educated at Eton where he read Paine and in 1810 went to Oxford University. He was expelled in 1811 for writing The Necessity Of Atheism. “If the knowledge of a God is the most necessary, why is it not the most evident and the clearest.” This led to a falling out with his father, and an often impoverished and nomadic life. Shelly became friends with William Godwin whose Political Justice is a precursor of Anarchism. Shelley eventually eloped with Godwin’s daughter Mary. Unlike Godwin, Shelley involved himself with the working people around him. In Wales he would often go out at night and have long conversations with the reservoir workers who were forced to grow their own food by moonlight in order to live. 

In an England being rapidly changed by the industrial revolution, Shelly defined slavery thus: “Tis to let the ghost of Gold, Take from toil a thousand fold. More than e’er its substance could. In the tyrannies of old.” Freedom is, “food , clothes and fire and food for the trampled multitude.” He calls for words not deeds. He sent his poem, The Masque of Anarchy with its call to revolution, to his friend Leigh Hunt in 1819. But it was not published until 1831 amid growing demands for reform. Shelly died in a boating accident in Italy. 

Shelly influenced a whole generation of Chartist poets and Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx lectured on his Socialism. Among these poets was John Bedford Lena. Leno was born in Uxbridge in 1826 and came to work in London. He was a Chartist, having founded Chartist branches in Uxbridge and Windsor, and a member of the First International. He met Marx several times and was friends with Deptford’s Red Republican George Hamey. In 1848 he was batoned in the face by the police during demonstrations on Clerkenwell Green. 

When the Reform League to campaign for an extension of the male franchise was formed in 1865 he became a leading member. The League held some of the largest demonstrations, some of them ending in riots, the largest seen since Chartist times. The League qualified its demand for manhood suffrage with the term “registered and residential” thus excluding the unemployed and casual workers. After the Reform Act of 1867, the League’s leader Robert Applegrath literally sold out to the ruling class by taking Home Office bribes to mobilise the new enfranchised working class behind the Liberal Party. Leno became a Liberal election agent for the League’s former General Secretary, George Howell. 

In 1867 Leno and other Reform League members were met by the French revolutionary Gustave Cluseret. Cluseret offered to start a revolution employing the services of 2,000 Fenian Irishmen. Leno declined which was just as well because the next day there was a full report of the meeting in The Times. 

Leno was a prolific poet, The Woolwich Gazette called him the “poet of the poor”. Among his -best known works are King Labour, Judge Not A Man The Song Of The Spade and The Dreamer. Riddled with gout, he spent the last two years of his life in Uxbridge and died in 1894.

It is not known if William Morris (1834-1896) read either Milton or Paine, but his Kelmscott Press produced a magnificent edition of Shelley’s works and he admired John Leno. Morris was born into a prosperous middle class family and was originally destined for the church. His mother had visions of his becoming an archbishop. But after his education at Oxford University he opted for a career of creative design. A polymath he excelled at everything he did from stained glass windows and fabric and wallpaper design to poetry and painting. 

The threat of war brought him into politics and eventually he crossed what he called the river of fire and became a socialist. Peeved with the dictatorial way H. M. Hyndman conducted the affairs of the Social Democratic Federation, together with Eleanor Marx, Belfort Bax and others he broke away and formed the Socialist League becoming editor of its paper the Commonweal. 

For Morris the pioneer socialists, the few against the world today condemned as fools and dreamers would tomorrow be seen as the brave and wise. No mean poet, after the death of Lord Tennyson he was considered for the post of poet laureate. One wonders what he would have written about Queen Victoria, nicknamed by the radicals of the time Empress Brown. His best known socialist poem is the one he wrote for the funeral of Alfred Linnell who was killed during a Trafalgar Square demonstration. Its refrain of “Not one, not one, but thousands must they slay, but one and all if they would dusk the day” hurls defiance in the face of a murderous ruling class. There were many anarchists in the Socialist League and eventually they removed Morris from the editorship of Commonweal. He wrote his futuristic novel News From Nowhere, which gives a glimpse of what a socialistic society might be like and carried on working for a united socialist party in the Hammersmith Socialist Society until his death in 1896. 

What unites all of these poets and countless more are some common themes: opposition to priestcraft and kingcraft, unorthodoxy or event overt atheism, a desire to improve the lot of working people either by radical reform or revolution and visions of a new and better world based on liberty, equality and fraternity. 

The Freethought History Research Group, joint publisher of Paine’s poetry, continues this tradition and has recently published, Ca Ira: Poems to Shake the Walls of Church and State. It includes two poems by Terry Liddle, who is a Thomas Paine Society committee member. It can be had for £3.50 post free from the address above.

The post Paine’s Place In Radical English Poetry  appeared first on .

A summary of the 2010 Eric Paine Memorial Lecture

Two giants dominated English popular radical politics a couple of centuries ago. The two men were William Cobbett (1763-1835) and Henry Hunt (1773-1835). They fought for justice, human rights and a reformed, democratic House of Commons and went to prison because of their beliefs. Both men came from southern England, shared interests in politics and farming and both became fiercely independent MPs for northern constituencies. Hunt was a member of parliament for Preston during the passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, while Cobbett sat in the first reformed House of Commons as a member for Oldham. 

The life of William Cobbett is well documented. Raised at the plough in Farnham in Surrey, he became the greatest radical political writer of the early nineteenth century, the man the essayist William Hazlitt called ‘a kind of fourth estate in the politics of the country.’ Cobbett’s Political Register was published weekly from 1802 until his death in 1835 and was read by everybody from presidents, kings and emperors to poets, soldiers and farm labourers. The establishment press or the ‘reptiles’, as he called them, loathed him. Governments plotted to suppress him and all his works that challenged them at every twist and turn. When Cobbett spoke out against the flogging of soldiers in Ely under the guard of German mercenaries, he was charged with seditious libel, found guilty and jailed in Newgate Prison for two years from 1810 to 1812. Many biographies have been written about William Cobbett and he is celebrated today. 

By contrast, the name of Henry Hunt remains relatively unknown, although he was the greatest political speaker of his times. Derisively dubbed ‘Orator’ Hunt by his enemies and, like Cobbett, vilified and demonised by the establishment, Hunt was the darling of the people. When he spoke at mass public meetings, he attracted huge crowds. He was the first member of parliament to win a seat (for Preston in 1830) on a ticket of one man one vote. Hunt was the star speaker at the great reform meetings of Spa Fields in London in 1816/1817 and what went down in history as the Peterloo Massacre on St Peter’s Field in Manchester on 16 August 1819. The meeting had been called to support a reform of parliament and the abolition of the Corn Laws. Five minutes after it began, it was brought to an abrupt stop when the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry slashed their way into the crowds to arrest Hunt and the men standing with him on the platform. In his book, The Casualties of Peterloo, Michael Bush estimated that the action by the yeomanry, which was backed up by the 15th Hussars, resulted in the deaths of at least eighteen people, while the number of those injured exceeded seven hundred. The perpetrators were never brought to justice and it was Hunt and his co-defendants who were jailed. Hunt was given the longest sentence in the worst jail. He spent two and a half years incarcerated in a dank cell in Ilchester Prison in Somerset where he wrote his Memoirs. 

