The Poetry and the Politics: Radical Reform in Victorian England 9780755623471, 9781780767239

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For David and Helen

‘The Poetic Spirit – Remember, a poetic spirit doth not consist in jingling sentences together on every mile-stone or broken pitcher with which ye may meet, nor in the apostrophising every flower or plant that may lie around your path. I would rather disadvise than advise the writing of such, for verse is a Will-o’-the-wisp that hath led, and still leadeth, many loving minds to destruction. Once caught, they follow the glittering thing, fancying themselves Shakspeares or Miltons, Byrons or Shelleys, and call the world unjust, when it pronounces its sentence.’ The People’s Journal 5, 1848, p.48. ‘Revolutions, and periods of political excitement, push many a man into prominence who might otherwise have remained in obscurity.’ Robert Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 (2nd edn, Newcastle upon Tyne and London: Browne and Browne, 1894), p.294. ‘For the few who were the activists, who sacrificed their time and energy and risked livelihood, personal security and family relationships, there was a drama, play-acting, education and challenge – and often the enjoyable excitement of living dangerously in the public eye.’ Alex Wilson, ‘Chartism,’ in J.T. Ward, Popular Movements c.1830–1850 (1970; London: Macmillan, 1978), p.133.

ILLUSTRATIONS

‘Song of the Seditionist’, Punch, 10 June 1848, p.240. [dedication page] 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

John Leech depicts the commercial poet, penning lyrics in support of a patent medicine, ‘A Golden Opportunity’, Punch, 21 October 1848, p.166. Author’s collection. [p.10] Map of Wapping area c.1848, based on the map of London by G.F. Cruchley, showing Wapping High Street, Hermitage Stairs, and Hermitage Bridge (above Hermitage Dock) and St Catherine’s [sic] Dock. [p.20] J.M. Whistler, ‘Black Lion Wharf’, 1859, reproduced from F. Wedmore, Etching in England (London: G. Bell, 1895). On the left is the five-storied Hoare’s Wharf. By courtesy of the University of Plymouth. [p.22] Detail of J.M. Whistler, ‘Thames Warehouses’, 1859, reproduced from W.C. Brownell, ‘Whistler in Painting and Etching’, Scribner’s Monthly 18:4 (August 1879), pp.481–495 (p.488). Author’s collection. [p.25] J.M. Whistler, ‘Thames Police, or Wapping Wharf’, 1859, reproduced from J. Pennell, Etchers and etchings: chapters in the history of the art together with technical explanations of modern artistic methods (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925). By courtesy of the University of Plymouth. [p.25] Facsimile of the title page of the first edition of Flowers and Fruits, based on the copy in the New York Public Library. The author’s copy lacks this page. [p.34] The opening page of ‘Edward Noble or the Utopian’, in the first edition of Flowers and Fruits, p.25, from a copy in the author’s collection. [p.38] A comic almanac’s depiction of the bearded foreigner, ‘April’, c.1843. University of Plymouth Special Collections, by courtesy of the University of Plymouth. [p.41] Stipple engraving of James Pierrepont Greaves, also reproduced in Letters and Extracts from the MS Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves (2 vols, 1843–5), vol.1. Author’s collection. [p.45] ‘FATHER MATHEW – An-ice man for a small party’, by George Cruikshank. Comic Almanack, London, Bogue, 1844, plate 9. Father Mathew as a water pump declares, in response to home brewed ale and

ILLUSTRATIONS

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

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home made wine, ‘Touch not! Taste not – if you must take any thing – take the Pledge!’ By courtesy of Plymouth University. [p.47] Facsimile of John Adolphus Etzler’s signature, from the register of his marriage in 1844: believed to be the only extant autograph. [p.58] Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer, by M.J. Cazabon, c.1850. By courtesy of the Stollmeyer family and Geoffrey MacLean. [p.61] Etzler’s ‘Satellite’, based on the illustration from The Artizan, October 1845, p.207. The travelling machine used a rotary digger ‘actuated by an endless rope from a stationary engine’. [p.69] Etzler’s ‘Naval Automaton’, based on the illustration from Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 19 August 1843. A is the hull; B the platform; C.C. connecting poles from the platform to the machinery on the vessel’s deck; D.D. the arms; E.E. the ratchet poles; F the ratchet wheels; and G the paddle wheels. [p.73] William Thom, ‘taken from life’, Illustrated London News, 1 March 1845, p.144. Author’s collection. [p.80] The Reverend John Goodwyn Barmby. By courtesy of John Goodchild. [p.87] Richard Doyle, ‘The Seven Ages of the Republic’, Punch, 25 November 1848, p.224: ‘Lamartine inditing a sonnet to Liberty’s eyebrow’. Author’s collection. [p.108] A Scourge for a Gag. Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic History, [G.L.] Broadsides Collection, 616 (1), vol.VI. © Senate House Library, University of London. [p.115] John Leech’s comment on the Trafalgar Square Revolution in Punch, 10 April 1848, p.112. By courtesy of Plymouth University. [p.121] ‘The Meeting on Kennington Common – from a Daguerrotype’, Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, p.242. Author’s collection. [p.123] Clerkenwell Green, showing the Middlesex Sessions House on the west side of the green. From Tallis’s Illustrated London, 1851. Author’s collection. The lamppost on raised ground where Duncan perched is not visible in this engraving, it would be on the left, beyond the fence. [p.125] The Chartist as a stage villain: ‘A Family Man. Professor Fusssssssell and His Talented Family About to Assassinate a “Minion.”’ Punch, 10 June 1848, p.240. By courtesy of Plymouth University. [p.135] John Leech, ‘Tom Thumb at the Old Bailey’, Tom Thumb (L–d R––l). ‘“Rebellion’s dead, and now I’ll go–―to Breakfast.”’ Punch, 21 October 1848, p.164. By courtesy of Plymouth University. [p.137] The French caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s sketch of the gardes mobiles, Illustrated London News, 29 April 1848, p.275. Author’s collection. [p.142] Gateway of the House of Correction, Coldbath Fields. Author’s collection, based on an illustration in H. Mayhew and J. Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life (London: Griffin, Bohn and Co., 1862), p.277. [p.146] The marginal comment by Richard Doyle, Punch, 31 March 1849, p.131, on the phonetic movement’s attempt to promote their reform via phonetic newspaper, 1849. Author’s collection. [p.164]

x

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS Masthead of the surviving copy of The Divinearian. By courtesy of the Seligman Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. [p.169] William Johnson Fox, an engraving, after a portrait by Eliza Flower, in Wolverhampton Art Gallery. © Wolverhampton City Council. [p.175] ‘Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, the Ojibbeway [sic] chief, sketched during the temperance meeting in Drury Lane Theatre’, Illustrated London News, 2 November 1850, p.344. Author’s collection. [p.200] Facsimile of advertisement in Weekly Dispatch, 16 February 1851, p.109. [p.204] Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, Frien Barnet, 1851. From Tallis’s Illustrated London. Author’s collection. [p.211] ‘Entertainment to the patients at the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum, Colney Hatch’, Illustrated London News, 15 January 1853, p.44. Author’s collection. [p.213] Mr Feargus O’Connor, M.P., engraved by Henry Vizetelly, Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, p.243. Author’s collection. [p.221]

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book grew out of curiosity about the fate of an obscure ‘poet of the people,’ James Elmslie Duncan, whose freaks and aberrations figured in the national press in Britain in 1848, as a means of embarrassing the Chartists in the year of European revolution. The focus of my brief biographical entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, written over a decade ago, more material has come to light since then through the digitisation of newspapers and other printed sources, and the industry of family history researchers, to allow a more detailed treatment of this strange figure, who, caught up in the excitement of metropolitan radical hopes, may also be seen as one of the casualties of the early Victorian ‘counter-culture’. Nevertheless, the sources for this biography are vastly more limited than my previous biographical work, on an aristocratic husband and wife blessed with long lives and material security and a wide circle of acquaintances. Where the aristocrat’s life was copiously documented in diaries and letters from school to dotage, in the case of James Elmslie Duncan, who one can be reasonably certain scribbled away throughout his short adulthood, little survives. Wary of historical writing as mere detective story, and the blunt appeal of the peculiar, I intended to put my curiosity to work, however, by conceiving this short biography as an approach to certain interesting themes in the social, political and cultural history of the period: the role of the poet in political radicalism, the relationship (perceived and ‘actual’) between the disordered mind and political disorder, and the role of ridicule in counterrevolution. In preparing this book for publication, I owe a debt at a late stage to the comments and advice of Mike Sanders, who generously shared his expertise on Chartist poetry with me at a time in the academic year when he had many other demands on his attention. In particular, his caution about my categorisation of Duncan as a ‘bad poet’ without paying heed to

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his intent and purpose, made me think again about how to present Duncan’s aesthetic achievements. I declare the usual academic caveat about all the errors that remain being the author’s entirely: even after meticulous work from Audrey Daly and my production editor, Cecile Rault. I am grateful to the editors of the twelfth volume of the Dictionary of Labour Biography, for publishing the brief entry in 2005. I thank Rudolph Ellenbogen of the University of Columbia for sending me a copy of Duncan’s Divinearian from the Seligman collection, and Jane Siegel for providing me with a crisp new image of the masthead, and Senate House University Library and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, for permission to reproduce images in their collections. Liz Dinlingen added to the debt I already owed the New York Public Library by sending me missing pages from my photocopy of Duncan’s chef d’oeuvre, Flowers and Fruits, and a copy of John Goodwyn Barmby’s poem, The Madhouse, for which I am most grateful. As I completed the editing of the manuscript I then discovered and purchased a third copy of Duncan’s book, which I have used to provide some of the illustrations that appear here. Geoffrey MacLean graciously granted me permission to use, and provided me with a copy of, his reproduction of Cazabon’s portrait of Conrad Stollmeyer. John Brown of Ronny’s of Christchurch saved me a costly fee, by providing me with the image of William Thom, and then provided me with the opportunity for further illustrations from the Illustrated London News. Kate Taylor generously and swiftly provided me with access to a photograph of John Goodwyn Barmby: permission to reproduce this here was kindly granted by John F. Goodchild, from whose historical collection housed in the Local History Study Centre in Wakefield it comes. I am indebted to Gweneth Duncan, for her research on the lineage of James Duncan, James Elmslie Duncan’s father: her work, published via Ancestry.com, allowed me to appreciate more about his family background. Communication with Donnette Smith similarly gave me useful context for Edward King the philanthropist of Bicester. Ian Rayment at Plymouth University helped with some of the illustrations: I am grateful to the University for permission to use this material from the Special Collections. I am also grateful to the University for the grant of funds for research in London in the winter of 2012, and for the sabbatical which allowed me to complete the text in 2013. My thanks to colleagues at Plymouth.

INTRODUCTION

This is a study in bathos and misguided enthusiasm: of history as obscure tragedy and farce. It is a biography of the eccentric radical reformer, poet, author and serial troublemaker, James Elmslie Duncan. Hailing from insalubrious Wapping in the East End of London, for a time, the young man amused the metropolitan and provincial press of early Victorian Britain by his antics and consequent appearances in the police courts of London, generally in the guise of a ‘crack-brained Chartist poet’, as one London correspondent of the Lancaster Gazette in 13 July 1850 described him.1 It should be understood from the start that both as a poet and supporter of the Chartist movement for political reform, Duncan has been judged of little consequence. His aesthetic achievement will not be promoted here. There were signs of promise in his first slim volume of poetry and prose, but he was not, on the whole, a very ‘good’ poet. His oeuvre is certainly not in the league of the poetic work created by contemporaries in the movement, such as that ‘Dante of Chartism’, the shoemaker Thomas Cooper, author of the epic Purgatory of Suicides, a Prison-Rhyme, in Ten Books; Cooper’s rival as chief ‘laureate of the Chartists’ in the later 1840s, the middle-class barrister Ernest Jones; or later Chartist poets such as the journalist Gerald Massey and the wood engraver William James Linton.2 None of his efforts provided poetical watch-words for the mass movement when it revived in the late 1840s. One of his critics was not being too harsh, if we accept the judgement as based on the criteria of originality or technical skill in versifying, when he described Duncan’s effusions as ‘trash’. Nor was Duncan a heroic labouring man who toiled to educate himself while supporting a family – although Duncan’s family probably bore the brunt of his enthusiasms – so that we should not be too indulgent of his literary failings. On the other hand, bad poetry, like bad paintings, can be sincere and, for the historian, offer insights. 3 Moreover,

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as we shall see, Duncan’s Chartist poetry may be seen as an attempt to respond immediately to dramatic events and attract a (paying) public audience on the street, so that the polish of a Miltonic verse epic or the metrical and rhyming demands of a sonnet were not intended. Although he had no place in Robert Gammage’s early history of the movement, published in 1854, he has figured in passing in later histories of Chartism, in Raymond Postgate’s Story of a Year, 1848, and Postgate and G.D.H. Cole’s The Common People, 1746–19464, in David Goodway’s London Chartism, that detailed exploration of London Chartism at its ‘most dangerous, most insurrectionary’,5 and has been remembered in association with the technological utopianism of the German-born engineer John Adolphus Etzler, for which he propagandised in the early 1840s, in work by W.H.G. Armytage, Gregory Claeys and others6; and in my short essay in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, but the full story of his career has not been told, until now.7 The accessibility of material through recent digitisation means that snippets previously hidden in the files of obscure newspapers permit us a more detailed view of Duncan’s public activities in the late 1840s. The mystery about what happened to him drew me again to the subject, but he has an interest quite apart from this exercise in detection. A curious individual, he seemed worthwhile studying beyond mere curiosity about his fate. In a review of Gammage’s pioneering account of Chartism, in 1855, The Leader deplored the Chartists’ ‘rash, theatrical, and violent mode of asserting their principles’ – and the young James Elmslie Duncan, identified with the Chartist movement by the metropolitan press, amply expressed those characteristics.8 No doubt every political cause attracts its eccentrics, men such as the ‘downwardly mobile artisan’ atheist and communist Dan Chatterton, for instance, later in the nineteenth-century, hawking his own extraordinary pamphlets and a typographically remarkable periodical in London9; and progressive causes always have their empty declaimers and youthful firebrands. 10 In Duncan, we have an instance of the young man (but not, by the time he became publicly associated with Chartism, a man in the first flush of youth), perhaps convinced of the justice of his cause, but also revelling in public notoriety. He behaved with eccentricity of appearance and gesture and ultimately with physical violence. One of his critics, the free-thought leader, socialist, and Chartist, George Jacob Holyoake, characterised his behaviour as ‘professional eccentricity,’ as if it were an assumed manner. From the aspirant man of letters and progressive of the mid-1840s, he had become a merry andrew for the mob.11 Duncan lived in an age of visionaries, with extraordinary utopian schemes developed by such figures as the Welshman Robert Owen, the

INTRODUCTION

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German-born American John Adolphus Etzler, the English Christian socialist John Minter Morgan (creator of the Church of England SelfSupporting Village Society12), and others – blueprints for a new world to be realised first in colonies at home or abroad. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, reviewing in 1843 a work by one English follower of the French utopian Charles Fourier, referred to it as ‘another of those purblind or one-eyed gropings after great truths which remarkably distinguish the present age’. 13 ‘Volcanic throes,’ wrote one eager ultra-reformer, ‘ever and anon agitate society. St. Simonism, Chartism, Communism, prophesy.’ 14 The moral sensibilities of proponents might be questioned, as in the cartoon by George Cruikshank in the Comic Almanack for 1848 of a Universal Philanthropist kicking away a starving family – expressing one popular prejudice against the progressive enthusiast as myopic or hypocritical visionary.15 Another contemporary British commentator thought that the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ was likely to scorn such schemes ‘with his trained practical mind’.16 Yet even Chartists committed to the democratic goals of the People’s Charter (universal suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot, no property qualifications for MPs, payment of MPs and equal electoral districts), could, from 1845, be enthusiastic about a Chartist Cooperative Land Plan that was designed to restore Englishmen to their land and to manly independence via smallholdings. Duncan promoted one utopian project, that scheme of South American settlement associated with Etzler, but he was perhaps too much of an egotist to join a community. James Hepburn’s A Book of Scattered Leaves: Poetry of Poverty in Broadside Ballads (2000) surmises that Duncan, after the failure of Chartism in 1848, emigrated to Venezuela, where the English followers of Etzler hoped to create a paradise on earth.17 His fate was, in reality, less exotic, and sadder, than these dreams of utopia. Duncan was not a famous leader of Chartists, like Feargus O’Connor or Ernest Jones, he was no great Chartist intellectual like Thomas Cooper or William Lovett, and his short life meant that he had no opportunity to move, as other Chartists did in the mid-Victorian era, towards Liberalism, or sustain a role in radicalism. Despite a personal appearance which became ripe for caricature, as vivid descriptions in the press suggested, there was to be no graphic sketch of him in the satirical middle-class papers that lampooned the unkempt and unshaven metropolitan Chartists in 1848. No picture of Duncan exists, and what physical descriptions we have of him lack detail except to emphasise his outré appearance (was he tall? was he thin? did he have a red head of hair or, as one acquaintance recalled, fair hair?). There would be no presentation portrait of him engraved for the readers of the mass-readership weekly Northern Star, or Reynolds’s Political Instructor, as there was for leading Chartists, no silhouette

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of him clinging to his lamp-post in satirical journals such as Punch or Puppet-Show as he addressed the mob in the spring of 1848. As with most people from this or any other period, his private life and thoughts are hidden from us: although he was certainly not taciturn we have no diaries or introspective notes. We have no personalia, no surviving MSS from him, no exuberant or crabbed signature to help interpret his character through the dubious insights of graphology (an old catalogue entry for a copy of his book Flowers and Fruits in New York Public Library claimed an author’s signature, but this is a mistake), and the scraps of information we have about his background are derived from his own published writings, which, if remarkably egotistical, were more poetical and political than autobiographical, and from the record of his appearance and his utterances, in police courts in the late 1840s and early 1850s. The police court records were not official accounts, for those do not exist during Duncan’s period. Instead, we rely on the press reports written mainly by penny-a-liners (and special reporters, for some newspapers) who fed the popular fascination with crime. These have their bias, of course, in that Duncan soon became a figure of some fascination for reporters, on account of his appearance and behaviour. But his notoriety meant that his conversation with magistrates and witnesses – interviews, as it were – were reported in some detail.18 The evidence might be confused and ambiguous in relation to a particular episode, already interpreted for us, as liable to different readings: but cumulatively as Duncan appeared and reappeared in courts charged with strange and disruptive behaviour, the press presented the case of an unhinged and wild young man. There are hints in the press accounts as well as in Duncan’s own writing that he saw himself pursuing the career of ‘reporter’ – perhaps he envisaged this as a way of becoming a literary success like Charles Dickens? This career aspiration creates an intriguing connection, given the allusions to penny-a-liners by the journalist James Ewing Ritchie as Bohemians and ‘jolly good fellows going down the hill’, with eccentric appearances and clothes ‘worn in defiance of fashion’, which makes these anonymous reporters of his deviations seem near relations – Duncan pursuing his poetic course through flimsy poetic broadsheets, the London reporters retailing his infringements by leaving accounts on their own flimsy paper at press offices, to be picked up by newspaper editors, and cut down for publication.19 In 1845 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, discussing the various classes of foraging metropolitan reporters, thought that the ‘police penny-a-liner by dint of perseverance attending one particular police court, and furnishing

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the morning papers accurate and well-written reports of the cases heard, contrives to establish himself in it, after a certain time, and becomes ultimately of some note in his little sphere.’ Moreover, ‘the greater number of them discharge their functions with great ability, and report very accurately all the cases of importance that are heard.’ ‘Sometimes when … a case involving any ludicrous incidents is heard the penny-a-liner relates it with a talent and humour not surpassed by our best novel writers.’20 Certainly the press reports of Duncan’s appearance in court were alert to the bizarre and the ludicrous: we shall see what sense of grievance this generated in Duncan. The London police courts – under the control of stipendiary magistrates who were barristers, rather than the police, despite the name – proved to be one stage for Duncan which guaranteed press attention for him. All who behaved themselves could be present, for ‘no magistrate has a right to expel any person who does not misbehave himself, or obstruct the administration of justice.’21 The snippets on his oddities, selected from among the many cases which the London police courts heard, reported in the daily and weekly press in London from 1848 to 1852, from The Times to the News of the World, were then reproduced in the provinces. Though an aspiring poet and man of letters, and a progressive who believed in the power of texts to initiate or stimulate reform, Duncan left little to posterity by way of published material. His publications have not survived in their entirety; the main progressive journal which he edited for about 27 numbers from December 1844 to July 1845 is preserved through less than half the numbers, in a copy in the British Library (although this is now more widely available through a digitised text). The first edition of his book, Flowers and Fruits, or Poetry, Philosophy and Science, which was published in 1843, survives in a couple of copies in public libraries, not in Britain but in the New York Public Library, in the collection of British Romantic material collected by Carl H. Pforzheimer and documenting Shelley and his circle. One of these copies was owned, according to the later nineteenth-century bookplate, by Percy C. Vaughan, a lawyer and rationalist who was killed in the Great War, who reprinted some of Shelley’s early prose works for the Rationalist Press Association.22 It is possible that other copies exist in private collections, as another copy was located as the manuscript of this study was nearing completion. The second edition is no longer in existence, and the serialised novel which Duncan revised, but probably never completed beyond the first couple of chapters, has disappeared.23 His series of broadsides, combining dirges and paeans about Chartist events, with some slight prose commentary and more self-promotion, have survived, incomplete, in some half dozen copies, in the British Library and the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic

