A Pedestrian Excursion Through Several Parts of England and Wales
John Thelwall’s account of his rambles
Between the years of the naval mutinies
of 1797 and the 1801 Peace of Amiens:
‘The cottages in general, are small, wretched and dirty. Some of them are built of brick, others are plastered and may exhibit nothing but miserable mud walls, equally naked without and within. They are wretchedly and scantily furnished; and few have even the advantage of a bit of garden. To complete the catalogue of misery, there is a workhouse in the parish, in which a number of deserted infants are consigned to captivity and incessant application…’
And even though Citizen John was being pursued,
Followed and shadowed by spies,
With consequent anxiety,
Thelwall could still write that …
‘The vivacity of conversation made the miles pass unheeded under our feet. We canvassed various subjects of literature and criticism, the state of morals and the existing institutions of society. We lamented the condition of our fellow-beings, and formed Utopian plans of retirement and colonisations. On one subject, and only one, we essentially differed – America. I cannot look towards that country with all the sanguine expectations so frequently cherished. I think I discover in it much of the old leaven. Its avidity for commercial aggrandisement augurs but ill even for the present generation; and I tremble at the consequences which the enormous appropriation of land may entail upon posterity.’
A visit to Wilton House led to musing
On art, gardens, the classics, literature,
And …
‘Our walk over the house and gardens had already cost us six shillings; and we flattered ourselves, that we had no more exactions to encounter. But, as we were going past the porter’s lodge, a servant stopped us with a fresh demand, informing us, in plain language, that they were all stationed there for their fees, and nobody could come in or out without paying. We accordingly submitted to be fleeced once more. I am told, that this kind of tax upon the curiosity of travellers is peculiar to this country; and surely it is somewhat surprising, that the pride and ostentation of greatness should not spurn the illiberal idea of supporting its servants on the alms of curiosity. But there is a nobleman in the county of Derby, who is reported not only to save the expense of wages by this expedient, but absolutely to make a bargain with his housekeeper for half the vails collected by exhibiting his splendid mansion.’
Before we hear of Thelwall in Wiltshire again,
Here’s another radical topographer,
Philip Alston, from the United Nations,
Commenting on the pauperisation
Of 20% of the UK population,
In the spring of 2019:
‘I think breaking rocks has some similarity to the 35 hours of job search for
people who have been out of work for months or years’:
‘A digital and sanitised version of the workhouse’,
And, here, Citizen John:
‘The daily toil of these little infants (who if they are ever to attain the vigour and healthful activity of manhood, ought to be stretching their wanton limbs in noisy gambols over the green)…’
John Thelwall and Slavery
It goes without saying that John Thelwall
Would be a committed abolitionist,
An activist, who also used his pen against slavery,
In his Jacobin novel The Daughter of Adoption,
And in this poem:
The Negro’s Prayer
(1807, commemorating the abolition of the slave trade)
‘O SPIRIT! that rid’st in the whirlwind and storm,
Whose voice in the thunder is heard,
If ever from man, the poor indigent worm,
The prayer of affliction was heard,-
If black man, as white, is the will of thy hand –
(And who would create him but Thee?)
Oh give thy command –
Let it spread thro’ each land,
That Afric’s sad sons shall be free!
…
If while in the slave-ship, with many a groan,
I wept o’er my sufferings in vain;
While hundreds around reply’ to my moan,
And the clanking of many a chain;-
If then thou but deign’st, with a pitying eye,
Thy poor shackled creature to see,
Oh thy mercy apply,
Afric’s sorrow to dry,
And bid the poor Negro be free!
If, here, as I faint in the vertical sun,
And the scourge goads me on to my toil,
No hope faintly soothing, when labour is done,
Of one joy my lorn heart to beguile;-
If thou view’st me Great Spirit! as one thou hast made,
And my fate as dependent on thee,
O impart thou thy aid,
That the scourge may be stay’d,
And the Black Man, at last, may be free…’
Here we see three of the four (sometimes five) stanzas –
The tone doesn’t do justice, perhaps,
To Thelwall’s ability to see slavery
As part of an imperial nexus –
He would have noted the links between war,
Empire, colonies, slavery, and Stroud Scarlet,
In his stay here with radical clothiers,
After his ten days at Nether Stowey
With Coleridge, Wordsworth, and a watchful spy,
In the summer of 1797…
‘Had the Maroons and negroes never been most wickedly enslaved, their masters had never been murdered.’