There have been only two biographies of Henry Hunt. Robert Huish published one the year after Hunt’s death. The second was written by John Beichem. He launched his academic career with his outstanding, political biography of Hunt, which was published in 1985. Belchem’s book dispelled the myth of the violent, argumentative, vain demagogue, the man who wilfully opposed the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832. This was the image of Hunt that has been copied and repeated by historians and essayists through the ages. Beichem portrayed a very different Henry Hunt, the Wiltshire farmer who became a democratic radical, established a mass platform for parliamentary reform and who, alone in the House of Commons argued, quite correctly, that the planned reform bill was a cheat and a sham. Sadly, John Belchem’s biography is out of print. 

What nobody has written about in any depth before is the unlikely but very real political partnership and close friendship between William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. Their relationship lasted in one way or another for thirty years until the deaths of both men in 1835 just four months apart. Nobody has charted its course from close friendship to deadly enmity with the various peaks and troughs in between. Quite simply, nobody was looking out for the story. 

It was Hunt who began it. He became a fan of Cobbett as soon as the latter returned in 1800 from his first period of exile in the newly independent America. There, Cobbett had become the most well-known and controversial of writers and he set out to repeat the act in England. When he launched his weekly Political Register in 1802, Hunt became a loyal reader. He described in his Memoirs how he longed to become acquainted with this most celebrated writer of the day. In typical Hunt style, he took the bull by the horns and went up to London to call on Cobbett. His visit took place in 1805. It was not a particularly productive meeting. Both men took a dislike to each other. Hunt described it in detail in his Memoirs: 

As I walked up Parliament Street, I mused upon the sort of being I had just left, and I own that my calculations did not in the slightest degree lead me to suppose that we should ever be upon such friendly terms, and indeed upon such an intimate footing, as we actually were for a number of years afterwards. It appeared to me that at our first meeting we were mutually disgusted with each other; and I left his house with a determination in my own mind never to see a second interview with him. 

Hunt was indeed quite right in his assessment of Cobbett’s reaction. Cobbett was suspicious of Hunt and thought he was a bad character. He especially took exception to the fact that Hunt had left his own wife and was living with the wife of another man. In 1808, Cobbett wrote a private letter to his publisher, John Wright, warning him not to associate with Hunt: 

There is one BEI, the Bristol man. Beware of him! He rides about the country with a whore, the wife of another man, having deserted his own. A sad fellow! Nothing to do with him. 

Much to Cobbett’s fury, this letter was used against Hunt in the Westminster election of 1818 when Cobbett was in self-imposed exile in America. 

Despite the initial mutual mistrust, however, Hunt persevered at forging a relationship and, despite his letter to Wright of 1808, Cobbett responded. The two men joined forces at political county meetings, taking great delight in bashing the system and baiting both the Whigs and the Tories, the Ins and the Outs, as they called them. Against all the odds, Cobbett the conservative radical, wily, experienced and fiercely independent, became the closest of friends with Hunt the democratic radical, ten years younger and totally new to the game. He addressed Hunt in his private letters as ‘my dear Hunt’. It was the highest compliment Cobbett could pay. 

It is difficult to understand how it all happened. Cobbett was a busy and famous man. Hunt was a minor dabbler in county politics. What was the attraction? Cobbett possibly answered that question himself in his writings from exile in America the second time round between 1817-1819 when he explained why he liked Englishmen best. 

The loud voice, the hard squeeze by the hand, the instant assent or dissent, the clamorous joy, the bitter wailing, the ardent friendship, the deadly enmity All these belong to the characters of Englishmen, in whose minds and hearts every feeling exists in the extreme. 

Cobbett could have been describing himself. He was also consciously or unconsciously describing Henry Hunt. In many ways, despite the difference in age and temperament, the men were very similar, passionate and extreme in everything they did and the way they lived their lives. They also enjoyed a similar sense of humour.

It is a puzzle why the depths of their collaboration and friendship have never been explored before. The clues for it are all there. They can be found in Hunt’s Memoirs and Addresses and scattered through the numerous volumes of Cobbett’s Political Registers. The material is available, although it tends to be tucked away in dusty boxes, on scratched microfilm or hidden on obscure shelves in places like the British Library, the Library of Nuffield College, Oxford, universities in the USA and county record offices. The relationship can also be traced in contemporary comments, caricatures, lampoons, squibs and poetry as well as in diaries and letters, including those mainly from Cobbett to Hunt. Only two letters from Hunt to Cobbett survived. I believe they are the last two letters Hunt wrote to his old friend and political partner. They are doubly important because they reveal why Hunt severed relations with Cobbett. As far as I know, the two letters have never been made public before. When the two men finally fell out just before the Reform Act of 1832, the radical press sighed in oblique references and subtle hints that if only the pair could make it up, radical politics would be stronger for it. United we stand, divided we fall. Like all good stories, the story of Cobbett and Hunt is of contemporary significance. 

When the pair did terminally fall out, it was like a nuclear explosion. After all the wonderful things Cobbett did with and wrote about Hunt, it is hard to read the tearing biting insults he repeatedly hurled against him. Hunt was the GREAT LIAR, the great impudent and ignorant oaf, a shuffling hulk and a carcase which only deserved to be whipped and beaten. After Cobbett wrote about Hunt’s ‘hackerings, the stammerings, the bogglings, the blunderings and the cowerings down’ of the ‘Preston cock’ in the Political Register of 12 February 1831, Hunt hit back in a public Address to Cobbett on ‘the Kensington Dunghill’. It was written in extreme bitterness: 

This backbiter of every man that ever was acquainted with him, the calumniator of every one who ever rendered him a service has thought proper to put forth his impotent venom and to level his cowardly and malevolent attack upon me in an address to you, the People of Preston, in his last lying Register, I feel it a duty … to state the reasons that have caused the wretched creature thus to assail me. 

Hunt went on to do so in ghastly detail. 