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Literature, University of London. Perhaps the effusions of his muse became wrapping paper for metropolitan butter-shops. Those who knew about him as a young radical in the 1840s seem to have lost any knowledge of him after the late 1840s. What we are left with, given his obscurity at the time, are fragments, partial accounts, and echoes. 24 Much of the printed record on Duncan comes from a newspaper press with no sympathy for his causes, and whose account therefore needs to be handled with caution. Newspapers were successful in writing a hostile first draft of history of the wider Chartist movement. The deficiencies of the press coverage were emphasised by Chartists at the time, thus the Star of Freedom complained in 1852: ‘What wonder that History is for the most part a fable, when under our own eyes we thus witness the records of the age poisoned at their very source?’25 A sympathetic but not uncritical radical newspaper also acknowledged the ‘scandalously magnified Chartist proceedings’ in 1848, where Chartist crowd numbers were exaggerated and speeches spiced up by penny-a-liners in order to create mischief, ‘and gull the sub-editors of newspapers with a belief that the Chartists’ doings were of the most horrible description’. Such reporters grossly maligned the Chartists.26 One frame in which to see Duncan’s career is that of the poet, and it no doubt provides an angle which he would have preferred. He evolved from the Romantic versifier reflecting on tombstones, roses and nymphs, and dabbling in unconvincing ‘Scottish’ verse that stemmed from his parentage, to the verse of the street agitator, offering demotic dirges to stir the Chartist heart. Poetry mattered to him, as it mattered to many contemporaries, seen as an ‘effective social and moral force’ and accorded the highest status as literary form.27 Much work has been published on the relationship of Chartism to poetry.28 Janowitz has argued, ‘Chartism placed literature and literary practice near the heart of its political agenda,’ while Schwab has asserted, ‘Poetry forms the principal genre of Chartism … the collective utterance of the movement,’ unlike the individual productions such as tales and novels. 29 Ariane Schnepf also stresses poetry’s central importance, after newspapers, to Chartism, its cultural prestige supporting a claim to respectability in appeals to the middle-class. And yet poetry also played an important part through easily memorised and sung verse such as ballads, in stirring and touching those without formal education. The Chartist poet, like the Romantic poet, was a major moral and political agent.30 After the fiasco of the Chartist display of strength on Kennington Common on 10 April 1848, the Gentleman’s Magazine printed with wry amusement a review of one pamphlet on the European revolutions that had taken place that year, which, though it was not written by James

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Elmslie Duncan but a ‘Superior Spirit’, no doubt echoed his exalted view of the role of the bard, when it argued: ‘The governing power must be brought into identification with the operative power: in other words the work-man must rule the idle-man: and as we see it now in France, to the poet as the highest, most laborious, and most intelligent of workers, must the chief place be given.’31 Another who extolled the political (but not party-political) role and other high duties of the poet was the journalist and poet Charles Mackay, writing in the improving People’s Journal in 1847.32 Critics of empty-headed radicals might see versifying, or the quotation of verse, as part of the repertoire of the aspirant politician, thus an essayist in the London University Magazine in the significant month of April 1848 suggested: To intersperse well a long and wordy speech with demands for universal suffrage, and the other four headings of the Charter, and finish off by a poetical quotation thus! – The despot King is falling, – the People’s Cause has won, The reign of Justice, Liberty, and Freedom has begun! The Pride of Nations melts away like Snow before the Sun, Thanks be to God in Heaven, that Tyranny is done. 33 This was a parody, but it might have been penned by James Elmslie Duncan. Chartists argued for an association between literature as ‘the free burst of heart and soul’ and politics: ‘Literature has but rarely flourished under a despotism – poetry never, except as its antagonist,’ argued one.34 Duncan’s achievements as a poet rather than as peddler of mere doggerel may be queried and his relationship to the Chartist movement is ambiguous; at times he gloried in the public label of ‘Chartist poet’ and he endorsed the Charter above all his other social and political reforms (‘as the most important of all popular aspirations’ 35) but he was critical of those Chartists who did not welcome his poetical interventions. But the comment of the conservative Fraser’s Magazine, reviewing the Christian Socialist Charles Kingsley’s novel Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet (1850), is useful to quote, as it offers some insight into Duncan’s activities as poet and supporter of Chartism: It was an ingenious escape for much of the hot-brained enthusiasm of the political agitator to make him also a poet. The two vocations fall in well together; and afford us an excuse, of which we are not at all sorry to avail ourselves, for tolerating a great deal of wild invective against established institutions, and for believing, at the same time, that under such circumstances it is not likely to be attended with much mischief.

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The union of poetry and chartism is quite natural. Chartism is a sort of poetry in itself, dealing largely in those visions of human perfectibility and longings after an impossible Elysium which have afforded such innocent delights to the poets from time immemorial …36 As the anonymous reviewer suggested, poetry might express an unreal vision of the world (like Chartism itself, according to the reviewer); perhaps an immature apprehension of what was possible. The poet, too, was a performance or role to adopt. Poetry provided a vehicle for Duncan’s radicalism – his Flowers and Fruits beginning with a quotation from that key poet of progress for radicals in this period, Shelley. The radical journalist Thomas Frost, who knew Duncan, recalled of himself, ‘The poetry of Coleridge and Shelley was stirring within me, and making me “a Chartist, and something more,” as the advanced reformers of that day were wont to describe themselves’.37 One working-class autobiographer, reflecting on poetry, discussed the apartness, and oddity – the madness – of poets.38 This was no new idea, of course; for Plato argued in Phaedrus thus: There is a third possession and madness, proceeding from the Muses; which, seizing upon a tender and chaste soul, and raising and inspiring it to the composition of odes and other species of poetry, by adorning the countless deeds of antiquity, instructs posterity. But he who, without the madness of the Muses, approaches the gates of poesy, … both himself fails in his object; and his poetry being that of a sane man, is thrown into the shade by the poetry of such as are mad. 39 In the Philosophy of Mystery, published in 1841, the surgeon Walter Cooper Dendy (a student at St Thomas’s with John Keats) had a character, in an essay on ‘Poetic Frenzy’, conclude that ‘The laurel then contains more poison than that of prussic acid in its leaf … the mere indulgence of poetic thoughts may so raise the beau-ideal of beauty in the sensitive and youthful mind as to unfit it for the common duties of life.’40 Poetry was powerful but it was also, in consequence, dangerous. Its pursuit could ruin a man. The physician John Carr Badeley, inspector of Essex lunatic asylums, writing in 1851, thought the poet more susceptible to insanity than the philosopher, his ‘imagination is ever on the wing whilst his reasoning powers are comparatively at rest, the “Insanit et versus facit” was frequently exemplified in [John] Clare even during my visitations and I have by me several pretty poetical effusions written by him during his confinement there.’41

INTRODUCTION

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After the examples of Nathaniel Lee, Robert Innes the madcap street hawker, and Thomas Lloyd of Bedlam and Christopher Smart, instances of modern mad poets that might spring to nineteenth-century minds would include John Clare, and, by ‘ordinary derision’, William Blake.42 The eccentric figure of the street poet, or Grub Street poet, even inspired upperclass masquerade costume among the English in early nineteenth-century Rome, where one Englishman dressed as a poet, had ‘ballads, pinned about his hat, his elegies, sonnets, and odes, offered to all’. 43 The relationship of madness to genius meant reflections on the poetic madgenius in works of mental science throughout the century (for instance, the late-Victorian miscellaneous writer John Ferguson Nisbet’s Insanity of Genius).44 It was thought a commonplace that ‘all truly good poets should be mad; that insanity is one of the most important elements in the poetic character.’45 Some critics might see the general poetic output of the age as one of madness: thus a writer in the Morning Post in November 1855 – after Tennyson’s poem Maud (a monodrama originally entitled Maud, or the Madness) had been published, decided that ‘most of those among us who profess to write poetry write mere madness,’ and that the most ambitious were ‘particularly conspicuous’, in that regard, dwelling on the ‘insane mind’ when they presented the desires of the mind. For poetry, what was offered ‘seems rather the transcript of a kind of mental epilepsy’. 46 Duncan’s work as a Chartist poet has been acknowledged by James Hepburn’s collection, and in inclusion in works such as Stephen Roberts’ Radical Politicians and Poets in Early Victorian Britain.47 We can argue that the Chartist cause, when it revived in 1848, came at the right time for him, no doubt looking for some public cause (and audience) when his efforts to make a name for himself as a man of letters or a lecturer in metropolitan progressive circles were proving feeble. Perhaps for a brief moment, his poetry seemed to pay too, as he became a hawker of his radical verse in the streets of London, even bringing them into the precincts of parliament (so he said, though I have found no other reference to Duncan as Chartist patterer within St Stephens). Printed verse was ever present: in newspaper poetry columns or book reviews and in advertising columns as doggerel designed to be eyecatching by playing on contemporary concerns. Thus the poem promoting the tailors and outfitters Elias Moses and Sons of the Minories and Aldgate, in the Weekly Dispatch in July 1848, bore the title of ‘Habeas Corpus Suspension Bill’.48 In Alton Locke, the hero, at that point a hack writer, berates the Chartist editor O’Flynn for attacking sweated labour whilst inserting slopsellers’ puffs such as Moses and Sons’ doggerel in the Weekly Warwhoop.49 The poet as hack writer, versifying advertisements for

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newspapers, may not have been Duncan’s experience, although he did use verse to promote his vegetarian foods. My endnotes include a short note on a contemporary in 1848, who did pen verse for money – the poetic equivalent perhaps of the penny-a-liner – in the role of Invisible Poet of Cremorne Gardens, paid to write verse for the amusement of visitors to this pleasure garden. Like Duncan, he was to appear in court and be judged to be insane.

FIGURE 1. John Leech depicts the commercial poet, penning lyrics in support of a patent medicine, ‘A Golden Opportunity’, Punch, 21 October 1848, p.166. Author’s collection.

Extensive quotation from Duncan’s poetry conveys his personality and the limits to his poetic abilities. It is easy to make him appear merely ridiculous by reproducing what was often (but sometimes designedly) doggerel, but it should be remembered that we are not reading the work of some autodidact whose laurels were hard won from the muses in Wapping. Duncan came from a modest background, but he was no hornyhanded son of toil whose artistic deficiencies we might give allowances for, on that basis. One might say that if a poet were to come out of a lower-middle class background in St Mary-Axe (where Duncan probably spent his childhood) or maritime and mercantile Wapping (where he lived as a young man), lacking the polish of a ‘liberal’ or classical education, the results would not be spectacular. Certainly it would not have surprised contemporaries if the results had been unimpressive. Hence one item in the periodical Notes and Queries, that ‘Medium of Inter-Communication for Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, Genealogists, Etc.,’ concerning a Mathematical Society

INTRODUCTION

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existing in Wapping in the mid-eighteenth century, turned on the remarkable fact, for one correspondent, ‘That Wapping was at one time the abode of science and literature.’50 And in the Asiatic Journal in 1843, Wapping was combined with St Giles as representative of low rank and intellect. The ‘little Barbary’ of the ‘flash’ dictionary of slang language, Wapping was not seen as a place conducive to savants.51 Yet Duncan had high claims for the role of the poet in society, prefacing an essay on his ‘Divinearian Apollonica’ (his scheme for the elevation of the people through lyrics and poetry) in December 1849, with the following lines, from the Political Works of a Scot, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, in 1749 (although unattributed by Duncan): Give me the making of a people’s ballads, And let who will enact its laws and logics. The bard, most potent of all legislators: He rules through men’s affections, not their fears.52 ‘It seems to us that, although Music and Poetry have not altogether been neglected as auxiliaries in the grand work of human amelioration, that they have been very – very far from made available to their full capability,’ Duncan suggested then.53 Reformers writing in working-class journals made similar claims, in the Chartist Circular, published in Glasgow in 1840, for example, as Martha Vicinus has noted, a series of articles on ‘The Politics of Poets’, argued that poets and their poetry would exert ‘an extensive influence on the destinies of Mankind’. 54 ‘Bad verse has at least the jingle to recommend it,’ observed one early Victorian reviewer.55 This book is a contribution to the study of early Victorian Britain, rather than a work of literary scholarship concerned with examining Duncan’s abilities to jingle words together. So the aesthetic judgments that are significant are those applied at the time to Duncan’s work: and some reviewers, as we shall see, detected talent. Charles Lee and Wyndham Lewis in The Stuffed Owl, a collection of bad verse by great poets compiled in 1930, argued that bad verse had its canon, that there was ‘bad Bad Verse and good Bad Verse’. They argued that ‘good Bad Verse is grammatical, it is constructed according to the Rubrics, its rhythm, rimes, and metres are impeccable.’ They were not interested in collecting choice specimens of the ‘constipation of the poetic faculty’, in the nobodies, urchins and shabby men of letters who produced bad verse.56 When he became a purveyor of inept poetry Duncan lacked the bravura awfulness of a McGonagall. The British Quarterly Review argued, in 1849, that:

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another melancholy point of comparison between the past and present is the want of bad poetry. Where are those refreshing rains of absolute nonsense which abounded in our callida juventa? Where is that generous contempt for common sense and for the conventionalities of grammar and spelling? Where those magnanimous absurdities, and voluntary humiliations? Echo answers, ‘Where?’ It is vain to deny that bad poetry is losing greatly the interest and the sublimity of its badness, and assuming a certain stupid level aspect. The storm has subsided into a dull dripping mist of mediocrity. The ravings of young blood, and the bombast of young lips, often lull into the calm of power and true poetry – but elaborate tameness can only tame farther into inanity. It is with poetry as with puns. There is no medium between the good and the bad.57 As an editor of a radical journal in the early 1840s, Duncan joined a small band of radicals who produced short-lived periodicals with a circumscribed readership – catering to Communists, to Fourierites (‘who may be called the Socialists of France,’ followers of Charles Fourier 58), and other social and political reformers. Duncan’s role as editor of the Morning Star, the journal of the Tropical Emigration Society, and propagandist for the schemes of John Adolphus Etzler, in fact needs to be reduced, since he ceased to be the editor within a year. Frustratingly, the surviving volume for his period in editorial control and as contributor is incomplete, and there is no general index, so that we do not even see what we are missing. Who knows what insights would have been yielded from these lost articles, in relation to his background, his associations and opinions? While we no longer have the situation noted by Alex Wilson in 1970, of a ‘serious dearth of Chartist biographies’, the biographical study of even prominent Chartists is often hampered by a lack of primary source material. Wilson noted the difficulty of publishing ‘biographies of largely forgotten men’, and this study might have been entitled ‘The Unknown Chartist’, but for the fact that there are so many who could merit this label.59 In Duncan’s case, since the demise of the Chartist mass platform almost coincides with his own demise, the subject is a brief one. For Duncan’s public career was short, no more than a decade (1843–1853). In an essay in 1750 Samuel Johnson asserted that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful’: here the narrative may be sparse, however, Duncan’s short life acquires significance as a means of exploring several important themes in the political culture of this dramatic period.60 I consider the place of the poet in radical politics (a contribution to the study of poetico-politics61). The role of ridicule in the undermining of the Chartist cause by a hysterical

INTRODUCTION

13

public press in the era of massed meetings at Kennington Common and riot at Trafalgar Square, is examined, including, inter alia, the satire offered on the London pantomime stage, and the trope of Chartism-as-burlesque. I also study the relationship of political commotion to insanity – of political agitation to mental agitation – in the opinion of medical experts and the public. The historical record makes Duncan seem a fairly selfcontained subject, but there are enough traces of associations and affiliations for his biography to incorporate a small cast of other characters less obscure, men such as the radical publisher Henry Hetherington, the Unitarian minister and reformer William Johnson Fox, the Chartist and utopian John Goodwyn Barmby, and the Scottish weaver and poet William Thom.62 Even such an eminent figure as Henry Bessemer the great inventor has a connection with the story. Also interwoven in the story of Duncan’s Etzlerite episode are the reform-minded entrepreneur Conrad Stollmeyer, the Fourierite Dr Hugh Doherty, the farmer and physician Dr Edward King, and the civil engineer Thomas Atkins. It is perhaps a bad historical practice to make a person who lived a relatively undocumented life into a ‘symbol’, but we shall see that Duncan the youthful poet thought in terms of emblems and types. He may be understood as a psychological casualty of an era of ‘revolutionary’ change, or the distorted (eccentric) or mediocre version of more talented figures. In his status, in his latter years, as a madman, or at least someone who would be incarcerated in an asylum as insane, reports of Duncan’s public acts of oddity reflect the interest of the public in insanity, which was not simply the prurience of a freakshow audience. Literary representation of the insane in this period was extensive; so too was representation of ‘real’ insanity, which had its conventions – its familiar forms of delusions – and the attraction of novelties too. Lurid tales of homicidal mania would later appear in the gutter press of the Illustrated Police News, Law Courts and Weekly Record.63 But at this time, sober newspapers reported the examinations of metropolitan commissions of lunacy which were principally for the well-to-do; occasionally because of sensational details that might be hinted at, but also, as Akihito Suzuki has argued, because of ‘the general conviction that the problem of lunacy should be a public concern, not something left to the discretion of those who were directly involved in the care and management of the insane.’ 64 These commissions were, as Suzuki makes clear, ‘dramatic or journalistic entertainment’ – and, as he also argues, sites for the formulation of the ‘subjectivity of madness’.65 The public eagerly attended lunacy cases in London and elsewhere – and the newspaper reporters might be lyrical about the pathetic appearance of the lunatic who appeared for personal examination. Although reports of commissions of lunacy actually disappeared from The

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Times in 1846–1849, it does not seem that this was because of disquiet at the pain this might cause families, and while this sudden reticence is a mystery, Suzuki notes the paper’s continued interest in reporting about other lunatics. Lunacy offered unpredictable drama, tragicomedy, and a frisson of horror. Duncan’s political opinions were not, it is true, discussed by the police magistrates as delusions, so much as showing a mind ‘misled’ – it was his behaviour and appearance that appeared mad.  Methodologically, this study continues my approach of using an everexpanding corpus of primary print material available through digitised collections. Scholars of Chartism have reflected on the growth of online resources for the study of the movement and the lives of individual Chartists – and the risk, following from the availability of journalistic sources, that archival research might be neglected.66 Duncan lived through print – not too impressively and all too briefly – and left little trace in the archives. Without digitised national and provincial newspapers and journals, a grasp of Duncan’s public reputation, and his activity in the late 1840s and early 1850s would be a laborious and tedious task to achieve. Some of the digital recovery of Duncan’s career is serendipitous – thus the only advertisement he seems to have placed for his final journalist venture has been available only in a pilot project of digitisation which was not extended.67 He has been well served by collections that now include his journal of 1844 and two surviving numbers of his broadsides of 1848.68 It is unlikely that there will be any further press coverage digitised, to illuminate his life, but interesting material was to be discovered in unexpected quarters.69 The context, whether it is his radical milieu or metropolitan environment, or attitudes towards political mania or poetic aspirations, may now be examined through the randomly accumulated and expanding digital archive freely available online, in addition to more carefully assembled and curated databases of primary texts. Many of the sources I cite, therefore, have been uncovered through digitised versions. In a world of Chartist studies beyond the familiar twin pillars of the Northern Star and Punch, including as it now does digitised versions of such important texts as Reynolds’s Newspaper and Puppet-Show, the ‘fading glooms’ of Duncan’s obscurity (to quote the poet himself) have been encouraged to fade a little more.