How he would have enjoyed walking past Capel’s Mill,
Reflecting on coincidence,
For as Michael Scrivener has written:
‘In 1793, trying to circumvent the political repression, Thelwall spoke at a
debating club, The Capel Court Society’;
But as regards the hidden colonial landscape around us:
‘That great family of human beings, every one of which, whatever be his name, his colour or his country, is the brother of all the rest, and ought to enjoy with them a community of rights and happiness’;
‘It would be a happy thing for the universe in general, and for Britain in particular, if there were no such thing as a colony or dependency…’
Citizen John’s visit to Stroudwater
Obviously had a profound impact on him –
This landscape is remembered,
Possibly subliminally, in his slavery novel,
With the names of two of the protagonists –
He met with radical dyers and clothiers –
The Partridges at Bowbridge Mill;
The Newcombes at Bowbridge House,
And the Nortons at Nailsworth,
On that excursion from Nether Stowey,
In the summer of 1797:
There is a Newcombe in the novel and a Captain Bowbridge, too…
Conclusion
John Thelwall, the ‘Jacobin fox’,
Pursued by William Pitt’s spies,
Puts William Cobbett in the shade
With a rather more radical typography,
Straddling, as EP Thompson said,
‘The world of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields
weaver’ –
But he straddled the ways of Socrates too,
For as Michael Scrivener has said:
‘Socrates was found, as usual, in the places of public resort – in the workshops of the artists, among the labourers in the manufactories, uttering seditious allegories, and condemning the desolating tyranny of the Oligarch’;
Or in Thelwall’s words:
‘Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse’…
But there is also something of the Rimbaud
About him too – something almost synesthesic
About the motto for The Tribune:
‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’;
His imagery also possibly
Subliminally influenced William Blake –
Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ seem to echo
These words of Thelwall:
‘For it is better, according to my judgment, – ten times better, to be immured oneself in a Bastille, than to have the Bastille put into one’s mouth to lock up one’s tongue from all intercourse and communication with one’s heart’;
Which is partly why,
In 1832, at the age of 69,
He was the sole eulogiser
For his old LCS colleague, Thomas Hardy,
His voice carrying to some 30,000 people,
Gathered at Bunhill Fields,
For this public ceremony and act of remembrance,
A reminder of the days forty years before,
When he lectured to audiences in their hundreds…
A reminder of the time when ‘pedestrian’
Meant wandering beyond accustomed paths,
Rather than its current meaning…
‘I have been rambling, according to my wanted practice, in the true democratic way, on foot, from village to village, from pleasant hill to barren Heath, recreating my mind with the beauties, and with the deformities of nature’
(ITLIC Tribune speech, 1795),
A pedestrian who could talk readily with anyone,
A writer whose mixed-genre The Peripatetic
Would influence Wordsworth’s rather more conservative The Excursion;
An activist who connected Nether Stowey with Spitalfields,
Spitalfields with Socrates and with Stroudwater too,
And Stroud scarlet with Empire;
He challenged the cultural hegemony of the classics,
He challenged aristocratic assumptions
About culture, hierarchy, and enlightenment:
The point of reading for Citizen John,
Was not to be elegantly learned and cultured,
But – to use the idiom of our age –
To empower and give agency
To the voices of the dispossessed,
In the triumph of Democracy over the Gothick,
In the triumph of a democratic sublime
Over that of Edmund Burke,
And in the triumph of collective walking
Over the solitary subjectivism of William Hazlitt:
A radical topography based on observation,
Discussion, inquiry and critique,
In language more lyrical than Wordsworth’s.
Post-script:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
‘We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him – ‘Citizen John! This is a fine place to talk treason in!’ – ‘Nay! Citizen Samuel, ‘ replied he, ‘it is a fine place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!’