This was a relationship that was conducted in the full glare of the public. The late Georgian and Regency public feasted on what the one wrote about the other. It was all there in black and white for everybody to read. There was Cobbett’s wife, Nancy, with her violent hatred of Hunt and her fury at her Billy’s friendship with that bad man. There was also Hunt’s long-time mistress, his beloved, beautiful Mrs Vince, illegitimate granddaughter of a baronet and part of the reason for Nancy Cobbett’s hatred. The press used Mrs Vince as a stick with which to beat Hunt. Legitimate tactics or press intrusion into private life? Cobbett stoutly defended Hunt, adding to his wife’s fury. Yet, everybody was able to read what Cobbett thought of men who dumped their wives and women who slept outside the marriage bed when he later published his Advice to Young Men. He was particularly severe about the women: ‘Here is a total want of delicacy; here is, in fact, prostitution,” he wrote. 

Nancy’s attempted suicide — provoked by the renewal of her husband’s collaboration with Hunt — and the separation of Cobbett from his family were also common knowledge, as was the unfounded accusation made by Nancy that her husband had a homosexual relationship with his secretary. Cobbett’s biographers have largely avoided these matters, maybe out of a desire to protect his reputation or because they found them of no significance or because they believed the incidents were part of Cobbett’s private life and off limits. (Both George Spater and Richard Ingrams touched on the subjects.) Yet all these events sprang out of the relationship between William Cobbett and Henry Hunt and are of relevance in understanding what happened. None of it diminishes either of the men. We stand on the sidelines and admire them even more, for the men they were, for their integrity and determination to do what they believed in, and for their achievements. 

These two men inspired generations. Two weeks after Cobbett’s funeral on Saturday, 27 June 1835 in Famham, the town of his birth, the deaths of both men were mourned and commemorated in a letter published in the Poor Man’s Guardian, one of the radical penny press newspapers. The letter positively remembered the two men in the heyday of their political struggle. It was a tribute from those who would help to carry the torch of reform into the future. The letter was written by the Bradford radical, Peter Bussey, one of the future leaders of the Chartist movement. It was very singular, he wrote, that within the space of a few months, they should lose two of the most staunch Reformers this country ever produced — Henry Hunt, the consistent and uncompromising advocate of equal rights, and the Member for Oldham.’ The pair had stood the test for years, braving ‘the storm of Whig and Tory vengeance.’ They fought and conquered the ‘demon-like power’ of Castlereagh, which had oppressed the country. ‘The base minions in power trembled beneath their castigations’, and the people were awoken from their slumbers. Cobbett and Hunt raised their ‘gigantic powers,’ and governments turned pale. 

Two Cocks on the Dunghill is an account of the personal and political relationship between two great men at a crucial time in history. It is set against the backdrop of the aftermath of the French revolution, the wars with France and the fear of a Jacobin- style revolution in England and the demands for a reformed House of Commons. The issues, arguments and emotions resonate today. The questions raised are ever relevant. How should a government fight against a perceived foreign and home threat of ‘Terror’? When, if ever, should human rights be suspended? What role does the press play? How much integrity can there be in politics and at what cost? Two Cocks on the Dunghill is a story about corruption and greed, compassion and morality, of love, hate, jealousy and scandal and how human beings deal with them. It is also about the courage of individuals against an oppressive state and the triumph of will power and determination in adversity. On one thing I am resolved, namely that, unless snatched away very suddenly, I will not die the MUZZLED SLAVE OF THIS THING!’ wrote William Cobbett in the Political Register. He did not, and nor did Henry Hunt. 

Two Cocks on the Dunghill – William Cobbett and Henry Hunt: their friendship, feuds and fights is written by Penny Young and published by Twopenny Press. Copies may be purchased either from a bookseller for £20.00, or direct from the author at: 2, The Old School, South Lopham, Norfolk, IP22 2HT for £15.00, postage and packing included. Please make cheques payable to the Two Penny Press.

The post William Cobbett And Henry Hunt – The Extraordinary Story Of Their Thirty Year Radical Relationship  appeared first on .

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. 

The post BOOK REVIEW: Transoceanic Radical: William Duane appeared first on .

The 2008 Eric Palme Memorial Lecture 

His creed was – and Thomas Spence had taught it to him – that ‘the Land is the people’s farm’ and that It belongs to the entire nation, not to individuals or classes. Thus did George Julian Harney, one of the pivotal figures of 19thC radicalism, begin a speech to a Chartist meeting in south London in 1845. I am sure I do not need to explain to this audience what Chartism was; but neither Thomas Spence nor Harney may be familiar to you. Born in 1817 on a troopship lying off Deptford, Harney was the son of a naval rating. Too sickly to follow his father to sea, he started his working life as a potboy in a London pub until, aged seventeen, he was taken on by the great radical bookseller and publisher Henry Hetherington. Hetherington was at the height of his influence, publishing the great unstamped weekly Poor Man’s Guardian and the teenage Harney quickly absorbed his employer’s politics. He had only worked there for a few months when, in October 1834, London’s other great radical publisher of the time, Richard Carille, faced financial ruin when his entire stock was confiscated following his -refusal to pay church rates. Harney’s response was to decorate the window of his employer’s shop with grotesque effigies of a Church of England bishop and the Devil. 

Harney was no milk and water radical, demonstrating but never fighting for his beliefs. In the same year as his vivid gesture of support for Carille, he served the first of three prison sentences for selling unstamped newspapers. He was co-founder of what – in effect – was a Painelte club: the London Democratic Association, the largest and liveliest of the capital’s Chartist organisations. From here Harney forged a reputation as one of Chartism’s outstanding national leaders. Then, in 1843, he joined the staff of Northern Star, the mighty Chartist weekly that, at its peak, outsold even The Times (and was thus, by definition, the biggest selling newspaper In history up to that point). As editor of the Star paper, Harney commissioned Frederick Engels to contribute articles on German politics, and he became good friends with both Engels and Marx who, by 1847, was speaking at Harney’s invitation at London Chartist meetings. 

Despite the decline of Chartism, Harney’s career as a campaigning journalist continued. He was still writing a regular column of political comment and reminiscence for the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle when he died, aged 80, in 1897. I detail Harney’s political career because he was a pivotal figure in the history of British radical politics, a man who In his youth was the friend of veterans from the London Corresponding Society (LCS); who went on to become a close associate of Mark and Engels, outlived them both and who was writing newspaper columns into the late 1890s, some readers of which would have lived into the 1950s. One of the things that interests me as a historian is the transmission of political Ideas – not so much through the intellectual analysis of the Influence of one great writer upon another, but rather at the ‘grassroots’ level of day-to-day belief and conviction. Is there, after all, more eloquent testimony to the Importance of Thomas Paine than the words of the almost apoplectic Attorney General at Paine’s seditious libel trial in 1792? ‘In all shapes and in all sizes, with an industry Incredible, it [Rights of Man Part 2] was either totally or partially thrust into the hands of all persons in this country . . . even children’s sweetmeats were wrapped in parts, and delivered into their hands, in the hope that they would read it’. 