1 ‘LONDONER OF BIRTH, SCOTTISH BY PARENTAGE’ James Elmslie Duncan described himself, in a broadside of 1849, as a ‘Londoner of Birth, Scottish by Parentage, Divinarian in principle’. The third element to his self-identity, I will explore in a later chapter. In this chapter I study the metropolitan and Scottish elements of his background. Very little, unfortunately, is known about his upbringing, but it was clearly an educated and lower-middle-class one – his father was described in the press as a ‘most respectable and worthy man’. James Elmslie Duncan was born 7 March 1822 and christened at Allhallows, London Wall on 2 June 1822. He was the second son of James Duncan and his wife Ann. He generally spelt his middle name ‘Elmslie’ but in his third attempt at producing a periodical, in the late 1840s, he styled himself throughout as ‘Elmzlie’ (under the influence of the phonetic reform movement). The Aberdeen Journal in 1850 described him as an Aberdonian, and David Goodway refers to him as the ‘Mad Scotchman’ in his history of London Chartism (as applied by observers of the young man’s behaviour, and perhaps an echo of the bearded convert to Judaism, Lord George Gordon of Gordon riots infamy), but there is no evidence from the numerous court appearances that he had a Scottish accent beyond the ‘Scotch’ adopted in some of his verse.1 Perhaps he had a cockney accent, but again, we have no indication. His father was born in Aberdeenshire in December 1790, the son of George Duncan and his wife Elizabeth, née Elmslie – one of the youngest of many siblings. James Duncan became a merchant and an accountant living and working at 353 High Street, Wapping, during the period of his eldest surviving son’s public career. We do not know why he was drawn to London to make his living. John Fisher Murray, in his book The World of London, observed in 1843 that, despite the city’s immensity, comparatively few Scotsmen established themselves in London, because, he argued, of ‘the practical shrewdness

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and intuitive plain sense with which natives of that country are so bountifully endowed … enables them to see that unless they have a connection established the capitalists of London are too heavy metal to contend with.’2 Murray argued that to the Scotsman, the Londoner was ‘mainly indebted … for our daily bread’ – and among James Elmslie Duncan’s later, all-embracing list of reform causes in the late 1840s was ‘the Abandonment of Death Work amongst Journeymen Bakers’.3 Duncan senior was certainly involved at one point in the provision of grain, although he also retailed other commodities, such as cheese. He is earlier listed in a Post Office Directory as a Scotch provision agent, at 5 Lower East Smithfield (a narrow riverside street, beginning at Butcher’s Row, with wharfs such as the Aberdeen Steam wharf, and Hawley and Downe’s wharf, and situated on the west side of Hermitage Dock) – perhaps with a relation, Charles Duncan, in the same trade, at Miller’s Wharf, Lower East Smithfield.4 James Elmslie Duncan seems to have been raised in relatively comfortable circumstances, for his father could afford to subscribe to the worthy weekly Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal – the ‘first family magazine of the world,’ as Duncan called it – from its inception (in 1832)5, had servants (or at least one servant, for one, Ann Gardener, sued for breach of promise when she became pregnant in 1846 by a Scottish ballast agent based in Wapping, and Duncan, described in the press as a Scotch provision merchant, agreed to corroborate her claim in court, but was then called away on business – or so it was reported 6) and in the early 1850s was said to have an excellent stock in his general store or chandler’s store. This was evidence proffered by a Poor Law relieving officer when the Poor Law Union was trying to make him pay more for his son’s upkeep in an institution, so this may have been an exaggeration as James Duncan claimed his stock never exceeded £30. We can infer nothing about James Duncan’s politics from his livelihood, although commentators did detect a definite bias in the case of the French épicier, or general provision merchant – he was the passive substratum, who ‘do not meddle with political opinions, or beat time in any way to the march of the movement’. Fiery youth, eager for change, confronted the épicier, ‘with his confirmed habit of order’. The Westminster Review, from which these comments come, discussed the ‘Physiology of the Epicier’, in 1836.7 A fascinating essay on the Parisian types, which appeared in the Scottish journal Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, in 1845, also suggested the grocer, or épicier, was the ‘upholder of conservatism’, but though like one ‘halfeducated’ – who but the épicier read successive editions of Voltaire and Rousseau? Yet who but the épicier read the novelist Charles Paul de Kock, wept at melodrama, or mixed sentiment with maintenance of social order

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and stability?8 Of the British grocer, the discussion in the series of character sketches illustrated by Kenny Meadows entitled ‘Heads of the People’, suggested a similar apoliticism in a time of thriving trade, although, interestingly, in relation to James Elmslie Duncan, there was the recognition that the sons of grocers could, at least until they settled down, be given to sentimentality and theatricality, ‘his eldest hope has a jaunty active look ... you perceive that his hair is parted in the middle and suffered to curl a little over his shirt collar. You once detected him putting a clove into a letter which he quickly sealed apologizing for the delay he informs you that he likes his letters to smell sweet even though it is only a bill.’9 Were James Elmslie Duncan’s poetic sensibilities ever similarly expressed, at his father’s shop counter? He certainly had the hairstyle. James Duncan married Ann Middleton, born in March 1798, and also from Aberdeen. Their ten children included George Middleton, born in 1818 at Broadford Street in Aberdeen, the only child of their marriage who seems to have been born in Scotland, who died in 1819; Jane Gordon, born in London in March 1820, who died in 1822; John, born in August 1824 (and received at Allhallows after having been privately baptised previously); Jessie Ann, born in September 1826, who died in 1828; George, born in July 1828; Gordon, born in September 1830; Charles, born in September 1833; William, born in July 1836; and Alexander Boyd, born in August 1838.10 The Duncans evidently made the decision to leave the expanding town of Aberdeen and move down south shortly after the death of George. All the later children were christened amid the classical elegance of the church of Allhallows, London Wall. In the baptismal registers the abode was given as 26 St Mary Axe, which was the address for ‘Duncan, brokers’, in a London street directory in 1823.11 The brokerage is unspecified in the directory but a partnership as provision factor with ‘C. Duncan’ was dissolved in October 1822; and James Duncan was a cheesemonger when declared bankrupt in November 1836, appearing at Basinghall Street Bankruptcy Court in December 1836.12 By 1838, the year in which the Chartist movement emerged, the family had moved from this City address, a place of marine insurance and shipbrokers – now a financial centre notable for the skyscraper at No.30 known as the ‘Gherkin’ – to 5 Lower East Smithfield, James Duncan’s occupation being listed as merchant or provision merchant. 13 At the same address was J. Shoobert, cooper and ships’ chandler, in the vicinity were opticians, a chart seller, a sailmaker and ships’ smiths. Presumably Duncan had settled with his creditors. There is no discussion of bankruptcy in James Elmslie Duncan’s work – but it may well have cast a dark cloud over his childhood, the ‘most spectacular form of economic failure in Victorian society,’ as Barbara Weiss describes it, ‘sudden, catastrophic, and

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final.’14 Although stigmatised, it was not an uncommon experience at the time, and Duncan’s change of trade was perhaps not unusual. Five of the Duncan children survived into adulthood, including one of the sons who had saved enough money to emigrate to Australia some time in the early 1850s15, and three of the siblings who lived with their mother in Scotland, being maintained by the father (whether this was merely a temporary arrangement, we do not know). He was able to support, in that period, the Scottish Society (according to testimony given in a police court; presumably this was the Scottish Hospital for the relief of Scottish poor in London, or Caledonian Asylum16). An essay on the Scots in London noted that they herded together, having their annual Caledonian balls, their Presbyterian clergy, and the ‘annual dinner of the Caledonian Asylum’.17 We know nothing about the father’s relationship with his son before adulthood: one of James Elmslie Duncan’s earliest poetic effusions, about sea bathing, recalls his father rescuing someone from the sea who had been seized with cramp, but otherwise, James Elmslie Duncan revealed nothing in his poetry. Even verse about the death of an infant sister is unrevealing, or rather its superficiality is enlightening. As one reviewer suggested of the Chartist poet Gerald Massey, perhaps he wrote because he ‘has read poetry, not because he has felt it’.18 In James Elmslie Duncan’s incomplete novel Edward Noble the Utopian, the hero reflects, ‘strong, very strong is the influence of early training, early associations, of the recollections of a mother’s words, of a father’s advice’.19 His mother does not figure in his surviving prose or poetry, except, possibly, in the reference to snow in a paragraph in Morning Star, ‘It is in Scotland no uncommon thing for people to be lost in the snow. We were ourselves once consigned to this grave by no means to the comfort of our dear mother.’20 He was, according to his own father’s testimony, ‘well educated, understood several languages’ – the police court magistrate Edward Yardley described his father’s ‘full duty’ towards his wayward son, in 1853, having given him a ‘very superior education’, by which was meant, perhaps, an education that went beyond the mere reading, writing and arithmetic which might be deemed useful for the sort of trade Duncan senior was engaged in.21 How formal or intermittent this education was, and indeed where it took place (perhaps in private or endowed Lower East Smithfield establishments), we do not know, but it was presumably supplemented by self-study. ‘I have been no little book-worm,’ he told his readers in 1845. 22 His published prose was, if not replete with foreign languages, occasionally adorned with italicised words such as mens populi and émeute, but he did not have the habit, useful for the biographer, of larding his

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prose with quotations from other authors, so one has no evidence of the width or depth of his reading except the absence of quotation. Shakespeare, Milton, Goldsmith, Sterne, Burns, Shelley, and Victor Hugo feature in his published work. James Elmslie Duncan saw himself as a member of the middle class, his education giving him access to the progressive and middle-class journalism of the age – The Times (which was praised by him, in late 1849, at least for its opposition to the New Poor Law and to protectionism), Punch, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal (‘too much of Malthus, too little of Bentham – too much of Paley, and too little of Paine’ 23) and Eliza Cook’s Journal (which, not surprisingly, since its editor was a popular poet, thought highly of the role of poetry: ‘no “dream,” but a reality of unmeasured influence and power, for good or for ill; so much so that one law-giver (Charondas) wrote his laws in verse, and another banished Homer from his ideal Republic’).24 We are on more certain, if insalubrious, ground in relation to James Elmslie Duncan’s environment in his adulthood in the 1840s. Wapping was the site of the ambitious Thames Tunnel connecting the Thames Dock to the Surrey side of London at Rotherhithe (and finally completed in 1843, for foot passengers originally). Duncan’s home environment was full of maritime bustle; Wapping was the archetypal nautical district, lending its name to other districts in England, in Tasmania, and elsewhere.25 Destroyed by later Victorian commercial growth, the Blitz, and post-war development, the Wapping of Duncan’s days was a distinct place: of narrow streets, with chandlers, sailmakers, public houses, and wharves. As one magazine described it in 1852, it was a district little known to most of its readers, but, in the east of London, on the Middlesex side of the Thames, a little below the Tower, chiefly inhabited by sea-faring men, and tradesmen dealing in commodities for the supply of shipping and sailors; … not overclean or elegantly-built locality … in the present day it would be considered by the denizens of St James’s and Belgravia a strange outlandish sort of place, in which dull warehouses, queer-looking little docks, swinging-bridges, narrow streets, dirty houses, and an illassorted population, were the most remarkable objects.26 Another account of the district, from an article appearing in the Leisure Hour in 1861, provides some more detail about the transition from high buildings with bridges interconnecting them across the High Street, to close shuttered houses ‘that seem to have been locked up for half a century. It is easy to imagine ghostly eyes peering out of the shutter holes

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or to picture to yourself a robber of the water rat species suddenly opening the door and fiercely demanding why he was disturbed in his lurking place’.27 Celebrated or notorious sites would include Execution Dock, where pirates used to be hanged in chains at low water mark and left for three tides to cover, and the Wapping Old Stairs immortalised by Charles Dibdin’s song about ‘Molly who has never been false she declares, since last time we parted on Wapping Old Stairs,’ and her sailor lover. It was imagined as a strange and dangerous place: ‘Floury men peer over from the top floors of throbbing steam mills as if they meditated suicide,’ claimed one writer in 1879. Its diverse maritime-related industries and enterprises included shipping butchers, marine stores, bakers of ship’s biscuits, makers of ropes and chains, and filtered-water works. ‘There is so to speak an almost ubiquitous smell of tar.’28

FIGURE 2. Map of Wapping area c.1848, based on the map of London by G.F. Cruchley, showing Wapping High Street, Hermitage Stairs, Hermitage Bridge (above Hermitage Dock) and St Catherine’s [sic] Dock.

It was also a place of terrible slums and cellar lodgings which flooded in the spring due to the district’s low level and in 1849 James Duncan’s letter of concern about the cholera-engendering stagnant lock to the London Docks at Hermitage Bridge (the bridge itself dividing to allow access to the London Docks – a good bird’s eye view centred on the 20 acres of the of the Western Dock or London Dock is provided by a large engraving appearing in the Illustrated London News in September 184529) was printed in The Times in August 1849 – his store being at the Hermitage, although the address given is incorrect.30

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Sir, There is an unused entrance lock to the London Docks at Hermitage, in which the water is as green as grass, and emits an effluvium sufficient to engender disorder all around. One cannot pass the bridge over this stagnant ditch without inhaling the noxious vapour arising therefore. Hundreds of half-starved fellows hang about for hours, almost daily, waiting for employment, on the verge of this upas pond. No wonder cholera is spread in all directions, seeing that the perishing wretches, whose frequent scrabbles for an hour or two’s work is so painful to witness, after breathing this foul air for perhaps half-a-day, return to their hovels, too often with empty stomachs and necessarily infused lungs. It was only yesterday that a boy was seized with cholera on Hermitage-bridge. The dock people sometimes open the gate sluices and let the fresh water in. A hint in The Times may bring them to let these sluices remain constantly open, at least during the prevalence of the epidemic, 335: Wapping, August 23 James Duncan Duncan’s intervention was stimulated by the current anxiety about ‘Asiatic cholera’. Wapping had also been a location for a cholera outbreak in 1831, and was to be again in 1866. In 1849 it killed over 13,000 in London. In 1831 the cholera was identified as spreading as a result of a ship mooring at Hermitage Pier in Wapping. The minutes of evidence taken before the metropolitan sanitary commissioners included the account of the surgeon Robert Bowie (who later emigrated to Australia) with details of the pumping of cellars at night to remove the sewage forced in through house-drains by the tides, in the district where the ‘labouring classes’ lived: the stench from the water pumped out was ‘often intolerable’. The Thames itself was a sewer and was particularly impure in that district, and it was near particularly noxious effluvia that shipping, chiefly Scottish smacks – large single-masted vessels – lay close. Water supply was inadequate and the water which was provided smelled offensive, and it was so arduous to obtain this via an intermittent standpipe provision that the labouring population ‘rarely bestowed much of it on their own clothes or persons’. It was a place of frequent epidemics, with typhus and scarlet fever, and fever on board the insanitary merchant ships. The rotting carcasses of dogs, cats and other animals were combined with the waste from shipping in the river, to pollute the beach at low tide. The ‘whole of the coast extending from St Catherine’s [sic] Docks the entire length of High street Wapping was very bad with the exception of a few houses at and near the entrance of the London Docks,’ Bowie recalled.31

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A second case of cholera was identified as a seaman, Thomas Skowes of the Evander of Aberdeen and the third was the mate of another Scottish vessel also lying at the Hermitage. The cholera spread from Wapping along that side of the shore, including Limehouse, and crossed the river to Rotherhithe, Bermondsey, and thus eventually into the City. In the years since the 1831 outbreak, when the Duncans settled in Wapping, little had changed. When Victorians spoke of the pleasant purlieus of Wapping, they were being ironic – it formed the natural antithesis to the Pall Mall Clubs or the Crystal Palace.

FIGURE 3. J.M. Whistler, ‘Black Lion Wharf’, 1859, reproduced from F. Wedmore,

Etching in England (London: G. Bell, 1895). On the left is the five-storied Hoare’s Wharf. By courtesy of the University of Plymouth.

James Elmslie Duncan was not the only poet who was to find an escape from dinginess through imagined ‘flowers and perfumes’. 32 One can understand, given the environment (Charles Mackay described it as ‘low, dirty, smelling strongly of pitch’, in his book, Thames and its Tributaries in 184033), why he should extol the beauties of nature, or delicate flowers and Deeside landscape, in his poetry, and why he should set so much store in his published health advice on cleanliness. He devoted some of the surviving number of his third journal, The Divinarian, to his ‘Theory of the Cholera’, in December 1849 – linked to ‘a deficiency of atmospheric electricity’ and a diet of diseased meat and insufficient ‘saccharine,

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23

frugiverous, and farinaceous nutriment’ – and endorsed something he called mysteriously ‘Medicinal Perfectionation’.34 He cited the health reformer Dr Edwin Lankester’s revelations of the cholera’s progress, which furnished a ‘pretty accurate map of those localities where the water is bad’.35 Yet, given the impurity of water in such an unwholesome locality as Wapping, his decision to be a teetotaller was risky. Duncan was christened in an Anglican church, but we do not known what denomination he was raised in. The surviving record – of his prose and poetry – has little to say except in anti-clerical terms, about the established church and organised religion. Where his father set up business in Wapping, there was little formal religious provision. As the Reverend George Charles Smith’s Mariners’ Church, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Gospel Temperance Magazine complained in 1845: What an horrible kind of neglect and disgrace to all the ministers and chapels. Here are streets, and courts, all alongshore from Shadwell to the Tower, with all the wharfs, quays, and ships, and steamers, but not one chapel or meeting house of any description. No preaching, or prayer meetings, or religious effort of any kind alongshore by the river side. There is one small church at Wapping, but no other place of worship. The Wesleyans have preaching at a house in Old Gravel Lane, but that is some distance up from the waterside.36 Given Duncan’s pride in his Scottish heritage, it is probably relevant that there was a regular link by steamers between the port of Aberdeen and London, with two fleets of steamers travelling between the two ports in the summer, by the 1840s, with an Aberdeen and London Steam Navigation Company providing a regularity to maritime travel which the old Aberdeen smacks had not enjoyed.37 An essay on ‘Back to Scotland’ in Charles Dickens’s All the Year Round details the journey via Aberdeen Steam Wharf in 1865.38 A discharged bankrupt himself, in 1843 James Duncan appears as Scotch agent and cheesemonger, of 113 High Street, Wapping, being assigned on 9 March 1843 all the estates and effects of his fellow cheesemonger Thomas Charles Terry, for the purpose of dealing with Terry’s creditors, in The Times and London Gazette.39 We have another glimpse of Duncan senior’s business associates or acquaintances in 1849. He was reported in the press giving recognisances for the appearance of the prisoners to put in the required bail, when Jonathan Webb Clark, a biscuit maker, and Walter (or William) Clark his son, were charged with the wilful and malicious setting fire to the premises of Gordon and Godfrey, ship-joiners and carpenters at Orange Court, High Street,

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Wapping on the night of 14 June 1849. The Clarks had been given notice to quit their bakehouse on the ground floor of the premises, they were to be discharged for lack of evidence.40 353 High Street Wapping, where James Duncan’s business as Scotch provision merchants was based, was also the address for a biscuit baker’s, James Thompson, in the 1840s and early 1850s. Next to it was the Gun public house, George Smith’s malt distillery at Eagle Wharf, and Newcastle Firebrick and Coke Co.; nearby businesses included a chandler and iron merchant and a Post Office receiving house-cum-stationer. The narrow cobbled High Street, beside the very many public houses, encompassed sailmakers, coal merchants, draper, baker, blockmakers, millwrights, potato merchants, steam corn mills. The Thames Marine Police Office was at No.259.41 There is no direct trace of the district in Duncan’s poetry and prose, no hint of ‘its long and narrow streets ... its dirt, and age, and squalor,’ no reference to ‘the dirty mazes of Wapping’ which attracted Charles Dickens to the district.42 One would not know, from his writing, that Duncan lived by the London Docks: one could not write Shelleyan verse about Wapping. He firmly shut out the city from his poetry. Judge Jeffreys was discovered at Wapping dressed as a sailor in 1688, trying to escape to Hamburg; in adjoining Ratcliff Highway, there had taken place the horrific murders which terrified Londoners in December 181143, the butcher’s son Arthur Orton escaped from a life amid the carcases of oxen and sheep at Orton and Woodgate’s in Wapping High Street to become the Tichborne Claimant and thus stimulate a bizarre but massive radical movement in the 1870s. Duncan was a far less fantastic figure, but his poetry clearly represented an escape too. For a visual sense of the place before such changes as the London embankment removed the picturesqueness (‘a more entertaining variety of the universal London ugliness,’ as one critic observed 44) we have the American James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s etchings from a decade later, when he rented rooms in Wapping and Rotherhithe in July 1859, to work on images which would become a series of etchings, his ‘Thames Set’. 45 For Whistler the place evidently had its picturesque attractions, a character which was acknowledged in a guide entitled Summer Excursions in the County of Kent, along the Banks of the Rivers Thames and Medway (published in 1847), where, through the mass of shipping, one could glimpse the ‘eminently picturesque’ and completely varied buildings, gabled wooden structures with bay windows, some with overhanging galleries and others shrinking back ‘as though fearful of too near neighbourhood of the river’, while other dwellings were propped up on poles and posts to make room for the cargoes of bales or staves or barrels or iron bars crowded beneath. 46

‘LONDONER OF BIRTH, SCOTTISH BY PARENTAGE’

25

FIGURE 4. Detail of J.M. Whistler, ‘Thames Warehouses’, 1859, reproduced from

W.C. Brownell, ‘Whistler in Painting and Etching’, Scribner’s Monthly 18: 4 (August 1879), pp.481-495 (p.488). Author’s collection.

