I first opened the pages of EP Thompson’s
Making of the English Working Class
On my 21st birthday in 1972:
It seemed to sit quite easily along
With the glass bottomed pewter tankard –
A traditional 21st father-son present back then:
Key of the door and welcome at the local too;
The glass bottom so I could see the King’s shilling,
And escape enlistment in some past imperial war –
The tankard now holds used paint brushes in the shed,
But the book sits on my shelf like a Bible:
But it wasn’t just the text that changed my life,
It was the picture on the cover of the labourer,
Foregrounded in late summer contentment,
Basket of blackberries, billy cock hat,
Puffing Billy, Locomotion, or some such,
Steaming and smoking along behind …
Like any sacred text, it is a product of its time,
But today, in 2019, I return to its pages,
Church bells ringing as I sit in the garden,
Hot on the trail of John Thelwall,
Like some government spy, checking the index,
To find, initially, this strange amalgam
Of Foucaultian-Augustan-Post Modernist-self-reflexive text:
Thelwall’s record of his Privy Council interrogation,
In the presence of no lesser personages
Than Prime Minister William Pitt,
The Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor …
‘ATTORNEY-GENERAL [piano]. Mr Thelwall, what is your Christian name?
T. [somewhat sullenly]. John.
ATT. GEN. [piano still] … With two l’s at the end or with one?
T. With two – but it does not signify. [Carelessly, but rather sullen, or so.] You need not give yourself any trouble. I do not intend to answer any questions.
PITT. What does he say? [Darting round, very fiercely, from the other side of the room, and seating himself by the side of the CHANCELLOR.]
LORD CHANCELLOR [with silver softness, almost melting to a whisper]. He does not mean to answer any questions.
PITT. What is it? – What is it? – What? [fiercely] … ‘
The Privy Council’s record differs from the account of Thelwall’s Tribune 4th April 1795:
‘Being asked by the Clerk of the Council how he spelt his Name – Answered: He might spell it according to his own discretion for that he should answer no Questions of any kind …’
‘Whatever’ is what we might say today,
And, whatever, Thelwall was one of a dozen
Sent to the Tower and then Newgate,
With a possible sentence of hanging,
Drawing, beheading and quartering
Waiting in the wings –
And yet, with perfect complacency,
Despite some confinement in the charnel-house,
Citizen John composed a series of reflective lines,
Poems Written in Close Confinement in the Tower and Newgate,
This Thelwallian fragment self-limns:
‘Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom
The Patriot still, with dauntless breast,
The cheerful aspect can assume –
And smile – in conscious Virtue blest!’
The late autumn of 1795
Saw Citizen John’s charismatic command
Of rhetoric in action again,
At Copenhagen Fields, Islington,
This time using his voice rather than pen,
To inspire and enthuse a mass-meeting
Of perhaps 100,000 souls:
‘The whole nation’ would be unified:
‘Combined in one grand political Association, or Corresponding Society,
from the Orkneys to the Thames, from the Cliffs of Dover to the Land’s End.’
Citizen John was at pains to keep matters peaceful,
But he was singled out after subsequent riots
(200,000 in the London streets!
‘Down with Pitt!’ ‘No War!’ ‘No King!’),
The Seditious Meetings Act and the Gagging Act followed,
And a particular and pointed clause,
Allowing the closure of lecture-rooms,
If deemed ‘disorderly houses’ –
This was aimed directly at John Thelwall …
‘The Jacobin fox’ tried to evade the hunt
By using Ancient Rome as a political allegory,
But further persecution followed,
Tribune was closed down and silenced,
Citizen John was assaulted by armed sailors,
When on a lecturing tour in East Anglia …
But who can forget sentences such as:
‘ancient abuses are not by their antiquity converted into virtues’,
Or,
‘Pitt has neglected, and by his wars and consequent taxes,
oppressed the poor, to secure his popularity among the rich’.
He had been singled out with that clause,
For from his quondam lecturing base
At Beaufort Buildings in the Strand,
And from the pages of Tribune,
His lectures fused together
The oral and the textual,
The page and the stage,
In a rather more formal version
Of Thomas Spence’s ‘free and easies’, in some ways –
Thelwall may not have been a Spencean,
But he could assert in the Rights of Nature
That there was more to changing society
Than Tom Paine’s Rights of Man:
‘I affirm that every man, and every woman, and every child, ought to obtain something more, in the general distribution of the fruits of labour, than food, and rags, and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it; and that, without working twelve or fourteen hours a day … from six to sixty. – They have a claim, a scared and inviolable claim … to some comfort and enjoyment … to some tolerable leisure for such discussions, and some means of or such information as may lead to an understanding of their rights …’
But further persecution, and a blind eye
Turned by JPs to attacks by
‘sailors, armed associates and … dragoons’,
Allied to a well justified and growing paranoia
About spies and informants in coffee house or tavern:
‘Some strange but well-dressed man would seat himself on the opposite side of my box’,
All helped lead Samuel Taylor Coleridge
To accept a visit from ‘intrepid, eloquent, and honest’
John Thelwall, to Nether Stowey,
In the summer of 1797,
‘… it would be sweet
With kindly interchange of mutual aid
To delve our little garden plots, the while
Sweet converse flow’d, suspending oft the arm
And half-driven spade, while, eager, one propounds
And listens one, weighing each pregnant word,
And pondering fit reply …’
(That’s John Thelwall, not Coleridge btw) …
But spies were hotfoot to Nether Stowey too,
Following that ‘little stout man
with dark crop of hair and … white hat’,
And so John Thelwall wrote thus:
‘Ah! let me then, far from stressful scenes of public life …
Ah! let me, far in some sequester’d dell,
Build my low cot! most happy might it prove,
My dear Samuel! near to thine, that I might oft
Share thy sweet concourse, best belov’d of friends’;
But Coleridge, feeling the hot breath of spies,
Wrote thus:
‘at present I see that much evil and little good would result from your settling here’;
Whilst, as for William Wordsworth,
He no longer found it
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven’ …
His views on the French Revolution had shifted:
‘… all was quieted by iron bonds
Of military sway. The shifting aims,
The varied functions and high attributes
Of civil action, yielded to a power
Formal, and odious, and contemptible …’
(Exeat John Thelwall)
Thelwall would visit Stroudwater
On his way to secluded, sequestered Llyswen
Where Wordsworth met Thelwall for the last time,
A meeting that would lead to the description
Of the Solitary in The Excursion –
Some Solitary!
He never forgot his earlier communal self
(This wasn’t some Et Ego in Arcadia oblivion,
He was back in London in the next decade,
Voice and pen well honed for the struggle),
And nor should we,
So we conclude with these lines from Rights of Nature 1796:
‘I adopt the term Jacobinism without hesitation – 1. Because it is fixed upon us, as a stigma, by our enemies … 2. Because though I abhor the sanguinary ferocity of the late Jacobins in France, yet their principles … are the most consonant with my ideas of reason, and the nature of man, of any that I have met with … I use the term Jacobinism simply to indicate a large and comprehensive system of reform, not professing to be built upon the authorities and principles of the Gothic customary.’
‘Monopoly, and the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands … carry in their own enormity, the seeds of cure … What-ever presses men together … though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.’