So it intrigues me to see a Chartist of Harney’s stature nailing his political colours so firmly to the mast in 1845, not of Thomas Paine but of the other great radical Tom of the 1790s, Thomas Spence. In 1795 Spence, a London radical printer and author, published The End of Oppression, a dialogue ‘between an old mechanic and a young one’. In It he developed a theme to which he would return several times – notably in his pamphlet The Rights of Infants of 1797 – that Paine for all his manifest merits did not go far enough in prescribing what the future shape of society should be.

YOUNG MAN: I hear there is another RIGHTS OF MAN by Spence that goes farther than Paine’s.

OLD MAN: Yet it goes no farther than It ought.

YOUNG MAN: I understand that it suffers no private property in land, but gives it all to the parishes.

OLD MAN: In doing so It does right, the earth was not made for individuals

YOUNG MAN: It is amazing that Paine and other democrats should level all their artillery at kings, without striking like Spence at this root of every abuse and of every grievance.

So this lecture focuses on Spence’s critique of Paine. It’s not my intention to subvert Paine’s place in history and substitute Spence in his stead; but I do argue that an uncritical deference to Paine’s memory all too easily obscures the contribution of others among his contemporaries to radical political thought. In the field of agrarian ideas especially, that is of Ideas concerning the distribution and tenure of landed property, it was Spence not Paine whose influence was the more decisive. I want to trace that influence through to Chartism (and glimpse beyond it too), by considering Spence’s critique of Paine’s Agrarian Justice (1797) and the subsequent reception of that critique, notably Richard Carilie’s.

Spence’s life has never been accorded the scrutiny Paine has enjoyed and a few biographical details may be therefore helpful. He was born in 1750, the son of an impoverished Newcastle fishing net maker. He probably met the future French Revolutionary Jean Paul Marat during the latter’s residence in Britain In 1765-77. But the formative influences on Spence’s distinctive brand of political radicalism were seventeenth-century and Enlightenment ideas, especially the neo-dassical concept of natural law. The young Spence was also shaped by an iconoclastic Calvinism and until his death his political beliefs had a strongly millenarian tone. His critique of private property was qualitatively different from the customary eighteenth-century radical attack on land as inducing effeminate and corrupting luxury, or for having abrogated its reciprocal obligations to society at large. Private property in land, Spence argued, was a wholesale theft, for the loss of which there could be no act of reciprocity – certainly not the system of taxation and pensions proposed by Paine. In terms of the development of natural law theories of property he may not have made a break as decisive as Paine did; but I would argue that this is – literally – an academic issue. Greater historical significance should be attached to the impact of political ideas on contemporary popular political practice and thinking. 

For Spence the original state of nature is a simple axiom and therefore one to which he devotes comparatively little time: 

That property in land and liberty among men, in a state of nature, ought to be equal, few, one would faint hope, would be foolish enough to deny. Therefore, taking this to be granted, the country of any people, In a native state, is properly their common, In which each of them has an equal Property. 

Spence’s idea of an original state of nature owes a little – but only a little – to divine intervention: there are none of Paine’s contortions in accepting this. In fact Spence does not seem to have been very interested in the issue. Instead concentrating on building up extensive moral and political arguments in favour of the community of property (exactly what he means by community of property is a point to which I shall return). For Spence the true significance of the state of nature was wider than that advanced by Paine in Agrarian Justice. It is as much liberty as land which Is Important in this condition, which in Spenceanism is far from being notional. The biblical authority he emphasised was not Genesis, but elsewhere In the Pentateuch in the early Hebrew republic under Moses. The state of nature on which Spence mainly rested his arguments was not the Garden of Eden. Neither was It John Locke’s or some kind of arcadian wilderness. Rather, in the tradition of the civic humanists of the seventeenth century, It was an economic and social democracy In which an active civic life was possible for all: in the Spencean vision of how society should be, ‘each parish is a little polished Athens’. 

Spence therefore rejected any notion of a social contract, arguing that private property in land anathema. ‘Our boasted civilisation Is founded on conquest’; if the ‘country of any people, in A NATIVE STATE is properly their common’, than they jointly reap its fruits and advantages: ‘for upon what must they live if not upon the productions of the country In which they reside? Surely to deny them that right is in effect denying them a right to live?’ It follows from this view that members of any one generation cannot, by personally appropriating the soil, deny rights to that soil to those generations that succeed them. ‘for to deprive anything of the means of living, supposes a right to deprive it of life; and this right ancestors are not supposed to have over their posterity’. 

Here again Spence broke free from the prevailing conception – derived from Locke – of the development of private property in land. And here, too, lies the fundamental difference of his views from those of Paine, in the disavowal that time confers innocence upon private property in land. ‘There is no living but on the land and Its productions, consequently, what we cannot live without we have the same property in as our lives’. It should be noted though, that Spence followed Locke in using the term property to embrace selfhood: ‘what we cannot live without we have the same property in as our lives’. It is this property in one’s own life that is the most important of all property rights, and upon which communal rights of ownership in land are contingent. The so-called `right’ of private property in land is no right at all but its very antithesis: a pretence and usurpation sanctioned only by the apathy or ignorance of the population as a whole about their true rights. Any ascendancy over lands is hence an ascendancy over people. Therefore in Spence’s view the issue of land ownership lay at the root of all social inequality, economic exploitation and injustice. 

In his early works, Spence advanced the argument that the power of education would suffice to secure universal assent to a system of agrarian equality. It was to be some time after he moved to London, and immersed himself in the radical maelstrom of the capital as it reacted to the French Revolution, before Spence sharpened his perception that other – and more direct – means might be needed to persuade land-owners to yield up their property. His perception of the ends, however, was unchanging – a partnership in every community of the residents of all ages and both sexes, equally dividing between them the revenue from the lease of the land to those who actually cultivated it. Restrictions would be placed on the duration of leases, and the size of holdings. Each community would be self-governing, but joined with others in a federation to coordinate the defence of the nation by citizen militias. 