FIGURE 5. J.M. Whistler, ‘Thames Police, or Wapping Wharf’, 1859, reproduced from J. Pennell, Etchers and etchings: chapters in the history of the art together with technical explanations of modern artistic methods (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1925). By courtesy of the University of Plymouth.

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Whistler’s etchings did not convey the colour, with the large lettering in black, gold, red, and white or the thick scattering of public houses – necessary in a place where the drinking water was dangerous – with their signs and red window curtains.47 The population of Wapping was in decline in this period, as a result of the building of the high walls of the London Docks which effectively cut off this part of the city: from 6,000 in 1801 the population fell to 2,000 in 1881.48

2 FLOWERS AND FRUITS

James Elmslie Duncan was to make his public career in the cause of progress and reform as a man in his early twenties. His first recorded association with progressive circles was in relation to an establishment called the Concordium. We know almost nothing about this involvement, and what little information we do have figured in reminiscences by others written long after he had disappeared. GENUINE SCOTCH OATMEAL, Round, Middling, and Fine, at 1s. 9d. per stone of 14 pounds, at Duncan’s Scotch Provision Warehouse, Wapping, near Hoar’s Wharf, Hermitage Bridge. Pearl and Scotch Barley, Split Peas, Grits, &c., equally cheap.1

In 1842 James Duncan’s ‘Scotch Provision Warehouse’ was thus advertised in a radical reform journal associated with the utopian community which was established a few miles from the metropolis at Ham Common in Surrey in 1838 – the small group of self-reformers eating Scottish oatmeal porridge for breakfast as part of their progressive regime.2 The advertisement appeared in November: the start of the year had seen the whole of Wapping High Street take on the appearance of a canal, with flooding following a hurricane, the tide rising rapidly and forcing the tenement inhabitants of the many courts and alleys to find shelter in upper rooms. Cellars, parlours and shops in the High Street, Great Hermitage Street and Gravel Lane and the many other streets and alleys leading from the main streets, were under water. Hoar’s Wharf (actually Hore’s steam wharf, at No.272, Wapping, owned by Elizabeth Hore) was flooded along with many others.

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Whether this commercial link provided the occasion for James Duncan’s son to become involved with the community, or reflected pre-existing ties, we will never know. The utopian enterprise, styled the ‘First Concordium’, was established by followers of the former merchant in drapery, and ‘Sacred Socialist,’ James Pierrepont Greaves (1777–1842).3 Known also as Alcott House, after the American educational reformer Bronson Alcott, its ‘sincere projectors carried out a living example of Alcott’s idea of human culture, in some practical particulars exceeding the experience of the original’, according to one of its leading figures, Charles Lane, who went on to join Alcott in America in his utopian venture at Fruitlands.4 The verdict of the British press was different, the Penny Satirist, for instance, in 1844, on reception of a copy of the community’s journal The New Age, Concordium Gazette and Temperance Advocate; A Monthly Journal of Human Physiology, Education and Association for July, observed: This eccentric periodical still continues to advocate extremes and excesses of various sorts. It is the organ of the Concordists of Ham Common, who have a house there, in which they live together, not in a Christian community, for they do not care for Christ more than anybody else, and they despise all reference to the past, having history within themselves, but they live in a sort of community, eating roots and fruits, and drinking cold water, and mortifying the flesh with its affections and lusts.5 The young James Elmslie Duncan possibly became associated with the community as a visitor or as a temporary resident. Certainly George Jacob Holyoake recalled him as linked with the place, in his history of the cooperative movement, ‘The Concordium had a poet, James Elmslie Duncan, a young enthusiast, who published a Morning Star in Whitechapel, where it was much needed.’6 In fact, although there are a few snippets in Duncan’s own published works to make this connection, he does not figure in the columns of the New Age or the other journal of the Concordists, The Healthian, either as a named contributor of poetry or indeed anything else. The poets that were published in the New Age and Healthian were John Goodwyn Barmby (of whom the reader will learn more, below) and his disciple George Meech in the Hanwell Communitorium in Middlesex; ‘H.G.W.’ who was presumably Henry Gardiner Wright, one of the leaders in the Concordium; Harriet Downing, the author of the popular ‘Remembrances of a Monthly Nurse’, in Fraser’s Magazine (and also Touched in the Head, and Satan in Love: A Dramatic Poem7); one Josiah Thomas; and one ‘A. Hume’.8 Perhaps the simple verse ‘The Pater’s Address to the Concordists’ – unattributed, but with the air ‘Scots

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wha ha’e’ – was his (1 February 1844) – although one doubts Duncan would have been happy with anonymity. Presumably Duncan read these journals; which were penny evangels ‘John-like sent forth as the annunciations or foreshadowings of an entire re-construction of society,’ as one progressive fellow-traveller declared.9 By 1845 the community experiment at Ham Common had failed, the Penny Satirist (which had imagined a Court Circular in which a corpulent Prince Albert, ‘stuffed with Christmas luxuries’, was advised to recuperate at the Concordium, ‘under the seal of secrecy’10) announcing that the ‘selfdenying party at Ham Common’ had recently given up the ghost – those that had been attracted, a very small number, ‘were only such unfortunate individuals as had failed to procure a comfortable living for themselves by the ordinary means of human industry. The House was called by many a refuge for the destitute; and, indeed, that was its real character.’ Its ‘pater’, William Oldham (‘with a beard as white and long as Merlin’s’ 11), had departed and members left to join other utopian or religious communities, such as the American Shakers, or the White Quakers in Ireland.12 Duncan did not leave London to join any of the community experiments which readers of the Penny Satirist heard about. He aspired, not unusually for a young man, to be a poet. It cannot – surely? – have been his idea to make a living from his poetry – for newspaper and magazine editors were flooded by unsolicited poems (a recent estimate is that five million poems appeared in the local press during the nineteenth century13), and fiction or drama would have been the root to fame, as the journalist Thomas Frost recalled, yet, the ‘first attacks of the cacoethes scribendi take the form, in most cases, of an irrepressible inclination to write verses.’14 The ‘Literary Adventurer often endeavours,’ one essayist observed in 1836, in writing of various English character types, ‘to commence his career by a short article or a small poem which he offers for nothing to the editor of a Magazine or an Annual.’ For Duncan, son of a respectable provision merchant, with what little evidence we have of his family life suggestive of supportive and indulgent parents, his fate would not be to live in a garret on bread and black coffee or weak tea (beverages which, in any case, he considered poisons) eking out an existence as a ‘speculative’ reporter on a penny a line, chronicling accidents and small crimes for the Sunday papers.15 James Elmslie Duncan himself first appears in the radical press in late 1842, when an item by ‘J.E. Duncan,’ apparently entitled ‘A Suggestion,’ was declined for publication by the Owenite socialist organ, the New Moral World in October.16 An early poem was printed in The World of Fashion and Monthly Magazine of the Courts of London and Paris Fashions and Literature, Music, Fine Arts, the Opera and the Theatres in 1 July 1843: ‘The Mountain

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Daisy’, a fourteen-line poem written on finding this ‘wee modest crimson tippit flower,’ early in the year, on Deeside, in Aberdeenshire – Duncan being loquacious about the ‘infant toy’ of Spring, the mountain daisy fair (already the subject of a poetic effusion by Robert Burns, his plough meeting the flower in an evil hour, in 1786, which Duncan gestured towards).17 It was an odd journal to appear in. In the same year he had already appeared as the author of verse in the Cheltenham Free Press, beginning in March.18 Cheltenham, ‘a fashionable town, a watering, visiting place, where everything is genteel and thin,’19 was also in this period the location for several radical groups: including Chartists, followers of Greaves, supporters of the socialist Robert Owen and the communist John Goodwyn Barmby (the Educational Circular and Communist Apostle emanating from the master wood carver Henry Lindsey Fry at 9 Northfield Terrace in 1841–1842), with a democratic teetotal society also formed.20 Advocacy of a vegetable diet appeared: the paper reported the socialist Alexander Campbell, also a follower of Greaves, urging a public meeting for the Animals’ Friend Society held at the Infants’ School in September 1843, that unless they ‘go to the root of the matter and endeavour to put a stop to the consumption of the flesh of the lower animals, then cruelty would go on until men became more rational’.21 The ultra-radical Cheltenham Free Press had been heralded as a ‘spirited attempt to establish a vehicle for the diffusion of sound political knowledge and principle’ in the Unitarian Monthly Repository in 1835 and was described in a contemporary ‘view of Cheltenham’, by Henry Davies, as ‘the champion of ultra-liberal opinions. The tone of its political articles is bold and uncompromising and much ability is sometimes displayed in the advocacy of the particular views which it maintains. It enjoys a respectable circulation among the advocates and supporters of the ballot, universal suffrage and the charter.’ In the company of talented local versifiers such as the actor John Wade Clinton, Duncan’s poems, such as ‘Forget-me-not’, ‘Love’s Offerings’, ‘The Flower o’ the Dee’ were unexceptional (one young Cheltenham poet, the unemployed schoolmaster Samuel Sperry, had been ruined as a result of his socialist tendencies, his alleged conversion covered in the rival Cheltenham Chronicle) – neither very evocative nor original – but indicated his identification with things Scottish.22 In the verse, ‘The Banks of the Dee’, he wrote of lingering by the ‘swift rolling Dee’, from May to winter, and he had presumably, as in the poem, gazed upon Panannaich’s forests from the hill of Craigen Darroch, and climbed Lochnagar. The Deeside village of Ballater was ‘dear to my heart, | As the beauty and worth that within thy walls dwell’, and was mentioned in several of the poems. Ballater, called the ‘capital of Deeside’, was a recently developed watering

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place, its waters supposedly curative of scrofulous complaints and the gravel and attracting Aberdonians to summer residence. The village was located near the estate that was to become royal Balmoral, after the Queen leased the old castle in 1848.23 Duncan was perhaps unaware that the childhood of the poet Byron was spent, for several years, in summer time, in Ballater.24 The verse also reflected his great admiration for the weaver William Thom (1798–1848), the so-called ‘Bard of Ury’, a man recalled in the 1890s as a genuine poet in a ‘small Burns-diluted way’.25 Duncan first read his verse in 1841, and had high praise for the poems entitled The Blind Boy’s Pranks. On his way back to London after staying in Scotland (presumably with relations, and presumably at Ballater) he decided to visit his ‘brother poet’ and spent a few weeks with him at Inverurie.26 Duncan’s enthusiasm for the poet was not unusual since the diminutive and clubfooted Thom was fêted by Chartists and London radicals, and featured in their journals, such as Douglas Jerrold’s Illuminated Magazine, which praised the genius and true poetry of the handloom weaver’s Rhymes and Recollections.27 ‘We have no fiction here,’ the reviewer wrote, in an article which also contained an engraved portrait of the smartly attired weaver sat at his loom, taken from the life, ‘no fabrication of artificial woes; every emotion recorded has been felt; every pang has been suffered. In prose and verse it is alike endued with the eloquence of truth; and in this consists much of its value. It is a revelation the “woes unnumbered” under which thousands – nay, millions – of our fellow beings are doomed to struggle through existence.’ In identifying with Thom, then, Duncan was associating with a man of toil, struggling to support his family in the terrible economic conditions of the 1840s. There were a few further poems published in the Cheltenham Free Press in 1844; ‘The Lovers’ a lengthy poem which appeared in late April, recounted the tale of a young couple who emigrated to New Zealand where the husband was quickly drowned in swimming in haste to be at the bedside of his wife who he sensed had just given birth: With hope-swelling bosom they crossed the vast ocean Heart with heart knitted, and hand linked in hand, Ah, me! But I cannot repress my emotion, Methinks I still see them coy, smiling, and bland. They crossed the vast ocean with hope swelling bosom, Alas! That for such we are forced from her strand, To see what their own native land did refuse them, In a wild, in a strange, in a far distant land. 28

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Continuing the same level of doggerel, the ‘Ploughing Match – The Plough More Honourable than the Sword’, which had previously been declined for publication, also appeared.29 This had been delivered by Duncan at the end of a match held in Deeside, where, so he wrote, he crowned the head of the ploughman with laurels, ‘amid the acclamation of the assemblage’ – that is, assuming the role of public poet – the verse was appropriate but hardly daring in its argument. It played to Scottish sentiment and identified the author with a great national poet: it also responded to a vogue for plough matches designed to foster harmony between landowners and tenants and encourage agricultural improvements.30 My Highland friends, I come before you now, To speak in praise of those who guide the plough, In honor, too, of him who has to-day Carried the highest ploughing prize away – And if you’ll deign to listen to my voice, Your kindness, friends, will be to me a prize. Britain! A mighty one art thou on earth, Mighty thine arm is when ’tis stretched forth To deal death-blows or make the fetters fall, Holding the negro in their galling thrall. On thy vast empire bright Sol setteth never,31 (And thus on thee, too, and never, never wane,) Thy ships in myriads plough the boundless main, To make the riches of the torrid zone, And of the frigid, too, proud one! Thine own, Yet, for thy wealth and power, how much dost thou Depend upon the children of the plough? But all thy riches, mighty one! And power, Yes, and each gorgeous palace, cloud-capt tower,32 And wide-spread city that is claimed by thee, And all thy ships that brave the perilous sea, Do in one sense, their very being owe To the industrious guiders of the plough. Say, what had been mankind’s condition now, If men had shrunk from toiling at the plough? Then, surely he who would a man despise For such a calling, scarcely can be wise; And he who ploughmen for their calling scorn, Wrongs at the same time, our ain Bobbie Burns! Yes, matchless Burns! To whom fame doth award

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The proud, proud name, of Caledonia’s bard, A ploughman was, yes – Robbie held the plou’! He ploughed Fame’s wreath around his manly brow; Then, sure, his judgement must indeed be weak, Who of the ploughman slightingly would speak. Surely, if he who ploughs the briny deep, Harvests of pain and death that he may reap, And in his brethren’s blood his hands imbrue, Deserveth honor, he deserves it too, Who ploughs earth’s soil, that it may soon supply Harvests, without which, men in misery Would perish – yes, in countless multitudes, Devouring, God! Each other’s flesh for food; If those who win in war’s unholy strife, The shedding blood, destroying human life, Deserving one of honor would not they Engaged in such a strife as I to-day Have witnessed here, deserve it too and well, The strife wherein men nobly strive to excel, Look at all useful toil, preparing earth To bring for man food in abundance forth? If he who gains the fearful fight of him, And blood and death deserveth to obtain A laurel leaf, methinks he also would, Who gains the fights of usefulness and good, And that I thus think by an act to show, I place this wreath, my friend, upon your brow. One can quite see why it had initially been rejected, but not why it was published now, in July 1844.33 He was back in London by this period, since the final poem published in 1844 was a weak Scots poem, ‘The Lad wi’ the dark roving eye,’ to the air of the old Scottish ballad ‘Lizzy Lindsay’, who, unlike the original, spurns the auld laird with his wealth and land for a ‘jockey tar frae the sea’ (‘Watty returned frae the Indies, | The Kirk frae the pair gat its fee; | Now she blesses the day when she saw him – | The lad wi’ the dark rolling e’e.’) signed ‘J.E. Duncan, London’.34 The paper also published lines written as a challenge to versify on the subject of solitude, ‘To be alone – this, this is solitude,’ the poem safely asserted in conclusion.35 Very few copies of Duncan’s collection, Flowers and Fruits, or Poetry, Philosophy and Science, survive, with two of the three known copies being preserved in New York Public Library.36 A slim octavo volume bound in

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green cloth which has been blind stamped with a scrolled pattern, and with the title in plain capitals in gilt on the front cover, it is almost seventy pages, the sense of pride in the artefact is palpable, even as it contained traces of editorial slips (an errata slip at the back for instance included ‘for “less verdure,” read “robbed of much of their verdure”. And, correcting a footnote in relation to vegetarian diet: ‘for “intestines,” read “intestinal canal,” &c. &c. and be d―d to ’em.’)

FIGURE 6. Facsimile of the title page of the first edition of Flowers and Fruits, based on the copy in the New York Public Library. The author’s copy lacks this page.

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The volume was published in London ‘for the author’ in 1843 by the firm of George Smith and Alexander Elder (both men were Scots, they were Thom’s publishers, and also the publisher of the Brontës) and could also be obtained via ‘Mr J. Duncan, 353, High Street Wapping, by post at 1s 10d’. Somewhat confusingly, the New Moral World carried an advertisement for his work, ‘in the press’, from J.J. Merriman and Co., of 3 Holywell Street, Strand, in late October 1843: alongside the life of Franz Anton Mesmer, ‘the Discoverer of Animal Magnetism’, an outline of Robert Owen’s rational system, and a cheap annotated copy of Byron’s Cain: A Mystery.37 In February 1844 the Owenite journal carried another advertisement (in a column immediately next to a letter from Friedrich Engels on French communism) a fifty-line advertisement, when advertisements of 10 lines were 4s and 4d per additional line.38 The title page was decorated with a simple floral border, and, expressive both of Duncan’s poetic and philosophical affiliation, a motto from Shelley. The collection of poems began with an affirmation of optimism about mankind’s progress, and the joyful purpose of man, in a sequence of poems entitled ‘The Beauties of Nature, or Man made to Rejoice’: ‘for man doth every day | Grow wiser; and in Wisdom’s train | His consort, Virtue! Follows – who shall reign |With him o’er all this vasty earth!’39 A paradise would be created through music, poetry, art, architecture, and science, assisted by ‘rosy Health’s pure festive board’ (vegetarianism). The effusion asserted: ‘Man was not made for woe and care: But to be happy ever here!’ And Nature, too, in sweet assenting voice Shall cry ‘’Tis true: man was made to rejoice.’40 As well as being a response to Robert Burns’s ‘Man was Made to Mourn’, this poem must have been one of Duncan’s attempts at a lengthy poem of Romantic (and socialist) philosophy, although what was published was ‘merely passages from the original poem’. Duncan may have been inspired by such work as John Garwood’s poem (dedicated to Owen), The Force of Circumstance – copies of which were available for 6d from the Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists.41 Poets were seen by one Socialist critic of poetry as the high priests of nature – those most sensitive to the influences of the natural world. 42 Nature was the source of his sweetest bliss, Duncan’s protagonist declares, in summer walks amid tree, flower and rill: ‘I could have wept with excess of bliss.’ And to myself I said ‘If it be true

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That man was made to mourn, why are these raptures mine? If it be true that man was made to mourn, Why doth a tiny flower, or a mere dew drop, Yield him such sweet sensations of delight? – If it be true, Oh why do God’s own works Call forth such heavenly raptures sweet, when gazed upon?’ And looking on Nature thus, as God’s own word That speaketh thro’ the bliss it calleth forth; Methinks it is declared MAN MADE FOR JOY. Perhaps too, one can detect Duncan’s anti-Malthusianism in the assertion of the joyfulness of man-in-nature.43 William Thom was to observe in a footnote to his poem, ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’, appearing in the second edition of Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-loom Weaver in 1845, that ‘The wide spread bounty of God was never willed to be a wide spread sorrow to man.’44 The collection also included his Scottish verse (one poem, an ‘Epistle to Mr William Thom’ described his hero, in a footnote, as a ‘poet of the first water’45). There were several poems which were ‘fragments’ or ‘pickings from unfinished poems’, and, as he stressed, ‘early effusions’.46 Duncan offered the reader elegies, songs, sonnets, and epigrams. One poem, ‘The Man of the World’, was in imitation of Oliver Goldsmith’s facetious ‘Madame Blaze’.47 There was an epigram written on the back of a pound note, ‘like the Tortoise thou com’st in, But flitt’st away on Eagle wing’. The verse included that archetypal Romantic theme of suicide, in ‘The Suicide’s Tomb’, its epitaph sympathetic to the flight of the ‘weary soul’, and lines on the death of a sister in infancy (‘a fair sister, fair as rosy morn’), and the death of a twenty-year-old mother, ‘Torn from the joys of young connubial love’.48 There also appeared a ‘monody’, after the ‘Melancholy and Sudden’ death of a woman who Duncan described as ‘fair and sylph like’. It is possible that the Mrs Honey mourned there is the twenty-six-year-old singer and actress Laura Honey, née Bell, celebrated star of the minor theatres, who had been married at sixteen to a law writer, was depicted in costume in several lithographed portraits, and who died suddenly of inflammation in April 1843. 49 If so, it is the only suggestion in Duncan’s oeuvre that he visited the London theatres. MONODY

ON THE DEATH OF THE LATE MRS. HONEY.

Alas, and art thou from us torn? Ah, has Death struck the fatal blow? And is it ours to weep and mourn

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For thee, thus soon? Ah surely no! But ah! those tears declare ’tis so Yes, thou hast pass’d the mystic bourn,– Well may we sigh in tearful woe,– From whence no traveller doth return.– Life’s summer had not long entwined Its rose wreath ’round her sunny brow But who ah who could have divined, That Death thus soon would lay thee low? 50 Heartfelt perhaps, but weakened by the banal repetition of ‘ah’. There were some charming poems – verse imagining the exploits of Cupid as a ‘little breechless imp’, for instance.51 There was also sentimental and romantic poetry, none of it suggesting the genuine pangs of adolescent or adult love, and giving the biographer little insight into Duncan’s private life. Nature, that hackneyed theme of the budding poet, figured largely, in the form of poems on the flowers amid verdant knolls, moss roses, and the poetic section ended with Duncan letting the Curtain fall, ‘and yet we’ll hope |’Tis not the Curtain of Forgetfulness.’ 52 Why did he feel the compulsion to publish what were incomplete, infantine, or juvenile poems? He was, after all, twenty one, which is not the age of a prodigy, even if some of the poetry were penned, as he emphasised, in his youth. The volume was not published by subscription, and nor did it feature any dedication to friends or relations. Yet someone must have paid for the cost of printing and binding the poetaster’s work. And as one cautionary article on the unprofitability of being an author commented, ‘If a publisher will neither purchase the copyright nor print and publish the manuscript at his own risk the author must anticipate a considerable loss in having it printed for himself.’ 53 His delight in being a published author is obvious: he embraced the textual apparatus. The work was footnoted (some of these notes, evidently for a metropolitan readership, explained the pronunciation of Scottish names, for instance: ‘The u in Muick is silent, and the I pronounced short.’54) and Duncan was clearly proud of his achievement in poetry and in prose. Three chapters of an unfinished novel entitled ‘Edward Noble, or the Utopian’ (the table of contents, at the back, disarmingly listed it as ‘Three Chapters of my First Novel!’) formed the ‘philosophical’ section to the collection. The phrenologist – reader of cranial bumps – might see here, particularly, the ‘promptings of Self Esteem and Love of Approbation’ which ushered into print such a fragment, but the venture also expressed the cultural prestige of the novel, despite the unlikelihood that Duncan

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would make a living by quitting the counter for a life as a man of letters. 55 Though it is tempting to see strong elements of autobiography in a first novel, one ought not to draw too much from so limited a fragment.

FIGURE 7. The opening page of ‘Edward Noble or the Utopian’, in the first edition of Flowers and Fruits, p.25, from a copy in the author’s collection.

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In the novel Duncan ‘proposed to himself to develop, in the hero and heroine, his beau-ideal of man, and woman, and work it up into a sort of narrative.’ It was written in an arch and unrealistic manner, with prolixity and obscurity, exhibiting slight literary merit, and it says much for his inability to apply himself, that he never completed the novel, but he felt confident enough of its virtues to publish revised versions of his ‘sort of narrative’, later in the decade. Perhaps it might have been a ‘philosophical novel’, as the reviewer in the Illustrated London News was to call it, and if there is no indication that it was intended to be a vehicle for debating or satirising ideas in the manner of Thomas Love Peacock, as a narrative dramatising the conflict of religious prejudice (or Christian orthodoxy) and idealism, atheism or deism, it might have been interesting. It did not, from the published fragment, suggest a novel explicitly dealing with Owenite infidelity. The novel was projected to begin in an urban interior, with three ladies gossiping over brandy-laced tea (the brandy contraband, the author thought he would introduce a smuggler to the narrative to create some ‘thrilling interest’) – the women being Mrs Goodbody the landlady, and two of her lodgers, presented like the three witches in Macbeth, gossiping about a beautiful young woman, Miss Llewellen, who was also lodging with them, and the ‘queer young man’ who they feared was merely after her wealth. This was the eponymous hero, an artist, introduced to the reader in a chapter entitled ‘The Artist and the Hobgoblin’ – which ended with the hero making the acquaintance of a dwarf standing on his head, and agreeing to accompany this original to London, where he seeks employment in a theatre. Edward Noble is an atheist of ‘massy, tho’ noble and beautiful features’ who wore ‘that which is so unusual now a days in England, tho’ once universally honored and cherished, and wherefore should it not have been? – namely, a beard’.56 He is gibed at by people for his ‘unusual appearance’ as he strides out in his cloak, past shops, streets and houses, to reach a hill from which to survey London and the autumnal countryside at sunset.  Here, we must take a detour from the novel, to explore the significance of the beard to Duncan and his contemporaries: for it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the young man’s reputation came to be linked with the wearing of a beard. The beard may already have been sported by Duncan himself from this period: its existence a symbol of manly independence or perhaps a sign of youthful rebellion. Although, as Christopher Oldstone-Moore has argued, the full beard had started to

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become more popular it was yet to enjoy the status it possessed after the Crimean war, when Punch and other journals debated the ‘beard movement’.57 Duncan’s hirsute gesture marked him out as eccentric if not worse. In the year that ‘Edward Noble’ was published, a newspaper report of the madness of the ‘monomaniac’ John Stevenson, who threatened to assassinate Queen Victoria and Sir Robert Peel in 1843, included the detail of his unshorn beard, worn ‘until the king shall come to Jerusalem,’ as the man told one of his interrogators in court.58 Given that Duncan sported a red beard too, he was bravely going against prejudices that would later be expressed in advice given by Punch in an article on ‘Reason and the Razor’ in 1854, which also noted the objection raised that the beard was a badge of ‘covert red republicanism, enmity to order, and membership of secret and treasonable societies’.59 It is possible that Duncan’s location, amidst bearded nautical folk in Wapping, would have made the wearing of a beard less odd for him. We may consider, too, Duncan’s literary work from the perspective of the Künstlerroman, with the artist as hero; the beard being also associated with the bohemian society of artists – ‘luxuriantly long hair and mustachios’ – these attributes figure in a description of a painter in a comic story in Hood’s Magazine in 1848, when a London ‘Peeler’ mistakes an artist’s lay figure for a murder victim, in the heat of the Chartist threat to metropolitan law and order.60 The beard in this period was also associated with Eastern society, with foreign refugees in general, and French fashions, although already in 1841 the Morning Chronicle predicted that it would become accepted in England, since it had become more fashionable in Paris.61 Connected as Duncan was with the Concordium, perhaps the beards worn there were the chief influence on the young man. A Mr Pratt had commented in discussions on God held by the metropolitan Owenites of Branch A1 at the Owenite Institution at John Street in 1843, ‘Why even without religion men will run into excess, as witness the Ham Common socialists, who suffer their hair and beards to grow as being in accordance with nature.’62 To borrow a pun, one can also see the beard as an attempt to replace the ancien régime with the ‘unshorn regime’ – the state of the chin taken by the great ‘I AM’ of radical politics in this period, the Irishman Feargus O’Connor, as symbolic of real plebeian status when contrasted with the smooth-faced labour aristocracy of his critics in the London Working Men’s Association. The Chartists were addressed by O’Connor as ‘fustian jackets, blistered hands, and unshorn chins’. 63 One scholar has also noted the suggestion from a Chartist in 1843 that all male Chartists should grow moustaches, so that ‘the Charter ever be prominently before the eyes of

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all’.64 The Sheffield radical Isaac Ironside, back from visiting the French republic in 1848, declared: ‘Most of the friends of the people sported a bit of beard, and it struck him that if the Englishmen would but wear their beards, the middle classes would not stand against them for another year. (Laughters and cheers.) It gave them such an air of determined independence as it was refreshing to witness.’ 65 Ironside, like Duncan, supported vegetarianism, and was a dabbler in utopian communities such as the White Quakers of Ireland; ‘bearded Isaac’ he became in the press.66 Another prominent Chartist who sported a beard, and long hair, was the Byronic Dr John Taylor of Ayrshire, ‘the Mirabeau of the Chartists’, who died a young man in 1842.

FIGURE 8. A comic almanac’s depiction of the bearded foreigner, ‘April’, c.1843. University of Plymouth Special Collections, by courtesy of the University of Plymouth.

With assistance, perhaps, from representations of bearded Chartists in Punch, the full beard was part of the mental picture of the bearded republican or ultra progressive – Charles Kingsley kept on meeting ‘bearded men, vegetarians, and other eccentric persons’ in metropolitan meetings to promote association or cooperatives in 1849–5067; and the philosopher Herbert Spencer’s essay on ‘Manners and Fashion’ in the Westminster Review in 1854 was to observe not only the general link between ‘democratic opinions and peculiarities of costume’ but a ‘considerable sprinkling of moustaches … here and there an imperial; and occasionally some courageous breaker of conventions exhibits a fullgrown beard’.68 Eliza Cook’s Journal in 1850 noted, ‘It is not difficult to

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distinguish the unquiet party in France; they may be everywhere known by the profusion of hair on their chin and upper lip’ and Sir Francis Head’s A Faggot of French Sticks, relaying the former lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada’s experiences in the new French republic, seemed to be very acutely aware of the bearded appearances of Radicals and Frenchmen. 69 A similar view would have been shared by Englishmen in the 1840s. The Illustrated London Life in 1843 facetiously imagined that if the corn law reformers and Union Repealers got Sir Robert Peel to ‘introduce a bill for the close-clipping of the luxuriant locks, demolition of moustachios, and total abolition of whiskers, their great aim would be at once achieved, and the country would become instantly and simultaneously convulsed.’ How would the hirsute bristle up, and agitate themselves, their owners, and the world. How would the streets be paraded and placarded! Fancy the banners – ‘Stand to your Whiskers’ – ‘Long Locks and Liberty’ – Moustachios or Murder’ – ‘Beards or Blood’ – ‘No Shaving and Slavery!’70 Prejudices remained. ‘Charity,’ said the London Leader in April 1851, ‘is not be bearded, Paul interdicted hats, Austria made the Lombards shave. Certain manufacturers in the North have been forcing their men to crop their hair. The Leicester Square Soup Society will not grant relief to those with mustachios or beards. It is evident that institutions are endangered by hair and hats.’71 Alexander Rowland, purveyor of hair oil, in his treatise on The Human Hair in 1854, came out in defence of the beard, arguing that there was ‘one certain fact ... As a general rule, every man with a beard is a man of strongly-marked individuality – frequently genius – has formed his own opinions’.72 Oldstone-Moore argues that it was precisely the waning of associations between beard wearing and Chartism or radicalism, that made the sporting of facial hair more widespread – moving full beards from the ‘social margins inhabited by artists and Chartists into the respectable mainstream.’73 But in 1857, the author of ‘To My Elderly Friends’ in Household Words still saw a problem in the wearing of beards: ‘Many find fault with beards as too aristocratic, too vulgar, too foreign, too philosophic, too symptomatic of Socialism.’74 And as one barrister who resorted to the law when harassed by the insults of the crowd found in the mid-1850s, the sporting of a beard still ‘excited the derision of an ignorant mob’.75 Why Duncan wore it, he never had the opportunity to expound in print (after Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal refused to publish a joint communication, probably written with the hydropath and vegetarian William Horsell, on

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the matter76). The Journal published the following communiqué in 1849, and he was stimulated to reply. GENTLEMEN – I think you would confer a great benefit on the male portion of the community if, in your able Journal, you would advocate the ancient custom of wearing the beard and moustache. I think it can scarcely be consonant with the design of Providence that we should addict ourselves to the practice of shaving; for if the beard was not intended to be worn, why does it grow? Shaving, therefore, is surely irreligious, and a violation of the conscience. I would suggest that there be an Anti-Shaving Association, which, if properly begun, would soon get plenty of adherents. Pardon the liberty of drawing your attention to this far from unimportant subject. 77  But to return to the romance of progression, with its courageous artist hero: Before an unfinished painting of an exquisitely beautiful face, stood the Artist, his palette and his brushes in his hand. He was gazing on his yet unfinished, but already beautiful creation, with ‘fondly glistening e’e’.78 He thus remained for some considerable time, his eyes fixed full on those of his work, which seemed to gaze back upon his, beaming their soft light full into the depths of his soul. ‘Yes, she is very beautiful,’ were at length his words, while a change came over his noble countenance, like the shade of a cloud passing over a sun-lit lane. He seemed scarcely aware he was expressing his thoughts aloud, however, he was alone in his apartment.79 Duncan was not dealing with the plain or commonplace. His hero was the beau-ideal of man, six-foot, broad-shouldered and well-proportioned, with broad and high brow like Napoleon’s – that is, from the limited descriptions we have of Duncan’s appearance, having no resemblance to him. His beau-ideal of woman, Miss Llewellen, the lodger of Mrs Goodbody, was ‘so peculiarly womanly, so gentle, so dove-like, in her nature; nor does she lack mind; her conversation is animated, and bespeaks a mind of no common cast – a mind that could think deeply, far more deeply than it does, were it not restrained by perceiving it has a tendency to wing its flight to regions, whence that it hath been trained to

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look on as holy and beautiful, appears petty and deformed’. Her physical appearance is pure fantasy, mixing the sacred and the profane: Her foot was placed on a small cushion, and a hand of exquisite mould and whiteness was half concealed amid her rich golden ringlets. Her face was far from disappointing the expectations which might have formed from that hand, and those ringlets, and no less that fair and slender neck. It was beautiful indeed, it was of a soft and gentle loveliness, its beauty was truly womanly, it was full and oval in form, in complexion finely clear, tho’ perhaps a shade darker than the neck and bosom, and tinted with a soft glow that was beautifully emblematical, together with her lily-like fairness of health and purity. Her eyes were almost hidden by the ivory lids, and their long fringes; her face wore a pensive expression, and with a sigh of deep emotion, which caused her scarcely hidden bosom to heave in a way, which had it been beheld, might have fired the coldest heart, she raised her eyes towards that countenance before her – Oh how beautiful were those eyes, so softly bright, so purely blue.80 It was strange mixture of eroticism (‘scarcely hidden bosom’) and the early Victorian cliché of soft, small, exquisite, slender womanhood. For Duncan there must be no ambiguity for the reader that this is a worthy heroine, although the physical side of her ‘truly womanly’ beauty, otherwise described in terms of gentle, soft and radiant purity, is given a restorative power which is notably carnal. Unfortunately for the hero, thus far in the story, the woman was ‘high principled, amiable, firm, and a sincere believer in the Cross of Christ’, – Duncan described vividly the picture of Jesus which decorated the mantelpiece in her room and which she was glancing at in the passage thus quoted (Duncan’s grasp of the believable, when it came to interior decoration was weak: flowered gauze curtains, gilt curtain rail, carpeted floor, ‘that air of combined simplicity, elegance and comfort, in a word parlor-like air so peculiarly English’ 81) – and ‘she seemed to entertain the idea that one could not be of the religion of Nature – could not differ from the world’s religion, unless he were a blind fool, or hard hearted reprobate, who was not willing to submit to its restraints, and desired to be freed from the fear of its threatenings.’ Miss Llewellen, in a chapter entitled ‘The Heroine and Her Adviser,’ does, however, accept that ‘a person might have good qualities, and yet seldom or never enter a church.’82 Noble resolves to introduce his ‘fair Episcopalian’ to ‘Mr–––’ and she would no longer have such thoughts. Who this was, is not made clear in the fragment of novel, although the table of contents elucidates that this is

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a ‘Sketch of Mr.–––., the Philanthropist, and Founder of the Infant School System’ (Greaves was commonly, if mistakenly, credited with this role, which rather belonged to his mentor, the Swiss Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi). Instead we have a description of the Christ-like expression of Mr.–––, ‘a true gentleman; not the gentleman of conventionality … but the gentleman of Nature, the gentleman of innate suavity’.83 This individual was aged, apparently, about fifty. His countenance was surpassingly beautiful, but not the beauty of form, no, it was the beauty of expression, the beauty of the soul beaming forth, the light of God-like intelligence, the warmth of the most unbounded benevolence. Indeed, the uncouthness of the features, and it must be confessed, they were somewhat uncouth, rather added to the beauty of that countenance, than otherwise …

FIGURE 9. Stipple engraving of James Pierrepont Greaves, also reproduced in Letters and Extracts from the MS Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves (2 vols, 1843–5), vol.1. Author’s collection.

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And here, in the description of Greaves (‘drawn from real life’ – although Duncan’s estimation of his age is inaccurate by about a decade84), the fragment of novel ended. Greaves was the centre of a theosophic and ‘syncretic’ group meeting at his home in Burton Street in London in the 1830s. He then inspired the Ham Common experiment, dying after unsuccessful hydropathic treatment there in March 1842, ‘shedding an halo of peace and joy on all around’.85 He was hardly a famous figure, although one American theologian thought he left behind him ‘a society of professed Pantheists’.86 For Duncan to feature a noble obscurity in the little portion of his work in (and of) progress was to ignore commercial realities, if Duncan hoped to entice readers to follow the novel. Duncan may have met the man, as his sketch claims, but echoed the appraisal of others who came into the orbit of this ‘mystic very far gone in theosophy’; Francis Foster Barham (whose long studies in occult and esoteric literature in the British Library, on a diet of bread and water, were bearing fruit about this time in his syncretic religion of ‘Alism’), for example, judged Greaves, ‘in himself the most wonderful man I ever met with; I say in himself, for his marvelousness, to use an expression of his own, consisted in his being and not in his having or doing.’87 At some point Duncan had become a teetotaler, telling readers of a later periodical progressive venture, ‘I boast myself a disciple of Father Mathew and the pledge.’88 This made him something of a pioneer, as well as the target of ridicule no doubt, as the cartoon by George Cruikshank from 1844 reveals, below (Figure 10). The accompanying verse in his popular comic almanac stated, ‘They who conform to your teetotal wishes, | And satisfied can be, | With water breakfast, dinner, supper, tea, | I class among the oddest fishes.’89 The famous Irish temperance advocate, Father Theobald Mathew, visited London in 1843, the Illustrated London News publishing an illustrated account of one meeting attended by the fourth Earl Stanhope, in which the Tory and Protestant nobleman publicly took the pledge, and in which the priest converted hundred of expatriate Irish to teetotalism in Wapping.90 Critics feared organised teetotalism provided a cover for revolutionists and a political dimension did develop, with Chartist teetotal associations in the capital (an East London Chartist Association – its secretary Charles H. Neesom – was reported in the weekly The Teetotaler in 1841, for instance) and elsewhere.91 The East London Association maintained ‘the necessity of the working classes abstaining from all intoxicating drinks in order to assist themselves in obtaining their political rights’. 92 In the Literary Gazette a sketch writer depicted a new London of young Chartists and ugly female teetotalers, both movements sufficiently ‘astonishing’ to warrant attention in the late 1830s: ‘The streets of the metropolis perambulated by new

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classes of people,’ the writer noted, ‘Chartists a political sect whose aim is an entire remodelling of the famed English constitution and Teetotallers another sect whose creed is entire abstinence from all sorts of intoxicating liquors.’93 Both movements seemed to be noisily congregated on that traditional site for mass meetings in south London, Kennington Common.

FIGURE 10. ‘FATHER MATHEW – An-ice man for a small party’, by George Cruikshank. Comic Almanack, London, Bogue, 1844, plate 9. Father Mathew as a water pump declares, in response to home brewed ale and home made wine, ‘Touch not! Taste not – if you must take any thing – take the Pledge!’ By courtesy of Plymouth University.