Spence had been a school teacher on Tyneside, but once In London (he moved here In 1788) he devoted himself full-time to radical politics, printing and writing and – his own unique contribution to popular political culture, the manufacture of copper token coins depicting radical icons and figures (including Paine) and inscribed with slogans. From his shop a few hundred yards from what is now Conway Hall, Spence devoted himself to the affairs of the ICS, to whose general executive committee he was a delegate and some of whose publications he printed. In 1793 he was one of a distinguished group of signatories to the Declaration of the Friends of the Liberty of the Press. He was arrested several times, including twice in December 1796 for selling Tom Paine’s Rights of Man. In 1794 Spence was detained without trial for seven months on suspicion of high treason. Imprisonment only had the effect of galvanising him more. Soon after his release he published the pamphlet to which I referred earlier, The End of Oppression. Here Spence re-evaluated the means by which his reforms could be secured and conceded for the first time that compulsion would be necessary. It was at this point that he attacked other reformers (Paine included) for passing over the critical issue of agrarian reform. Not only did Spence now explicitly endorse the use of force to secure radical objectives, he was emphatic that the destruction of the economic basis of political power must be chief among those objectives. It was a controversial and far-reaching step, and it met with considerable opposition among metropolitan radicals. Spence answered with his biting satire Recantation of the End of Oppression, containing this barely-veiled reference to Thomas Paine: 

Adieu then to striving against the stream, since the readiest way to get to port is to go with it. So here goes, my boys, for an estate and vassals to bow to mei Who would not be a gentleman and live without care! Especially a democratic gentleman without a king. Avaunt rights of man! I am henceforth a democrat, but no leveller. 

Spence further developed his critique of Paine in The Rights of Infants (1797). It also contained an extensive argument in favour of women’s rights, including the vote. This concern to widen the constituency of radical politics was also reflected in his continuing preoccupation with education and it was as an educator and author that he was mainly content to concentrate his energies. However from the beginning of the nineteenth century until his death In 1814, Spence attracted a small but loyal circle of followers, the Spencean Philanthropists. His book The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State, published in 1801, the year the Spencean Philanthropists were founded, again reiterated the justice of applying force to secure reform, this time invoking the examples of the American and French Revolutions and the British Naval Mutinies of 1797. For this he was arrested and tried for seditious libel. William Cobbett attended his trial: `he had no counsel and insisted that his views were pure and benevolent. . . He was a plain, unaffected, inoffensive-looking creature. He did not seem at all afraid of any punishment, and appeared much more anxious about the success of his plan than about the preservation of his life’. 

Spence was jailed for a year. It ruined him financially. On his release he resumed bookselling from a barrow, usually stationed in Oxford Street and more enterprisingly sometimes in Parliament Street, Westminster. But the Spencean Philanthropists continued to meet and were responsible for a flurry of publications in which their leader’s ideas were further refined to embrace forms of public ownership for ‘Shipping, Collieries, Mines and Many other Great Concerns’. It was they who organised Spence’s funeral in 1814.It Is clear from the Spence’s Recantation of the End of Oppression, that his very real admiration for Paine was tinged by envy – and this even before Paine’s Agrarian Justice was published. The latter served only to strengthen Spence’s conviction that republicanism alone would not suffice to secure real justice. The very name of its author secured for Agrarian Justice an audience far beyond Spence’s vainest hopes. One senses a certain righteous indignation that Paine (for selling whose publications Spence had after all been twice Imprisoned) should venture upon specifically agrarian reform entirely without reference to him. We can only conjecture how far – if at all – Paine was acquainted with Spenceanism. 

Like Spence, Paine postulated the historical reality of the state of nature, in which the right of every individual to an equitable share of the soil was absolute; both believed that such a situation was still obtained among North American aboriginal peoples. In such a state, Paine points out, there were none of, 

…those spectacles of human misery which poverty and want present to our eyes In all the towns and streets of Europe. Poverty therefore is a thing created by that which is called civilized life. It exists not in the natural state. 

Spence and Paine therefore shared their primary supposition: but thenceforward their proposals diverged. Paine does not countenance the real yet figurative state of nature that Spence sought to restore. On the contrary, he held that, it is never possible to go from the civilised to the natural state’, because the latter was Incapable of supporting the level of population that, through manufactures and commerce, could in civilisation. 

The problem as Paine perceived it therefore was not really agrarian at all: it was one of poverty. ‘I am’, he declared, ‘a friend to riches because they are capable of doing good. I care not how affluent some may be, provided that none be miserable in consequence of it’. Thus it was that he posited in Agrarian Justice that all landowners should pay ‘to the community a ground-rent’, to be accumulated in a national fund. From the latter every person reaching the age of 21 would receive a bounty of ‘Fifteen Pounds Sterling, enabling him, or her, to begin In the World’; and all persons aged fifty and over would receive an annuity of £10, ‘to enable them to live in Old Age without Wretchedness, and go decently out of the world’. Having made this postulation, virtually the rest of Agrarian Justice is devoted to the arithmetic of the proposal – calculations no more or less spurious than those which feature in the writings of other reformers – Cobbett, say on how the population of early C19th England was declining, or Robert Owen on how much more productive the soil can be If ploughs were abandoned in favour of spade husbandry. 

Paine’s proposals had sufficient in common with Spenceanism for Spence to feel perhaps that his Ideas were In danger of being eclipsed. But mainly Spence was irked by Paine’s refusal to return to first principles and disavow that the passing of time rendered private property in land morally innocent. Agrarian Justice would extend no democratic control over the land, and no opportunity for the landless to return to it should they so wish. In Spence’s view, Paine’s plan would effectively reinforce the landed interest by incorporating it into a centralised state system of welfare payments. 

Under the system of Agrarian justice, the people will, as it were, sell their birthright for a mess of porridge [sic], by accepting a paltry consideration in lieu of their rights. . . . The people will become supine and careless in respect of public affairs, knowing the utmost they can receive of the public money. 

This was a major issue for Spence, the latter-day civic humanist in each of whose little polished Athens’ there would be extensive public participation in the processes of government He was quick to point out that Paine’s version of Agrarian Justice would give use to ‘the sneaking unmanly spirit of conscious dependence’. In Spence’s opinion, his own plan would be an incentive to vigilance over public expenditure, necessitating parliamentary democracy and stimulating education. His greatest fear was that Paine’s vision of Agrarian Justice would deteriorate into a placebo for social ills, masking the continuation of oppression. For Spence, the distribution of property, rather than political systems in themselves, determines the real character of a nation and the liberties it enjoys. ‘What does it signify whether the form of government be monarchical or republican while (landed) estates can be acquired?’, he demanded. 