Teetotalism, like Chartism, had become a familiar aspect of radical metropolitan life by the mid 1840s, but in his espousal of vegetarianism Duncan was more unusual. His dietetic radicalism was reflected in Flowers and Fruits in a short essay on vegetable diet, subtitled ‘Rosy Health’s Pure Festive Board’, drawing on his knowledge of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s vegetarianism (a footnote boldly coupled Shelley’s observations on diet and anatomy, slightly paraphrased, from ‘Notes on Queen Mab’, with ‘J.E.D.’s), and the ‘Healthian diet’ of ‘the London Vegetarians.’ 94 Deliberately brief, but attempting to treat the subject systematically and logically, Duncan claimed that man could not be anything but inferior if he ate inferior material: Can it be best to have our bodies, our nerves, our brain built up of the dead flesh of the lower animals – of the filthy hog, of the stupid sheep, and the dull ox, or of the fruits, the grains, and the vegetables,

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of the apples, the orange, and the thousand delicious and beautiful creations of vegetable nature?95 One might detect here the plea of the grocer’s son; moreover, being raised partly in the environs of Lower East Smithfield, Duncan would have been close to the centre for the metropolitan slaughter of livestock. It was the hard-working classes who existed on a vegetable diet and had the most vigorous and in the long run most serviceable bodies, Duncan claimed, whereas the middle-class and the ‘upper’ classes consumed the great bulk of animal food. ‘I am myself acquainted with a blacksmith who has adopted the vegetable and water diet, or, as it is termed by the London Vegetarians, the Healthian diet, and he declares he is stronger since having done so.’96 In that passage, Duncan was displaying his knowledge of a freshly minted word, for ‘vegetarian’ was not yet a word with any public currency. Man had been defined in the preliminary of the essay as having a threefold nature (quoting here, unattributed, from Robert Owen97) ‘of animal propensities, intellectual faculties and moral qualities,’ and Duncan saw vegetarian diet as checking man’s animal nature – the inflamed passions, the disposition to anger, and: Nature’s most ungovernable tendency – a tendency sufficiently powerful of itself – a tendency which, given way to improperly and intemperately, is a source of the most frightful woes. Children, displaying untimely activity of the instinct referred to, have been quite cured by a purer diet.98 ‘Experience also proves that vegetable diet is most favourable for the intellectual faculties.’ A simple and cool diet would keep the head clear. He personally recommended the diet, having ‘myself studied almost without cessation, for eight and forty hours taking no sleep the whole time, without my head being in the least disagreeably affected’.99 The European, despite his larger brain, was scarcely a match for the ‘Hindoo’. Duncan’s appraisal of the Hindoo’s superior nature also appeared in his discussion of man’s moral nature, as they were ‘the most amiable and gentle of the human race’. While man involuntarily killed life in a draught of water or walking through a field, to use this as an argument against the vegetable diet was ‘miserable sophistry’. The greatest advantage of the pure diet was, he suggested, ‘that the state of feelings is more elevated; we seem to be different beings, to be transported to a different atmosphere, from earth to heaven, as it were; and we see, practically, the truth of the saying of Pythagoras, that “The only way to secure the higher pleasures is to abstain from the low.”’

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He also endorsed hydropathy, or the water cure, and the preventative power of water drinking as well as cold water ablution. The Englishman Richard T. Claridge published his manual on hydropathy, popularising the water cure of Vincent Priessnitz at Graefenberg in Silesia, in early 1842, and the cure was known to the Concordists. Interestingly, one of the only surviving two copies of Flowers and Fruits is bound in with a tract entitled The cold water cure tested! Or, the hydropathic treatment of diseases established by the combined testimonies of actual experience, and the most eminent medical men, particularly of ‘the present time’, published c.1846.100 The essay on vegetable diet was followed by extracts from an American health reform journal, the Graham Journal of Health and Longevity (which, issued from Boston and New York, in 1837–1838, was named after the health reformer Sylvester Graham, the owner of one of the few surviving copies of Flowers and Fruits perhaps also had Graham’s A lecture to young men on chastity: intended also for the serious consideration of parents and guardians, published by the Concordists, as it was also bound in), designed by anecdote and discussion of its defence against the cholera, to support the case for the diet. Duncan was eager to proselytise for a diet which he evidently saw as having relevance for the population at large rather than simply for invalids or intellectuals, for he also published a Shelleyansounding tract, Defence of a Vegetable Diet, in 1843, which supposedly reached a ‘second thousand’ in 1844; and another tract priced at 2d and, perhaps democratically, entitled Vegetable Diet for the Million! This was also presumably a reprint of his essay, but neither of these tracts has survived.101 When James Duncan was residing at 8, Jeffrey’s Square, off Leadenhall Street and near St Mary Axe, in early 1844, copies of his son’s Vegetable Diet (For the Million!), published by William Strange, were priced at 3d. A second edition was advertised in the Owenite journal, New Moral World, alongside Flowers and Fruits, from his son’s address at 16 Little Hill Street, Tower Hill, or from the publishers Watson, Hetherington, Merriman and Phillips.102 Almost forty lines of the vegetarian essay were quoted in the Cheltenham Free Press, in April 1844, prefaced by the comment ‘Mr J.E. Duncan, with whom our readers are to some extent acquainted by his poetical contributions to our columns’, and in The Literary World in 1848.103 Interestingly, the first edition of Flowers and Fruits, after the contents page at the back, included a note for The London and New York Magazine, a work ‘just commenced … containing the Gems of American Periodical Literature’ and sold by George Vickers of Holywell Street – a narrow street off the Strand which, associated as it was in the early Victorian mind with vicious literature, was hardly a publishing address for polite

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readers.104 The note of this periodical suggests Duncan’s connection with transatlantic culture.105 At this stage in Duncan’s literary career, although his essay on vegetarian diet contained criticism of the upper classes, there was no overt political content. The motto on the title page of the book, which was Shelley’s prediction from the final stanza of Queen Mab, V, that ‘A brighter morn awaits the human day, |When every transfer of earth’s natural gifts | Shall be a commerce of good words and works’, was no political clarion call, though it was quoted as a motto in various reformist or progressive publications in the 1830s and 1840s.106 The critical response to an author’s first book matters greatly to the author. From James Elmslie Duncan’s selective use of favourable critical comments, it clearly mattered to him that his book was reviewed. The socialist movement was sympathetic towards poets – and itself experienced versified condemnation and vilification. 107 In a review of Flowers and Fruits in the issue of the New Moral World for 27 January 1844 which also reviewed the publication of the literary remains of James Pierrepont Greaves, Duncan and other young writers were cautioned to practise patience and self-culture.108 Whilst clearly the production of a ‘disciple of progressive philosophy’, the artist was immature, there was evidence of power but it was uncultivated and had little profundity. ‘Too great precipitation in public has been the rock on which young writers have generally made shipwreck of their fame.’ No doubt Mr Duncan would produce work that was more worthy of his ‘own aspiration after usefulness’.109 Readers of the New Moral World would also see, from the advertisement, that neatly bound copies of the work would be sent from James Duncan senior’s address at Jeffrey Square, after receipt of 28 postage stamps. ‘Young poets, upon the whole,’ advised Leigh Hunt, ‘at least very young poets, – had better not publish at all’: jealous critics would be sure to find faults.110 The volume was reviewed in more mainstream journals and newspapers. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine thought the vegetarian pleading ‘incongruous’ in a collection of poetry.111 The Spectator thought both the prose and the poetry ‘very so so’.112 Other reviews emphasised his potential: The Athenaeum noted that, with some eccentricities, the collection ‘shows just such a degree of talent as may improve by cultivation’, while The Satirist thought the work ‘indicative of kindly and generous feelings, some talent, and occasional eccentricity’ in a review in December 1843.113 Lloyd’s Newspaper called it a ‘very respectable little collection for a mental feast, amongst which we discern occasional flashes of genius, that give fair promise of future excellence. The author is, we understand, a youthful worshipper of the Tuneful Nine.’114 Cleave’s Penny

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Gazette of Variety and Amusement – which gave an extract from the proposed novel – noted the essay on vegetarianism was ‘tolerably well written’ and the volume as a whole ‘worth the perusal of all who would encourage the bud which gives promise of an ultimate expansion in beauty or utility’ (the bookseller and publisher John Cleave was the publisher of the Concordists’ journal New Age). The poetry and philosophy the reviewer took to be on the model of Shelley, like the Romantic poet, his poetry and philosophy were ‘intertangled and enwoven’. There was amiable and gentle verse, in the lines in ‘Beauties of Nature, or man made to rejoice’, and though here and there were to be found faulty lines and imperfect metre, Duncan displayed a feeling for rhythm and music. With more practice would come that ‘calm judgment over the bantlings of his own imagination’.115 The Era thought Duncan ‘anxious for the notice of the critic. There are few modern poets who would venture to court it, and he is, perhaps fortunate in meeting with one who wishes well to all young aspirants,’ and amidst a number of pretty poems this reviewer detected ‘germs of poetry worth cultivation’,116 while the Railway Times responded to the copy sent for review by describing it in a small paragraph as a ‘very creditable production by a young author’.117 There were other notices in such journals as the News of the World (which thought it ‘above the average merit’), United Services Gazette and the Naval and Military Gazette. In an advertisement in the New Moral World in 1844, the snippet from Bell’s Weekly Messenger described the work thus: ‘An agreeable collection of minor poems and essays, written with considerable feeling. Some of the articles are above the average merit of such productions, and will inspire the reader with a favourable opinion of the author’s powers.’ The Morning Post declared the Scottish adaptation to the air of Kate Kearney, ‘particularly good’ and a ‘poetical vigour of a stamp that would be in vain to be looked for in many more pretending volumes’. The United Services Gazette declared ‘buds which may one day mature into pleasing bloom’. The Illustrated London News classed it with several other collections as bearing ‘indications of promise of better things’, and noted its ‘vigorous defence of the use of vegetable diet’.118 ‘Some of his Scotch songs are very lively,’ the reviewer judged, ‘but in these also we detect some negligence which tells us that the writer could do better things.’ The two-penny Mirror of Literature, in a number which had by coincidence a description of William Thom’s town of Inverurie, felt the vegetarian essay to be a ‘manful’ defence. Its criticism of his poetry was fair:

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THE praise of intrepidity is due to an author who, in these times, dares publish poetry on his own account. The encouragement given of late to such experiments has not been excessive. Mr Elmslie Duncan has a good deal of vivacity, and he has written in a variety of measures. He is not always so nice in his rhymes as he ought to be. ‘Taste,’ does not sound much like ‘nest;’ nor ‘hell’ like ‘will;’ yet these and many similar instances of negligence occur. They deserve to be rebuked, as in some instances he has produced elegant verses, and seems to have an ample command of language to save him from the necessity of putting off his readers with such make-shifts.119 And as the writer observed of his ‘Monody’ on Mrs Honey’s death, ‘all that in effect is said is “Can she be dead? Impossible! Who would have thought it?” Was it worth while writing so much to express so little? Such spinning out not all the pathos of his four “tragic ahs!” will render very acceptable to readers of taste.’ The Critic was harsh, ‘a pamphlet of some eighty pages, Flowers and Fruits contained a scrap of rhyme, a joint of an essay, a bit of a maxim and so forth.’ Duncan should abandon literature and – the reviewer correctly identifying his social milieu, no doubt from the fact he had stated his father’s occupation and domicile for copies of his book – return to his trade. He was no village Milton for the world to recognise and lift to fame. He mistook the desire to be a poet for ability. He had ‘just enough power of verse-weaving to flatter him with a notion that as he has got so far, he might climb a few steps higher.’ Imperfect metre, incorrect rhymes, tautology in his poetry, and prose that was not better. The reviewer poked fun at his grammar: ‘“Ah! Things was very different when I was young,” are not calculated to raise one’s opinions of the writer’ (actually, this was inaccurate, since Duncan had clearly meant the character to make this mistake – although in this edition ‘Mr Author! Printer’s devil.’ actually asterisked the misspelling of ‘Cogniac’, a mistake one might condone from a teetotaller120). If Duncan did not turn his thoughts to more profitable things than his authorship, The Critic’s reviewer suggested, he would be forced to adopt the purely vegetable diet he advocated in his essay from poverty. For this reviewer at least, Duncan was in danger of being unfit for the commercial life that his background implied. Wise words for tradesmen appeared in an article on ‘Commerce’ published in Chamber’s information for the people, in 1849: ‘He that affects a rambling and bombastic style, and fills his letters with long harangues, compliments, and flourishes, should turn poet instead of tradesman, and set up for a wit, not a shopkeeper.’ 121 Not that there was any lack of supply of literature: one writer observed ‘the

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cacoethes scribendi, or “rage for book-making,” one of the distinguishing characteristics of the present generation, has drawn into the field a host of authors, royal, noble, and plebeian, and the consequence has been a perfect deluge of Biographies, Memoirs, Travels, &c., of every variety.’122 And other reviewers in this period identified a glut in the market for poetry, with anyone who could rhyme, inundating the market ‘with a most unmarketable commodity … if poor and would try to make his poetry support him he will be told that booksellers now are paid to publish poetry instead of paying for leave to do so.’ 123 Oddly, one of his poems did reach a wider readership and audience. An annual collection of sentimental verse entitled Friendship’s Offering of Sentiment and Mirth, for 1844, which was edited by the Scottish novelist Leitch Ritchie, probably with the assistance of Camilla Toulmin, and published by Smith and Elder of Cornhill (Duncan’s publisher), contained a verse by Duncan which was praised by The Art-Union Journal in December 1843 as ‘supplying a good subject for an artist’. This poem, entitled ‘Mary and the Mossy Stile’, had appeared in Flower and Fruits as a song (‘Air – Kate Kearney’124), and surfaced in American anthologies such as The Gift of Friendship. The American composers J. De Anguera and Frank Howard (a stock-breeder whose real name was J.F. Martindale) even set it to music for the guitar and other instruments. De Anguera dedicated his version to ‘Miss S.C. Thompson’, Frank Howard sang his version at Serenaders’ Concerts: Do ye know where I first saw my Mary? The sunny-eyed, rosy-cheeked fairy– With her long silken hair, and her bosom so fair, And a smile – of that smile be ye wary!– CHORUS

With her silken hair, and her bosom so fair And a smile – sweet the smile of my Mary. O! see you yon mossy old stile there? O! I first saw her soft sunny smile there; O! ’twas that sweet smile did my bosom beguile, For sweet is the smile of my Mary. O! ’twas that sweet smile, etc. She was wearing that dear gipsey bonnet – Blue-bell, rose and lily upon it; But scarce were they seen by the laughing-eyes’ sheen, And the lovely sweet face of my Mary.

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O! scarce were they seen, etc. Dear to me is yon mossy old stile there. For O! my young heart she did wile there; For I know she’ll be true, or else I might rue That stile, and that smile, and that Mary! – For I know she’ll be true, or else might I rue That stile, and that smile, and that Mary!125 Friendship’s Offering of Sentiment and Mirth belonged to a genre of elegant literary trifles, to be scattered, as the Illustrated London News’ review described, ‘on the rosewood table or curiously enchased cabinet in the drawing room, or scattered with graceful negligence on the rich satin fauteuil of my lady’s boudoir’.126 Not, one assumes, the environment which Duncan was familiar with.

3 HERALD OF PROGRESSION

Plans of paradise circulate plentifully by the penny post. Laughable, lamentable are the projects – impracticable and impossible the schemes which fill tracts.1 TO CORRESPONDENTS. We know nothing of the plan concocted to

persuade emigration to Venezuela, where there are no creeds, and never any winter, and where somebody has invented an ‘extraordinary machine’ to do all the labouring work, and cultivate land at the rate of 100 acres a day! This must be the machine for gentlemen-farmers all over the world.2 The critical reception of Duncan’s small volume was reasonable: here was an author who could do better, the most favourable critics suggested, if he devoted himself to the craft. The world, though, did not need yet more poets. And Duncan needed employment. We simply do not know how he envisaged ultimately earning a living, but from the snippets of information about his family life that emerge, it seems likely he was sponging off a father who believed him to have some poetic talent. One imagines him – from the evidence of his later behaviour in his father’s household – giving sullen and ungracious assistance in his father’s provision store. We find him, a year after he had become a published author, with the role and presumably salary of editor. He was later to style himself a reporter and attend metropolitan meetings of reformers in this guise. His first editorial venture, entitled the Morning Star, or Herald of Progression. A Monthly Magazine of General Instruction & Entertainment, began in December 1844. This magazine, printed initially by J. Ford of Beech Street, the Barbican3, was priced at a penny although Duncan was advised to go for tuppence in order to make a profit. It was, as the title suggests, full of a

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radical optimism based on mankind’s ‘whole past and present experience’. I quote the first two paragraphs from his opening address: The present age has been well termed an age of wonders. Every day is bringing to light some new and startling discovery so that men raising their hands in wonder exclaim in soul-felt astonishment ‘what next!’ Ay truly – what next? There is – first – that mighty triumph of human intellect the STEAM ENGINE! Never shall we forget our sensations when it was first our lot to behold the rush – the headlong whirl of a ponderous railway train – with its living load – huzzing in enthusiasm and triumph – the kerchief fluttering in the hands of the fair! and the hat waving to the shout of her forgetful companions! Onward! Rushed the mammoth-like and flaming monster, like some mighty lifethrobbing creature of another and mightier planet ... Well may we have ‘dreamed’ of a brighter future for man since that day; well may the heart of men throb with pride; and with fond expectation and hopeful trust – in gazing on the work of his own hands – that he shall yet be a happier and nobler being! The Morning Star makes its appearance, heralding (it is humbly hoped) the dawn of a Better Day. Its Eradiations piercing through the mists of Error to beacon man from the paths of Falsehood and Misery, and awaken him to the Light that even now shines in the Darkness! In other words whatever tends to man’s elevation as a moral being or the progress of human improvement – whether the Cause of Peace, the Abolition of the Punishment of Death – Temperance – and all kindred movements, will in the Herald of Progression find a Zealous advocate.4 Duncan’s prose expresses the thrill of the new generation – seeing the technology of steam trains revolutionising transport in the metropolis (it was in this decade that a railway network was established across London, with a railway mania fuelling the recovery of the national economy in the mid-1840s) – and that awareness of being in a new century that we see as recognisably a modern sensibility: We would desire The Morning Star to be representative of the NEW MIND now springing up in England and elsewhere – misunderstood it is true – Let then, all who have aspirations for man’s advance whatever their mission, if but in the right direction – Onward! Let them hasten forward, pen grasped manfully in ink be-stained hand, to fight the good fight! We call upon all young aspirants to enrol under our banners – Let them uprouse them! O heaven grant, the COMING

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GENERATION may be worthy of their boasted Nineteenth Century!

Let us not cut each other’s throats as our forefathers have done, but stretch out the warm hand of universal brotherhood – no longer foster misery, crime, bloodshed, war – MAN’s PROGRESSION for the future our watch word!5 Unfortunately, the magazine was probably neither as catholic nor as entertaining as the opening essay (and initial title) suggested that it would attempt to be. Admittedly, we lack so many issues from Duncan’s period as editor, that this may be doing a disservice to the periodical and to Duncan’s ink be-stained editorial hand (for Duncan’s period, we lack issues 2, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 12, 15, 16, 18, 20 in the only copy which is preserved in the British Library). Practically no other periodicals or newspapers knew of its existence, and so there are few extracts or reviews to judge the journal’s critical reception. The sole surviving collection (unfortunately incomplete) of issues of the Morning Star was later owned by the members of the Society of Independent Religious Reformers, or Free Church, ‘desirous of cultivating the religious sentiment in a manner essentially free from the evil spirit of creed, from the intolerance of sectarianism, and the leaven of priestcraft’ an organisation which met at Newman Street off Oxford Street, and which was established by Dr Philip William Perfitt in 1858.6 The magazine, which was founded and edited initially by Duncan, from an address a little distance away from Wapping, at 16 King Street, Tower Hill, instead gave pride of place to the ideas of the German-born utopian John Adolphus Etzler, ‘that greatest of scientific men’, as the Morning Star called him in Duncan’s opening address. If men, money and time were devoted to his system, Etzler predicted there might be paradise on earth within a decade. All movements and sects seemed to have their press organs, and for a venture which required followers and capital to fund machinery and organise a relocation of families to new colonies, a periodical was essential. Thomas Carlyle had commented in 1829 about the ‘Paternoster-row mechanism’ in a ‘mechanical age’: every little sect ‘must have its Periodical, its monthly or quarterly Magazine; – hanging out, like its windmill, into the popularis aura, to grind meal for the society.’7 Duncan’s estimation of Etzler echoed that of the American Fourierist, Albert Brisbane, in the journal The Phalanx in 1843, when Etzler was living in Philadelphia.8 For Etzler, the son of a shoemaker, had been established in the United States since the 1830s. Now (as Robert Owen journeyed in the opposite direction to visit America) Etzler came to propagandise in Britain in January 1844, with preliminary trumpeting from the Concordium through the medium of their magazine. The New Age was glad

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to see ‘that extensive notices of his inventions are now being circulated freely among the press’ anticipating his arrival in England in November 1843.9 The Concordium’s press also published tracts by Etzler, such as Two Visions of J.A. Etzler, available for tuppence and subtitled A Revelation of Futurity (in which the paradise of futurity was presented by the Lord to Etzler, as revelation – including the fact that a new generation of humanity would emerge, a ‘new and better one’, within twenty five years).10 Etzler and his new wife stayed in the Concordium briefly in the spring of 1844.11 Etzler delivered a course of open lectures there on Sunday afternoons in May 1844, departing the community to concentrate on his plans in London after 17 June.

FIGURE 11. Facsimile of John Adolphus Etzler’s signature, from the register of his marriage in 1844: believed to be the only extant autograph.

Owenites were interested in Etzler’s ideas too, indeed Owen endorsed the work Paradise within the Reach of All Men without Labour by Powers of Nature and Machinery after a lecture and advertised its sale through a bookseller in Covent Garden, as reported in The Crisis, and National Cooperative Trades’ Union Gazette in May 1834, and the New Moral World had discussed his utopia of a tropical paradise since that period.12 Etzler asked a follower, Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer, to contact British socialists and rationalists as people free from ignorant or vulgar prejudice, and shortly after Stollmeyer’s arrival in September he visited the Owenite headquarters at Pall Mall, being received by Owen and other leading figures. Owen, the editor of the New Moral World, and others, examined the models which Stollmeyer had established in a room at Cheapside, and Stollmeyer attended the Socialist Congress in May 1842, giving advice about the estate and offering to subsidise a windmill. In December 1843 Stollmeyer was invited to Harmony Hall by its acting governor, with the promise of travel expenses being reimbursed, to explain Etzler’s plans. Stollmeyer came with the engineer Thomas Atkins. The turmoil in the colony meant there were no funds either for the machinery or for expenses.13 It is clear that many Owenites were drawn to the new movement: ‘I am convinced,’ the stone merchant George Hillary of Bingley, near Bradford, told the New Moral World’s editor, ‘that Etzlerism will, in no distant day, become the most popular ism that has yet come forth, being so eminently

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calculated to attract all the scientific minds of the day, on account of the magnitude and beauty of its plans.’ These were no longer ‘dreamy visions’ – called into existence by ‘stern necessity’. For Hillary there was almost an aesthetic appreciation of Etzlerism – ‘beautiful and scientific theories’, as he referred to them. ‘Man must not toil with flesh, bones, and sinew to gain a subsistence, or he can never be made to have rational feelings and sentiments towards his fellow men,’ Hillary asserted, discarding the spade cultivation advocated by Owenites for Etzler’s vision of ‘mechanical contrivances’ performing all the drudgery.14 Press attention was extended through correspondence, for instance letters by Stollmeyer in the Poor Man’s Guardian or Morning Post in 1843, correspondence in Cleave’s Penny Gazette, and a series of letters sent to Lloyd’s London Weekly Newspaper.15 There were reviews of Etzler’s publications in other journals. One satirical journal rightly described Etzler, after perusal of Two Visions (which was also published by the radical publishers Henry Hetherington, James Watson, John Cleave, and William Strange, the latter ‘an excellent publisher for strange productions; no doubt raised up by Providence, for wise and mysterious purposes,’ as the same journal commented), as ‘an eccentric mechanical genius, who has elevated machinery into the firmament of romance.’16 Etzler became the leader of a ‘Tropical Emigration Society’ formed at his London residence in October 1844, which was designed to encourage working people to emigrate to the infant South American republic of Venezuela. The country had been seeking English and Scottish emigrants since the late 1830s, and desiring an Emigration Society in England to achieve this.17 Duncan was one of the first six directors, alongside Messrs Joseph Hearn, John Alexander, William Fletcher, Harrison Jennings and William C. Julyan, the treasurer being Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer. Stollmeyer was another American of German origin, born in 1813. His father was a wine merchant and hotel keeper in the free city of Ulm, his relatives included a Lutheran clergyman, Johann Stollmeyer, intent on seeing his young cousin educated to become a clergyman in his turn. But Stollmeyer instead studied philosophy and political economy, emigrating to the United States in the 1830s where he established himself as a partner in a German and foreign book store with his old school friend William Ludwig Kiderlen.18 The texts published included a translation of the German Charles von Rotteck’s ‘ultra-liberal’ history of the world and works advocating homeopathy – Stollmeyer having met its pioneer, Dr Samuel Hahneman.19 He also became a member of the executive committee of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society (claiming friendship with leading figures such as Lucretia Mott and John Greenleaf Whittier) and founder and

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editor of the German National Gazette in 1838. A lecturer on abolitionism to his fellow German emigrants, in the Gazette Stollmeyer condemned the burning down of Pennsylvania Hall by anti-abolitionists in May 1838, and found himself threatened by a lynching from the door of the German Zion Church for daring to intervene as a German naturalised citizen or alien, in American affairs.20 A book of verse immortalising the Pennsylvanian abolitionists included the following: Hail to thee, Stollmeyer! A second Fourier! Thy system is surely a treasure; To Christian or Turk It makes all kinds of work. By some hocus pocus, a pleasure, Stollmeyer! By some hocus pocus, a pleasure.21 As these lines indicate, Stollmeyer was a follower of Fourier: describing himself as a Phalansterian, publishing the American Fourierist Albert Brisbane’s Social Destiny of Man: or Association and Reorganization of Industry from 65 South Third Street, Philadelphia, in 1840, and naming one of his children Charles Fourier Stollmeyer. Stollmeyer then became a disciple of Etzler. Selling his share in the book store, the young man travelled out to Europe with his wife and children. A company having been established in Philadelphia for the purpose, Stollmeyer sealed patents for Etzler’s inventions in London in 1841. Someone who met him in 1841 described his ‘tone of quiet confidence’, in promoting the venture.22 He became associated with the Irish peer and socialist Joseph Blake, Lord Wallscourt, and with inventors such as James Hadden Young, a silk merchant turned type-composing machine inventor from Lille (who printed editions of the Paradise within the Reach of All Men and Madame Gatti De Gamond’s Fourier and His System23), and the engineer Henry Bessemer (to become world famous after the 1850s for his steel-making process, among other inventions). Stollmeyer was active in promoting Etzler’s ideas by displaying the models of his inventions.24 He joined Etzler during the brief stay at the Concordium. He also acted as Etzler’s witness (with his wife) at the marriage by banns to Regina Caroline Soergel, daughter of a merchant, which took place at the church of St Barnabas in King’s Square in the parish of St Luke’s in Middlesex, 28 March 1844 – a fact hitherto unknown.25 Stollmeyer presented copies of Etzler’s works to the factory reformer Richard Oastler, then in prison in

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the Fleet prison for debtors.26 He also brought with him a few sets of Rotteck’s History, presenting one set of the four volumes to Oastler. 27

FIGURE 12. Conrad Friedrich Stollmeyer, by M.J. Cazabon, c.1850. By courtesy of the Stollmeyer family and Geoffrey MacLean.28

Those wishing to join the new emigration society were asked, in a note in the Morning Star dated 9 November 1844, to communicate with Duncan, as editor, at 16 King Street, Tower Hill, London.29 The secretary of the society, a ‘fiery little Welshman’, Thomas Powell, was available to inquirers at 266 The Strand (Stollmeyer’s address, as merchant, in the Post Office Directory at this time), from three to six o’clock, in early 1845.30 The magazine featured a few articles by Etzler, including an essay in the first number entitled the ‘Poetry of Reality’. There was something poetic about Etzler’s vision, to be sure, and as one commentator judged, his writings ‘breathe the poetry of mechanics’. Another described the scheme as an ‘arithmetical poem’.31 The ‘Dialogue on Etzler’s Paradise’, which Etzlerites published in 1844, portraying a conversation between ‘Messrs. Clear, Flat, Dunce and Grudge’, had depicted an ignorant critic confusing

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Etzler’s scheme with some poetic epic: ‘I saw it advertised in a newspaper, and supposed at first it was a kind of poem like Milton’s Paradise Lost, or some romance; but when I saw it, I found it not worth reading, all full of foolish pretensions and promises, humbug or crazy bombast.’ 32 Henry David Thoreau’s review, in the United States Magazine, of the second London edition which was typeset on James Young’s patent typecomposing machine, was entitled ‘Paradise (to be) Regained’, and identified a ‘transcendentalism in mechanics.’33 As a final note on the associations between Etzler’s enterprise and the poetic, the radical bookseller James Watson advertised his work in 1845 alongside William Watt’s anti-Miltonic freethought parody, Paradise Lost; or the Great Dragon Cast Out, Being a Full, True, and Particular Account of the Great and Dreadful Bloodless Battle, that was Fought in the Celestial Regions, about 6000 Years Ago, a text which invoked the Grub Street muse, and which was originally published by John Brook in 1838.34 The first number was reviewed by the Cheltenham Free Press in early December 1844, which noted that it was ‘not a very favourable specimen’ – it obliged later by noting simply ‘The Morning Star … has reached its eighth number’ in a review of literature of the month in March 1845.35 Advertisements were carried in the Owenite New Moral World, which also gave an extract from the magazine when it first appeared, and republished from an early number, the ninety-four lines of William Thom’s angry verse of impoverished weavers, ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’.36 The Chartist organ Northern Star which Etzler had targeted via a lengthy letter to the editor published in July 1844, as ‘leader of the progressive order of men’,37 also carried advertisements (and Feargus O’Connor quoted the title of Etzler’s Paradise in one of his leaders38), and reviewed the first issue, extracting from Duncan’s opening address, and wishing it ‘a brilliant and successful career’ – the reviewer thought that William Thom was a contributor (and on the same page as the review, appeared verse dedicated to Thom by one John Kennedy of Gateshead – verse that was rather more convincing than Duncan’s efforts, it has to be said).39 Etzler’s career has recently been the subject of a book-length study by Steven Stoll, entitled The Great Delusion. A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth.40 As Stoll argues, it is ‘tempting to think of Etzler as an innovator of clean, renewable energy systems, but that implies a sense of economy he never demonstrated’. He neglected, for instance, the problem of friction, in his inventions. 41 Hindle notes that ‘absolutely nothing’ remains in terms of material culture from Etzler’s inventiveness because every project he proposed or had built, failed. 42 Nevertheless, for working people desperate for a better life beyond the grime and ordeal of industrialised Britain, the Tropical Emigration Society

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(hereafter TES) offered the possibility, in Venezuela, of a healthy tropical existence. Emigration to the tropics would be the key to the ‘melioration of the condition of all classes of people of all nations’. 43 ‘We are on the eve of the most eventful period of mankind. Migration of millions from North to South will soon take place,’ Etzler declared in a pamphlet of 1844, ‘and new nations and empires will be founded by them, superior in every respect to any known in history.’ But the British migrants had humbler concerns than dreams of empire. 44 So Venezuela was presented as a republic where land was free, where there would be no taxation for fifteen years, and where members of the society would ‘choose their own magistrates and police’.45 A treaty was signed with Britain in 1839 to abolish the African slave-trade – but the continuing existence of slavery in Venezuela and in South America was not something that was referred to. 46 The Society was to attract supporters in the North of England, with support for his ideas in the West Riding of Yorkshire already in 1843 as a result of the propagandist efforts of Stollmeyer, and following Etzler’s own lectures.47 His Paradise within the Reach of all Men was also made available in a cheap format of two six-penny parts.48 Some 7,000 family members joined after 1844, with branches of the TES formed among the artisans of London (one TES district was in the East End, with headquarters at 29 High Street, Great Garden Street, Whitechapel and meeting place at Edmond’s coffee house) and other cities and towns (such as Bradford, where meetings took place at Stott Hill, and where 105 shares at £2 each had already been taken up; Bingley, where the first English Etzlerite society was formed in about October 1843; and Newcastle, which published a short synopsis of the scheme49). Etzler, accompanied by his wife, planned to lecture in the principal towns of Yorkshire in late 1844, and brought along the models of his machines. With these exertions, and the scale of the support in terms of membership and branches, Malcolm Chase has described the TES as ‘the most ambitious transnational migration to emerge from the organised labour movement during the first half of the nineteenth century’.50 As Gregory Claeys has noted, the appeal of Etzler’s ideas was partly a result of the failure of the Owenite community experiment at Tytherley in Hampshire, and the demise of the general Owenite movement in this period.51 In its promise of a colony where poor Britons could acquire land, it also addressed ‘the feverish thirst for land which seized the Chartist movement in this period’ – going ‘back to the land’ was an important part of the popular politics of the period.52 Advertisements for the TES summarised the attraction as ‘Thirty Acres of Land, a Cottage, and guaranteed Subsistence for Two Pounds!!!’53 The apparent fecundity was also important, as we shall see.54 Socialist critics asserted the need to stay

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at home, where the ‘great battle of moral and social reformation’ was to be won, and where the materials and facilities for creating a new society were most abundant.55 But socialists had supported a number of emigration schemes before, especially in London, where several emigration societies found homes in radical institutions. The English Fourierists too, supported the idea of colonisation alongside association. Trade unions would support emigration in this period, as a means of ensuring wages were kept up by reducing the labour supply. 56 There were critics of emigration, of course: George Jacob Holyoake, supportive of Etzler’s ideas in the journal The Movement, describing his pamphlet as offering ‘really practical information’ and advising ‘let not England, this nursing place of fanatics, impostors, and demagogues, turn away from its shores this ardent herald of inventions, science, and plenty,’ later cautioned all who were attracted, to keep enough money back to be able to return if they were disappointed, otherwise they would find themselves self-transported; but recollected in 1849, it was ‘an ungracious task to speak in the language of caution about emigration, so many persons are interested in it whom judgements it is painful to question’. 57 Later, in his History of Co-operation, he observed, ‘By Mr. Etzler’s invention the sea was to become a drawing-room, and the air a sort of upper chamber, for the accommodation of those who dwelt on the land.’ 58 The British reviewers of Etzler’s The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, a book which had appeared in the United States in 1833, 59 was then published in London first by the progressive publisher John Brooks of 421 Oxford Street in 1836 (‘Toil and poverty will be no more among men; |Nature affords infinite powers and wealth; | Let us but observe and reason,’ was one of the mottoes on the title page60) and then by John Cleave, in 1842, were often critical. Thus the monthly Polytechnic Journal in September 1842 thought it ‘the greatest nonsense to which type was ever yet misapplied’.61 The Spectator’s review was also scathing: ‘A reprint of an American publication of an Utopian scheme for employing the winds, tides and the sun’s rays to work machinery that shall supersede human labour and convert the world into a paradise. Mr Etzler is a German enthusiast whose acquaintance with practical science seems to have excited his fancy to produce this dream of the omnipotence of machinery.’62 The Era’s review of the Cleave edition described it as odd, or mad.63 The Literary Gazette’s review also struck the sceptical note about the utopian inventor: Don Quixotte [sic] has heretofore been thought an intelligent sort of madman, but must hereafter take his place among the decidedly insane. He tilted at the windmills; and had he been stout enough, with

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his lance in rest, would have thrown them down. Now Mr Etzler has discovered that nothing more is necessary for the paradisiacal happiness of man upon earth than to cover land and sea, in certain situations, with windmills. These are to do all his work, perform the labour of the agriculturist, the operations of the manufacturer and mechanic, the intellectual processes of the statesman and philosopher…64 Etzler imagined that a paradise would be realisable by using the natural power of the wind, sun and wave, allied with self-acting machinery and (as one writer commented), ‘merely looked at by Mr Etzler and his benevolent associates sitting calmly on the hill slopes under the shade of vines and fig and orange trees’, and with vast floating islands to produce food. As one mid-nineteenth-century commentator on Thomas More’s Utopia noted, ‘The only obstacle to the construction of these floating Paradises which are the next step to Gulliver’s flying island is the few millions it would cost. Otherwise nothing would be more easy.’ 65 The role of machinery and technology in utopian schemes of the period, whether Owenite socialist, Fourierist, or others, is the subject for another study. 66 Thomas Carlyle had characterised his contemporary Britain in 1829 as the age of machinery in The Signs of the Times, where nothing was now done ‘directly, or by hand: all is by rule and calculated contrivance’, instancing steam-powered sea vessels and even artificial chicken hatcheries, ‘We war with rude Nature; and, by our resistless engines, come off always victorious, and loaded with spoils.’ Etzler’s work was published by the followers of the French visionary Charles Fourier (whose life and writings from the London Phalanx were abridged for the Morning Star, 14 June 1845). English Fourierists advised that the only salvation for unemployed men given the relentless march of machinery, were associative communities on the land. 67 The Owenites had recognised the liberating potential of machinery through the ‘extension of opulence through new forms of production’ and one of their poets extolled ‘all machinery’s Christ-like power’.68 But they and other reformers could see the harmful consequences of mechanised labour – lecturing on its harmful moral and social effects as well as its ‘right application’.69 I quote one Owenite’s discussion of the impact of machinery: We invent machines, whose beneficent action might give to the highest possible number of people who could exist in this country, the blessings and advantages of education, physical comfort, leisure and recreation; and having exercised our ingenuity, we start horrified from

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the powers we have given birth to, and by our absurd arrangements render unavailing all its benefits, – forming what should be a blessing into a positive curse. Babbage 70 informs us in a work written by him on machinery, that the time is coming when the great body of workers will be worse than useless, when machines of such intricate nature will be invented, in addition to those already existing, as nearly to monopolise all the business of production, or at least a vast portion, and that there must be a terrible period of suffering to the labouring classes. This period has begun, the suffering is increasing, and unless prompt and efficient arrangements be entered into, to give another direction to mechanical power, we know not what great extent of misery may yet be endured. We have no doubt, however, but that the ultimate result will be good, and that present misery is only a gloomy epoch in the history of society, whose existence is the herald to a brighter period.71 Given the rivalry that developed between Etzlerites and Owenites, it was not surprising that the New Moral World would publish critical analyses of Etzler’s machinery: in February 1845 it printed a detailed letter from a ‘practical man’ who attended the Sunday afternoon meetings of the TES at the Parthenium Rooms in St Martin’s Lane (where the Chartists were to hold their National Convention in April), listening to Etzler’s explanations of his models, and joining a self-appointed body of eight men with scientific knowledge, to examine the machinery more closely – a development which Etzler ruled out of order. The writer claimed the whole scheme was a ‘fallacy’, the agricultural machine on which so much depended was not worth a groat, the errors in relation to the strength of ropes, the weight of the frame and wheels, made it ‘more insane than Mr Etzler himself’.72 He suggested destroying the broken ropes that would ensue to protect any disappointed Etzlerites from ‘trying other experiments with them which might endanger their lives’. Stollmeyer’s reply attempted to tackle the points about the weight of the machine, and chide the ‘practical man’ for his ignorance of mechanics. He used the metaphor of the Etzlerite solid float of unsinkable timber saving the crew of the Owenite old vessel. It was better, with or without machinery, to be away from a worn-out, overtaxed, overburdened, priest- and king-ridden country.73 Etzler’s technological marvels may not have been the most important element in the appeal of the TES for impoverished and desperate men and women.74 Yet Etzler’s machinery was reported in the press – it was a time of great civil engineering, and of mechanical schemes such as William Samuel Henson’s steam-powered monoplane and aerial transit company,

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and perhaps Etzler’s agricultural machine did not seem quite so outlandish.75 Indeed, news of one of Etzler’s inventions appeared on the same page, in one Australian journal, as an account of the voyage of the Aerial Steam Transit Company’s ship Ariel to India via Hyde Park – or rather, the ‘draught of the intended journal of the first voyage’ from one of the shareholders in Henson’s enterprise.76 A model of Etzler’s ‘Agricultural Machine’ was brought to London in late 1844, about the time when Etzler intended to depart for Venezuela to survey the land before the rainy season.77 A full-scale version, renamed the ‘Satellite’ or ‘Iron Slave’, was eventually completed by the civil engineer Thomas Atkins at Bicester, Oxfordshire, in September 1845, after he was contracted to do this within ten weeks by a unanimous request of a scientific committee which included him and James H. Young.78 In fact he had studied the problem of steam cultivation since 1843, and his efforts with Etzler’s patented model was the culmination of efforts which, he later estimated, cost him some £1,000. When the machine had been built it was too late for the Royal Agricultural Show at Shrewsbury, and a public lecture to talk about the model attracted only two Russian gentlemen. The demonstration in Oxfordshire was therefore the first opportunity to test out the full-scale apparatus. Atkins, who became engineer to Oxford’s gasworks and was thus celebrated ‘for illuminating the dark abodes of man’, was an Owenite. Indeed he was to be praised as ‘one of the most energetic disciples of Robert Owen’. It will be seen how Atkins’s own career in the cause of reform developed, in the concluding chapter. 79 His experiment in Bicester was reported by the Northampton Mercury and later by the Mechanics’ Magazine. It was like a holiday for many. Placards detailed the entry fees, opening shots were fired and church bells rung, and booths were erected to cater for the 800 or so assembled on the land, three miles from Bicester, renamed ‘Satellite field’ for the occasion. Those gathered included many local gentry. There were extravagant hopes about this ‘machine which was to do everything, and knock labour on the head at once’, and operate at thirty miles an hour. Almost supernatural capabilities were anticipated. But the performance was limited to 80 yards at a decidedly slower pace. The Satellite (almost three tons) had not been quite finished, and problems in steering, and the smallness of pulleys, created difficulties which meant that the public were not satisfied.80 But the shareholders of the TES who were present (identified by ribbons) seemed pleased with the demonstration, giving a vote of thanks to Atkins and his workmen at an evening meeting in the Cross Keys Inn. 81 The land made available for the trial was eleven acres belonging to the wealthy gentleman-philanthropist Edward King of Blackthorn (1789– 1868), who had long been interested in a scheme of colonisation in the