This critique of ‘Paine and other democrats who level all their artillery at kings’ Is essentially a civic humanist one. Indeed, it is the formative thinker of British civic humanism, the philosopher James Harrington, whom Spence quotes more frequently than any other author in his writings. If there is a pivotal transitional figure in the development of radical ideas about property It is Spence, not Paine. The hitter’s Agrarian Justice represents at most a fine-tuning of the secularisation of natural law arguments. It is doubtful what impact – if any – these actually had. In the nineteenth century Agrarian Justice received little attention other than as a coda to its author’s earlier and more significant works. It was not reprinted after the 1790s until William Sherwin’s edition in 1817; Guide produced another (1819). It then lay dormant until the 1830s. 

Why this neglect? Great as his reputation as a democrat and polemicist was, Paine’s Agrarian Justice is deficient as an argument for land reform. Its most eye-catching proposal, for old age pensions, simply repeats without much elaboration remarks he had made in Rights of Man Part 2. Its fiscal proposals, concentrating as they are due on death duties, are arguably less radical in scope and intent than the progressive taxation proposed In Rights of Man. Paine’s Agrarian Justice was markedly less-Innovative in character than the work of Thomas Spence, and it was less-precise In identifying the roots of injustice – all this without the compensatory merit of being any more plausible or practicable. Arguably, it reveals an estrangement between its author and English popular radicalism, the consequences maybe of its author’s years of exile. This so-called agrarian reform, doing nothing to reduce the power of the landed interest, attracted little attention other than on account of its author. It was Spence’s agrarianism which more commonly informed theory and practice in the early labour and radical movements. This is evident even in the writings of Richard Carille, where Paine’s writ might have been assumed to have prevailed. 

For example in November 1822 Cartile, in an extensive review and critical development of an otherwise obscure pamphlet on taxation reform, rejected its argument that financial investments should alone be subject to taxation, thus creating an equitable tax that would avoid discriminating against the poor whilst taxing only those able to pay. CarHie was not opposed to implementing a socially progressive tax regime; but he argued that to base a so-called `equitable tax’ on investment in the funds would Ipso facto be an affirmation of the legal and moral right to such property. Carifie opposed this: ‘land, and land only’, he argued, was ‘the only tangible property’. The only sensible, and morally defensible, equitable tax would be ‘the Spencean plan . . certainly the most simple and most equitable system of society and government that can be imagined’. The Spencean plan, Cattle continued, had been run down by its critics without proper examination. It was eminently suited to immediate adoption by the emerging republics of Latin America but it was vain, he went on, ‘to urge it against the prejudices of those who have established properties in this country’. 

Instead, Cattle argued for a single equitable tax on land as the most effective social and financial strategy for a reformed parliament to pursue. The owners of large estates, much of them unproductive shooting land or parkland, would be forced either to give them up or turn them over to productive cultivation in order to meet the burden of the tax. This incentive to full cultivation was in turn a guarantor of greater employment, which would in turn increase demand for goods and produce that – because no longer taxed – would be more affordable. 

Thereafter the ‘equitable tax’ would be a recurrent feature of Carfile’s political thinking. And whenever he returned to the land question, he would cite Thomas Spence as his prime authority, reiterating the merits of equitable taxation: 

The sentiment of Thomas Spence, that THE LAND IS THE PEOPLE’S FARM, is incontrovertible by any other argument than that of the sword. The land cannot be equitably divided among the people; but all rent raised from it may be made public revenue, and to save the people from taxation. 

The case against agrarian monopoly and usury . . . the two master evils of society’ was one of the few economic issues (perhaps the only one?) Carlfie consistently advocated across his long and turbulent career. Indeed, this was the economic policy that sat alongside his advocacy of Paineite republicanism in the political arena. Less than four years before his death, Celine engaged the Chartist leader Bronterre O’Brien in a heated exchange on agrarian reform: 

Here is a subject worth thinking, worth talking, worth wilting, worth printing, worth a Convention. Universal Suffrage, in the present state of mind, and church, and kings, and priests and lords, is all humbug and trickery compared to it. 

And he concluded by repeating the ‘People’s Farm shibboleth’, concluding, ‘I am for getting the rent paid to the right landlord’. 

This is an instructive moment in the history of radicalism. Richard Garble, perhaps Paine’s foremost disciple, urged the nascent Chartist movement to abandon universal suffrage in favour of Spencean land reform. Carlile had republished Agrarian Justice but, clearly, he regarded Spenceanism as the more authoritative marker on the issues of agrarian and fiscal reform and – no less-crucially – more-familiar to his readership. It seems reasonable to conclude that CarlIle regarded Spencean theories as central to the pedigree of radical ideas about property and taxation in a way that Paine’s were not. 

In doing so Carille was not alone, as I indicated when I begun with Hamey’s tribute to Spence and the concept that ‘the land is the people’s farm’. Robert Owen recounted with pride in his autobiography how he was once mistaken for Spence. Francis Place, architect of the repeal of the Combination Acts which had made trade unions Illegal between 1798 and 1824, endorsed the views ‘of my old and esteemed friend . . . making the whole country the people’s farm’. The innovative thought of Thomas Spence on the issue of land reform was a bench-mark to which subsequent radicals (and sometimes their opponents) often referred. Among opponents, for example, Thomas Malthus singled out Spence for special criticism in the extensively revised 1817 edition of his Essay on Population. And John Stuart Mill warned of the dangers of falling ‘into the vagaries of Spenceanism’. Marx enlisted Spence in his German Ideology. Beyond Chartism, Spencean Ideas became a point of reference for a variety of reformers, including the pioneer of the Garden City movement, Ebenezer Howard. The rediscovery of Spence by H. M. Hyndman was especially significant. In 1882, at the insistence of Henry George, Hyndman republished what he described as ‘Spence’s practical and thoroughly English proposal for nationalisation of the land’. This was the first of three important late nineteenth-century reprints of Spence, the others being the Initiatives of the English Land Restoration Society in 1896, and the Independent Labour Party Labour Leader in 1900. 

But it Is within Chartism that Spence’s influence was particularly influential and this, I suggest is significant because – with over 3 million supporters at its zenith, the Chartist movement was (as it remains) one of the high points in the history of British popular politics. It was in effect Britain’s civil rights movement, and we should not let its concentration upon securing the vote for men alone obscure the fundamental challenge that it posed to the political establishment of early Victorian Britain. And that establishment, of course, was still overwhelmingly a landed one. 

Throughout the years after his death, former members of the Spencean Philanthropists were pivotal figures in London radical politics. For example, the London Democratic Association, the organisation that absorbed G J Harney’s earliest Chartist energies counted among its members several influential Spenceans, including Spence’s biographer, the poet and early socialist Allen Davenport, and the Brick Lane tailor turned radical bookseller Charles Hodgson Neesom (who, in 1847, would go on to be a founding member of Britain’s first ever Vegetarian Society). The young Harney was profoundly influenced by the Spencean generation and In turn – disseminated awareness of Spence through the Northern Star. Studies of Chartist attitudes to landed property have overwhelmingly focused upon its Land Plan, a remarkable (though, sadly, also remarkably flawed) initiative to settle its members on the land in cottage smallholdings. It speaks volumes for the extent of popular interest in agrarian reform that the Land Plan could mobilise well over 70,000 subscribers in the teeth of the economic crisis of 1847-1848. 

But the sheer scale of the land plan has obscured the extent to which agrarian ideas were central to all currents within Chartism. Furthermore, historians traditionally have had difficulty reconciling the sturdy possessive individualism of the Plan with those other arguments within the same movement, for public ownership of the soil. Chartists advanced arguments for, variously, forcible re- appropriation, land and building societies, a free market in landed property, deeply radical taxation regimes and, from 1850, `the Charter and something more’ (a social democratic programme with land nationalisation at its heart). 

Yet three common elements underpinned them all. First was an outright hostility to large accumulations of landed property, irrespective of the legal form in which they might be held. Thus, secondly, Chartism was suspicious of the central government as the putative owner or manager of the national estate. Thirdly, all Chartist conceptions of the reform of landed property shared a ‘way of seeing’ land that was shaped by ideas of shared access, usage and control rather than by possessive individualism. These three elements very much encapsulate the essence of Spence’s thinking. 

A powerful adjunct to this argument was that – of all methods of organising land holding – smallholding maximised the productivity return from labour input Into the soil. This in turn would alleviate poverty by widening employment opportunities and the production of plentiful food countering the spectre of starvation, so frequently used by Whig Malthusians to justify the reform of the poor law. This notion was itself powerfully rooted in contemporary idealization of spade husbandry (just about the only principle held consistently and unanimously by three of the greatest figures of early 19th century radicalism, William Cobbett, Robert Owen and Feargus O’Connor). Even Bronterre O’Brien, the Land Plan’s fiercest critic from within the Chartist movement, eulogized smallholding. 

The development of arguments favouring large-scale collective farming was an ideological Rubicon that none of the Chartists ever crossed. Land nationalisers and Land Planners alike favoured small- scale cultivation. Support for land nationalization certainly did not equate with any interest in the collectivization of agriculture. For the Chartists, suspicion of centralizing state power was a leitmotif. This, like the promotion of the smallholding ideal, was one of the elements that bound together supporters of the Land Plan with its critics in the movement. And it was an element which acted to curtail enthusiasm for land nationalization, because the mechanism needed to administer the national estate was essentially incompatible with the Chartist concept of light government nationally and significant local autonomy. The main Chartist land nationaliser, Bronterre O’Brien’s response to this was to argue (just as Thomas Spence had done) in favour of local community control, once the nationalisation of property in soil had been secured by nationwide legislation. 

For Chartists of every persuasion, the first duties of a reformed parliament would include land reform. For, to quote the movement’s great newspaper Northern Star once more: 

Monopoly of land is the source of every social and political evil . . . every law which ‘grinds the face of the poor’ has emanated from time to time from this anomalous monopoly . . . our national debt, our standing army, our luscious law church, our large police force, our necessity for ‘pauper’ rates, our dead weight, our civil list, our glorious rag money, our unjust laws, our game laws, our impure magistracy, our prejudiced jury system, our pampered court, and the pampered menials thereunto belonging, are one and all so many fences thrown round the people’s inheritance. 

The land plan’s presiding genius and Chartism’s greatest leader, Feargus O’Connor, specifically interweaved mechanisation into this catalogue of injustice: 

What is the loud demand of the working people for a plain, simple, and efficient PLAN for practical operations on THE LAND, but the effort of man to regain his natural position, from which he has been dislodged by the combined operations of high-taxation, paper-money, and an unduly- hot-bed-forced amount of manufacturing machinery? 

This abiding perception of history as a continuing decline in the people’s fortunes re-echoes both Spence and William Cobbett and it had an important impact on Chartist Ideology. It meant that even within the deepening economic problems of the 1840s, an agrarian analysis of contemporary problems – and an agrarian prescription for them – was not redundant. The key social problem that Chartists perceived was not so much a society that was rapidly industrialising, but a society that was increasingly divided (politically, socially and economically) between rich and poor. 

To sum up, then. All Chartists agreed that land reform would be a political, economic and social imperative for a reformed parliament. There was virtual unanimity that the basis on which land should be held for cultivation must be that of smallholdings and small farms. The emergence of arguments in favour of land nationalization was attenuated by a continued disposition in favour of small-scale ownership (which In time meant ex-Chartists were a significant element with the emergence of building societies). The concept of land nationalization was also constrained by suspicion of the State and its centralizing tendencies. 

Was there a single defining feature of the various Chartist positions on land reform? I would argue there was, and I would describe it as neo-Spencean. It is a commonplace of Chartist historiography that the movement appealed particularly to displaced domestic outworkers such as handloom weavers. A disposition towards small-scale production is evident too in Chartist agrarian ideology. The movement’s overarching political outlook privileged issues of equity and access over that of public ownership. Access to – and control of – the land, rather than the democratization of ownership itself, was the essential basis from which all Chartist land reform emerged. The ostensibly Janus-headed stance of the Chartists, at once critical of private ownership of the soil and yet zealous In promoting smallholdings, ceases to be problematic once we register that the key issue for all Chartist land reformers was access to – rather than direct ownership of – the land. 

And so in conclusion I return to where this lecture began, with George Harney, the main architect of the 1851 ‘Charter and something more’ social democratic programme, telling his audience of Londoners: ‘His creed was – and Thomas Spence had taught it him – that “the Land is the people’s farm”, and that it belongs to the entire nation, not to individuals or classes’. When Spence spoke of ‘the real rights’, or ‘the whole rights’ of man, he was signalling that the profoundly radical prescriptions of Thomas Paine had to become more radical still. Republicanism, even accompanied by a fiscal regime of progressive taxation, would not alone suffice to restore humanity to the natural state Spence believed possible and necessary. In Chartism’s emphatic drive for radical parliamentary reform, we can see the working out of Paineite thinking. And in the same movement’s impulse towards agrarian reform, we can see the working out of Spencean thinking. Tom Paine and Tom Spence walked with the Chartists: both should walk with us still today.

The post Paine, Spence, Chartism And ‘The Real Rights Of Man’ appeared first on .

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.

The post BOOK REVIEW: Thomas Paine His Life, His Time and The Birth of Modem Nations appeared first on .

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.

The post Paine’s Influence On 19th And 20th Century Radicals, Secularists And Republicans  appeared first on .

Contested Sites, Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell. 192pp. Illustrated. Hardbound. Ashgate, 2004. ISBN 0 7546 3229 6. £45.00

Britain’s towns and cities are littered with memorials to those we are supposed to consider as the great and the good. Whether most of those they commemorate can really be described as great is debatable, while the designation as good is highly subjective. Amongst this mass of monuments are to be found a handful dedicated to radicals and reformers, many of whom suffered appallingly at the hands of the aforesaid ‘great and good”. The accounts as to how these radical monuments came to be erected, or not erected, can be quite fascinating as the essays in this book show. 

Contested Sites consists of seven essays compiled by Pickering and Tyrrell along with Michael David, Nicholas Mansfield and James Walvin, their titles being, ‘Bearding the Tories: The Commemoration of the Scottish Political Martyrs of 1793-94’; ‘A Grand Ossification: William Cobbett and the Commemoration of Tom Paine’; Radical Banners as Sites of Memory: The National Banner Survey’; ‘The Chartist Rites of Passage: Commemorating Feargus O’Connor’; Preserving the Glory for Preston: The Campo Santo of the Preston Teetotallers’, and, ‘Whose History Is It? Memorialising Britain’s Involvement in Slavery’. An opening chapter, ‘The Public Memorial of Reform: Commemoration and Contestation’, presents an overview of the book’s theme. 

Perhaps the chapter which will probably first attract those interested in Thomas Paine is that by Paul A. Pickering which presents an account of a failure by William Cobbett to carry through a plan to have a major monument erected in England commemorating Paine, which was his excuse for exhuming his remains. Pickering’s detailed analysis of what occurred after the remains arrived in England and Cobbett’s efforts to carry out his aim makes for absorbing reading. The author draws attention to Cobbett’s hostility to many of Paine’s ideas, notably his republicanism and views on religion, nor can the suspicion be escaped that he also used Paine’s political reputation in furthering his own reputation by finding a ready body of support amongst the radicals who had been inspired by Paine.

Pickering also mentions the reaction against Paine, even amongst those who shared his political ideas, created by The Age of Reason, stating, “most contemporaries (and historians, if they discuss it at all) agreed that it was Paine’s hostile attitude to religion that doomed [Cobbett’s] campaign to commemorate him with a monument to failure”. There is a great deal of weight in this, as Chapman Cohen pointed out many years ago in a booklet he wrote about Paine, but Paine was not hostile to religion, and here I feel the author has managed to confuse his opposition to the concept of personal revelation and the use of the idea to establish a system of belief. In fact, Paine actually invented a religion, which he called Theophilanthropy. 

There is a strong Painite element in the story of the five Scottish martyrs as told by Alex Tyrrell and Michael T. Davis in their essay about the events and ideas behind the plan for and eventual building of Edinburgh’s Martyrs Memorial. Of the many interesting facts they record is that three of those commemorated were actually English! The authors say their contribution is an attempt to “rescue the Martyrs’ Monument from neglect and misunderstanding by demonstrating its important symbolic role in the political struggles of the second quarter of the nineteenth century”, and how it brought Scottish and English reformers together. Now, though,” they suggest, “it is assuming a new form of symbolism, namely a stress on Scottish national identity”. If they are correct, then I personally consider such a trend to be retrogressive. 

There is another smaller memorial to the five, also an obelisk, in Nunhead Cemetery in London, which they illustrate with a 19th century engraving. This may be said to compliment the Edinburgh obelisk and also to transcend nationalism. Controversy surrounded the plans for the erection of the Edinburgh monument almost from the inception of the idea to have one, and this side of the saga is brought out in detail by the authors. The story of the controversy reminded me of that which broke out in Thetford in the early 1960s when a statue of Paine was offered to the town. 

Perhaps the most unusual monument described in this book is the teetotallers’ monument in Preston and its associated burial ground, which is to be found in the town’s General Cemetery, though it is hardly an inspiring sight now. Preston, it seems, had the reputation, if the author of the essay Alex Tyrrell, is to be believed, and I found no reason to doubt his contention, as being the national hub for the missionary endeavours of the teetotal movement, however, as I cannot really do justice to this chapter in a short review, I shall simply say his narrative reveals a somewhat strange saga that is likely to come as something of a surprise to many students of Britain’s radical history. 

In his essay on radical and trade union banners, Nicholas Mansfield presents details of a national survey, which seeks to locate and record the surviving banners. He discusses the reasons for them and their changing imagery. They were in essence a form of pictorial propaganda displayed proudly at demonstrations and parades. At one time May Day parades were awash with them, but we now we see fewer and fewer of them, perhaps this is symptomatic of the decline in the number of trade union branches as the unions have centralized their organisational structures. The preservation and recording or surviving banners froM our political past is important. 

The chapter titled ‘The Chartist Rites of Passage: Commemorating Feargus O’Connor’, also contributed by Paul A. Pickering, is primarily a description of two monuments to him, one, a Gothic obelisk in London, the oiler a statue in Nottingham. The campaigns to raise the finance for them, particularly that in the capital, along with the inevitable controversies the proposed monuments gave rise to, are retailed in detail. In Nottingham, the opposition was political, but tactically concealed by being represented as concern over erecting it in a public park known as Arboretum. However, the statue was eventually placed there and can be seen to this day, although how many of those who use the park for recreation, or as a convenient right of way, know anything about the person commemorated, or of Chartism, is debatable. 

The final essay commences with reference to the unveiling of a monument to Thomas Clarkson in Westminster Abbey, although Clarkson, as is pointed out by the authors, Alex Tyrrell and James Walvin, had no desire to be commemorated there. He was a radical whose reputation has been unjustly eclipsed by that of Wilberforce, for whom he appears to have acted as a sort of researcher. His opinions were of the radical Quaker variety, and he was the author of a three-volume work on Quakerism published in 1806. Nor was he, unlike Wilberforce, indifferent to the fate of the free white “slaves’ labouring in English factories. In respect to Wilberforce, the authors quote approvingly E.P. Thompson’s assertion that he, ‘turned the humanitarian tradition into a counter- revolutionary creed and left it warped beyond recognition”. 

Contested Sites deserves a wide readership. It contains much I found new and it has prompted me to wonder what other radical monuments lurk forgotten around the country and also what might be said to constitute one. Perhaps here we have a neglected area of research for local historians. If I have any reservations about this book it is the price, this may prevent many who would benefit from reading it doing so. One might hope, then, that public libraries will stock it, but tight local authority purse strings might well prevent many doing so.

The post BOOK REVIEW: Contested Sites, Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain appeared first on .