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African interior (a son, Albert, also bore the name ‘Africanus’). He published a pamphlet, On the Advantages of a Triform System of Colonization of South Africa, affording a gloriously splendid prospect for the next generation of mankind, in 1844 which expressed ideas previously presented to no avail to the readers of the New Monthly Magazine in 1819, and in a pamphlet of 1825 dedicated to the Foreign Secretary George Canning which, despite the promise of the title page, sold a grand total of three copies. It was a scheme which led one reviewer of his new pamphlet in 1844 to declare him ‘an enthusiast’, and another more sympathetic reviewer, to observe, ‘The work is a psychological curiosity – in style and sentiment it is altogether sui generis – and the writer, indeed, conscious of a rare idiosyncrasy, suggests that perhaps “the reader doubts either his sanity or his sincerity.”’82 Another reviewer saw it as similar to Fourier’s schemes, only ‘more strictly excluding every temptation to personal cupidity’ – and including the metaphysical.83 The Freemason’s Quarterly noted, ‘The author is a medical psychologist converted to his theory by a politico-christian philanthropist; he states that he uses a phraseology as little in vogue as the science of psychology.’84 Certainly when one reads the pamphlet entitled Bliss not Riches, published by King about January 1845, with the assertion by King (who had practised as a surgeon) that he could have been the equivalent to a Newton or Harvey, for his systematisation of ‘all metaphysical knowledge under the primary metaphysical faculties of the soul – mensurability, temporability, and sensibility’, his discussion of caloric and frigoric, and that at ‘any time within the last thirty years, I could have broached a system of psychology which could have shaken the philosophical world, as earthquakes shake kingdoms,’ one doubts his entire level-headedness. But, ‘being wanting in enthusiasm, I have done very little of that sort,’ King perhaps reassuringly told the reader, although his open-minded discussion of Robert Owen’s writings in contrast to the tiptoeing around the subject of sexual love by the community at large, would have been suspect.85 His ‘triform’ system was designed to limit the role of selfinterest, in the pursuit of ‘pure Christism’, and he appealed to the working classes, middle classes, aristocracy, churches, and press, for support. The response had been limited, although he acknowledged the ‘amiable and finely strung feelings of some of my lady-correspondents’.86 Goodwyn Barmby reviewed King’s systems of association. 87 Africa had held the prospect of ameliorating the ‘worst horrors of diabolism’ in the interior of Africa, from a community established in South Africa, but now King was persuaded to consider emigration to America, and offered the government £10,000 and his personal superintendence, to carry out his own scheme, expressed in Bliss not

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Riches.88 This pamphlet had gestured towards Etzler’s agricultural machinery, and to such other evidence of mankind’s approach to the ‘threshold of the temple of science’ as Captain Warner’s ‘long range’ (a telling association, given the general view of Samuel Alfred Warner as a fraudster, with his claim to have invented a way of destroying objects by shell at the range of several miles).89 But the Iron Slave came into King’s life at a time when medico-psychology had become for him merely the ‘agreeable lucubration whilst my half-knockt plough teams drag their unwieldy length lazily round at land’s end’. King now loaned his steam carriage, previously travelling between Hammersmith and London, to the TES for the powering of the Satellite, who marked their appreciation of King’s support with some engraved silverware.90 This vehicle had been operating in the mid-1830s – indeed King had penned a letter, detailing an experiment relating to sheep rot, from the ‘Steam-carriage station’ at Hammersmith – the machinery devised by John Scott Russell and constructed in Edinburgh.91

FIGURE 13. Etzler’s ‘Satellite’, based on the illustration from The Artizan, October 1845, p.207. The travelling machine used a rotary digger ‘actuated by an endless rope from a stationary engine’.

For Stollmeyer, the creation of the iron machinery would offer employment to the English iron industry, in addition to replacing physical labour in agriculture. Disappointed by what he saw as the Morning Star’s less than glowing account of the Bicester trial, his letter in response detailed the reasons why the ropes had failed, and why the experiment had actually been curtailed due to the drunkenness of the ‘natives’, who would rather have seen a ‘good fight’.92 But at the time there was some close and appreciative attention to the ‘Satellite’ elsewhere. Following the report in the Mechanics’ Magazine, news of the trial and a detailed description of the machine appeared in the Jamaica Times, Weekly Mirror, and provincial papers.93 The Artizan: A Monthly Journal of the Operative Arts in October 1845 reviewed the tract J.A. Etzler’s Mechanical System in its greatest simplicity

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for Agricultural Works, Formation of Ditches, Canals, Dams, and any Excavation, Applanation and Elevation of Ground, Eradicating, Sawing and Removing Trees, Crushing and Removing Rocks, Forming Terraces on Slopes of Mountains, and other Works which was published by the radical John Cleave of Shoe Lane, London. The reviewer noted the importance of the ‘Satellite,’ as it was ‘on the successful operation … the hopes of this Society we understand chiefly depend’, but the result of the experimental machine constructed at a cost of several hundred pounds was one ‘from which no opinion of a positive nature can yet be deduced’.94 The reviewer did endorse colonisation, but feared that with insufficient preparation on the ground, even though Venezuela seemed eligible, it would ‘be found in the end to be impracticable and fruitless’. Duncan, a year before, had expressed no such qualms. The second item in the Morning Star’s first issue was about ‘Emigration to the Tropical World’, which was ‘Printed, with the Author’s permission, from the type of the forthcoming new edition of “FLOWERS and FRUITS,” by JAMES ELMSLIE DUNCAN.’ The expanded edition, with ‘Prose-sketches and Essays’, also included, ‘by the Author’s especial permission’, Etzler’s The Mechanical System with plates. A copy of the work seems to have been sent to James E. ‘Shepherd’ Smith’s Family Herald, a leading working-class / lower-middle-class journal edited by a Scotsman who had some acquaintance with Etzler’s inventions, and Owenism and sacred socialism, but no review appeared in the journal which was being typeset by women using James Young’s pianotype machine (an enterprise which would soon be forced to stop owing to the opposition of male printers).95 In the new edition of Duncan’s book this essay on emigration was to follow a section of ‘variety’, a quality which he declared to be his aim in the periodical, and was to precede the essay defending a vegetable diet. It was ‘above all things my desire to make my little work useful ’. The essay in the Morning Star used extracts from Etzler’s recently published Emigration to the Tropical World, with his permission. Mr Etzler makes use of the powers and substances which compose our world and takes no notice of the whims and caprices of mankind. But he shows to man how he can avail himself of the things of nature to live a life free from toils and cares for his food and comforts. He presents various plans all founded on facts known to the world and undeniable. These plans are: – 1. To emigrate in organized bodies to the beautiful ever-mild and ever-green tropical countries, in which on the authority of Alexander Von Humboldt and others, 1 acre may be made to produce as much as 50 in this country, in such rich nutritive productions as the bananas

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and maize and others. 1 acre of bananas produce as much nutritive stuff as 133 acres of wheat in Europe or 44 acres of potatoes. Land is to be had there for nothing or next to nothing; wants to be supplied but very few – a hut, two or three square rods of soil, and a few shillings worth of light cotton stuff for clothing, &c. Passage may be obtained for 3 to 5 pounds to South America if whole ships be hired or bought by a society. The tropical region he calculates to extend on the average all around the globe to 30 degrees latitude on both sides of the equator – consequently comprising one half of the world! Therefore, Duncan thought it ‘nothing but absurdity to drudge and grovel in this country for the bare physical wants’. ‘Startling, and like a romance as this may at first appear,’ Duncan asserted, ‘he nevertheless proves beyond the possibility of contradiction, with any shadow of reason, that there are powers in abundance, for driving all machinery, freely to be had anywhere.’ These powers included waterpower via reservoirs and continual waterfalls. Heat was also to be generated by a great numbers of flat mirrors concentrating solar rays, which would also bake building material such as pavements, columns and bricks. Duncan anticipated with Etzler the use of machines such as the Satellite, directed possibly just by a single man, that could plough ‘1 rod in breadth at once &c, and cultivate 2,000 up to 20,000 acres of land and in so simple a mode as to limit the expenses for machinery to less than even the cost of the present implements for same purpose … This is about to be carried into practice in various parts of the world simultaneously.’ Joint-stock companies were to be organised for the machinery and pioneers to emigrate, and for home cultivation too. Maritime navigation would be cheapened by Etzler’s improved form of wave-powered propulsion, exceeding ‘several times’ steam and sail power.96 Stollmeyer had secured various continental European patents (in Belgium, Holland, and France), and one in London in September 1841, for Etzler’s ambition was to establish a ‘cosmopolitical or international’ movement.97 The patenting of his wonder devices did, however, become a source of complaint to radicals such as Isaac Ironside of Leeds – who tackled Stollmeyer on this point when he met him at Ham Common in June 1844.98 The model of the vessel, whose sails were like a lady’s fan or peacock’s tail as the Fourierist paper London Phalanx tried to explain to a correspondent, had been exhibited to ‘ship owners, steam ship companies, capitalists, merchants, and the public in general’ in a room at 70 Cheapside in 1841, cards of admission and prospecti organised through the offices of The Phalanx.99 The machinery was apparently created by the inventor

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Henry Bessemer, then in his late twenties, and a few years before his fortune would be made by the manufacture of metallic paint – a venture in which the Fourierite Arthur Young was involved.100 The chief figure in this experiment was the Irishman Hugh Doherty, born c.1803, a graduate of the University of Paris and former Catholic, who had sought a public career as lecturer on a ‘new and mathematically correct science of language’ with public lectures at Exeter Hall in 1835, became drawn to Owenism, met Charles Fourier in Paris in May 1836, and became the leader of the British Fourierites.101 A contemporary described him as ‘one of the most profound and brilliant writers of the day’, although his work as the translator of Fourier (popularly viewed as insane) and his subsequent multi-volume attempt to describe the world, mystified many. The Fourierites wished to combine, as Doherty wrote, the enthusiasm of religion with the conviction of science. He hoped, in 1842, to make a fortune from Etzler’s invention superseding steam propulsion. Unfortunately the ship’s float ‘of equal specific gravity to the water’ seems to have pulled the ship down, in the Thames, when tried out by Stollmeyer in 1842, although the vessel was salvaged and Stollmeyer, who had been on board at the time, claimed it was an accident caused by the float having been fixed faultily.102 We actually have a more detailed account of the experiments. In June 1845, the writer ‘Lever’ in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper – none other than Doherty – described how the new mechanism had fared, in an article (part of a series he had initiated 4 May 1845 on ‘Navigation, Ship Building, and Sea Transport’) under the motto ‘Britannia rules the waves.’ Doherty appreciated the difficulty for a non-scientific readership, without diagrams, in apprehending the new invention. He had travelled in the ship – a modified seven-ton ‘long boat’103 – with an experienced seaman of twenty years who was willing to embrace the idea of this new motive power, and was ‘now in South America, engaged in a noble cause, and entrusted with a very responsible office’. With an old sailor and a boy the two had sailed as far as Northfleet near Gravesend, but a fault with the machinery delayed the experiment for two months; the next experiment, only with the boy, took them as far as Holy Haven near the Nore; connecting the underneath platform, fixing the upright levers to the side levers, they were towed out by the coast guardsmen: ‘our little “ship” and our levers moved up and down, and the ratchets pulled the ratchet-wheel and paddle-wheel around. The fact of the applicability of the waves’ power for propelling vessels was established.’ Because the engineer had deviated from Etzler’s instructions the experiments in Margate, where the waves were higher, although successful, showed the deficiencies of the mechanism. After this experiment, Doherty said to his readers, he had called Etzler to England,

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and Etzler had then advocated the idea of the ‘floating island’ – something which Doherty equated with the floats of wood travelling down the Rhine.104 The Mining Journal reported its success more succinctly (in paragraphs that were printed in provincial papers); a model of the vessel which was driven by the ‘alternating perpendicular motion of ship’ through waves, was also exhibited to the public in the captains’ room at Lloyd’s Coffee House, at the Royal Exchange, home of the underwriters.105 Cleave’s Penny Gazette also produced a diagram, evidently based on the model, in a front page article entitled ‘New Invention in Navigation,’ which contrasted its claims to safety with a recent maritime disaster involving the steamer Pegasus sailing from Leith to Hull, with the loss of over fifty lives, off the Farne Isles in July 1843 (it was no coincidence that John Cleave was the publisher of the pamphlet Description of the Naval Automaton).106 The Mechanics’ Magazine had published the engraving too, in prefacing a detailed communication from Etzler himself. The Magazine subsequently printed Stollmeyer’s account of the ‘floating island’, for the new maritime mechanism was to be combined with another invention: balsa wood maritime vessels, ‘solidly built floats of wood instead of our hollow vessels, so breakable and liable to sink and [Etzler] calculates them to require one tenth of the expense of the latter.’ 107

FIGURE 14. Etzler’s ‘Naval Automaton’, based on the illustration from Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 19 August 1843. A is the hull; B the platform; C.C. connecting poles from the platform to the machinery on the vessel’s deck; D.D. the arms; E.E. the ratchet poles; F the ratchet wheels; and G the paddle wheels.

One supporter, Luke James Hansard (printer to the House of Commons, who wrote on Fourier and Etzler as ‘Minor Hugo’, and was shortly to become a leading figure in the Alleged Lunatics Friends’ Society as well as a proponent of a scheme to pay off the national debt), reported:

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Mr Etzler conceives it will ere long be practicable to cross the Atlantic Ocean from Holyhead to New York in three days, or four at the farthest; recent discoveries on the nature of the tides and winds, which have been the results of experiments made at Plymouth during the past year (1842) by scientific men have tended entirely to confirm Mr Etzler’s doctrine.108 The Cheltenham Free Press published designs for a large steam vessel called the ‘Huge Leviathan’, from Richard James Morrison (a retired naval lieutenant who issued a famous astrological annual under the name of ‘Zadkiel’, from 1830) in response to Etzler’s scheme.109 Further afield, the French journal Le Correspondant reported the interest of the English maritime authorities and specialist press, in the potential of Etzler’s floating island project.110 What would all this inventiveness lead to, in Duncan’s summary of Etzler’s vision, in the Morning Star? Finally it is proposed to make use of all these agencies and contrivances not only to create continuous gardens throughout all the country with stately dwellings in their midst, but to enable mankind to live like a higher order of beings, having no use or desire for one fellow being to make a servant or slave of him – all slaves being of wood and iron, much more lasting and effective than those of flesh and bones, and infinitely cheaper too, – not only to do all this but to accumulate all that is beautiful and instructive around the dwellings of man; to employ his time and energies in the enjoyment and study of things worth his knowing, to educate children, to form their intellect by the attraction of curious and interesting things so natural to man and child to behold and handle and observe. To form the moral by something more substantial than mere barren preaching in allowing no man to be poor and in want or unprotected. And the final prospect for mankind was the achievement of godlike order and harmony: ‘Men in the future will cultivate to the full ALL his powers, so that they shall act as well ordered mechanism; or like planets, revolving around each other in harmony and beauty, giving forth light and warmth – like them – singing as they shine – breathing celestial music.’111 Also in this opening issue of the journal, Duncan told his readers: I as a young man but too willingly believe the world to be what it pretends, have been disposed to look upon our nation, as full of wise men, patriots and philanthropists, judging them by their titles, high

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salaries, honors and possessions. But truly after this I must hold their pretentions [sic] in doubt and imagine the world has made little progress in true wisdom since the days of Columbus when all the doctors of Salamanca could find nothing in Columbus’ project worth their recommendation, and pronounced his scheme to discover the unknown half of the world a madness! 112 Duncan also thought that what was perhaps best of all about the Etzlerite scheme of emigration was, ‘to the inhabitants of a country curst with a government such as ours, to live under republican institutions nor have any of our present magnificent and costly mockeries of Church and State to support’.113 His view on the relationship between the secular and religious establishments was not elaborated, at least not in surviving issues of the Morning Star, but in a later periodical he made clear that there should be a separation – no surprising posture for a radical, admittedly; he also endorsed religious equality, Jewish emancipation and the Sabbath as a day of enjoyment as well as of worship.114 The New Moral World’s editor was critical of this argument of the Etzlerites – to what extent could this El Dorado of the TES, a place with perpetual revolutions and wars, be one of liberty of speech and writing, he asked?115 Duncan’s signed contributions to the journal included a sketch of Etzler. Although it may be read as a piece of boosterism, it seems likely that, as with Duncan’s parallel adulation of William Thom, at this point the young man genuinely admired Etzler. Etzler, being born about 1796, was the same generation as James Duncan senior. The sketch reads like a physiognomical or phrenological report, but was designed to emphasise Etzler’s credentials as a man of practical science: In person, Mr Etzler is below the middle stature, but of a firmly knit and muscular frame; in his figure and face there is every indication of great nervous energy. The face and head are ‘massy,’ the brow strikingly protuberant, there is evidently a large volume of brain. In the expression of the countenance there is more of the intellect than of the feelings – it is rather on the man of science that we gaze, than on the philanthropist … the chief deficiency is the extreme breadth of the mouth, which is otherwise highly intellectual, and indicative to the phisiognomist [sic] of great strength of character.116 Duncan added, ‘I have frequently taken great pleasure in observing Mr Etzler; I can now recall him to my mind in his favourite attitude – grasping the floor with his foot, his head thrown back, his broad chest advanced – firm and motionless – to the fanciful eye, impressed by the

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stern and intellectual contour of the head, as if the globe itself had shrunk beneath him, and upon which he stood, as a statue, on its pedestal.’ One is reminded, in reading this prose, of Benjamin Robert Haydon’s depiction of Napoleon of 1839. No graphic portrait of Etzler exists to compare with Duncan’s prose sketch, but with Duncan’s own poetic vision of the world, one ought to think indeed of the heroic figures of the Romantic age. By contrast with Duncan’s description, we have the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier’s recollection of an encounter while travelling in Pennsylvania, with Etzler, ‘a small, dusky-browed German’. ‘His whole mental atmosphere was thronged with spectral enginery.’117 In the effort to sell the programme of reform, it was important to emphasise both the paradise that was in South America and the healthiness of the tropics (against all the prejudices about Europeans being struck down by fever). This Duncan did in a sub-Carlylean (or Dickensian) piece extracted from the forthcoming second edition to Flowers and Fruits. The tropics were the natural home of man, where man originated, and leaving it had been the true Adamite or Cainite curse.118 This passage, unusually for him, referred to the actual conditions in urban England, a land of bishops and beggars, parsons and pickpockets, ‘Is the fear of poverty nothing? Do we never hear of murders? Of robberies? Of starvation? Of suicides? Of prostitution? Of beggary – bankruptcies – jails?’: ‘Old England’ is a sweet country certainly, especially just now, in this most delightful of months, November, and in this sweet and most picturesque of towns, London. Very delightful to have to burn candles at mid-day, and light ourselves along the streets with torches, lest we be heedlessly crushed beneath some wagon wheel? And the fogs – very delightful, now coming on us, ‘thick and threefold’ – sweetened too by a wholesome mixture of coal smoke, foul air, and abominations unnumbered accumulating on all sides, from cesspools, gutters, mud, and filth – raked from ‘earth and ocean.’ ‘Very delightful indeed!’119 Stollmeyer had stressed the fertility and ownership of the soil by contrast to England where one must ‘pay to a landlord an exorbitant rent for the use of an exhausted soil in a cold climate’. 120 The Newcastle branch of the TES noted among its 17 points that there was never any winter in Venezuela.121 Duncan presented the tropics as an inexhaustible cornucopia, ‘Nature there imposes no life exhausting toils and labor on her children, but leaves them to revel and rejoice amid her rich and unceasing bounties, without care, without anxiety, or fear for the future.’ To establish a colony in Venezuela would be to escape a motherland that

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‘Moloch like devours and destroys her own children,’ – a country in which, citing Chambers’s tract on the management of infancy, Duncan asserted half of all children died in infancy. But the Tropics would prove an inhospitable environment for Malthus or Marcus.122 Here, Duncan’s comments have been viewed in the light of a reaction to Owenite qualms about emigration as an acceptance of Malthusianism.123 What a glorious country for men and women ‘thirsty to free themselves from the evils and oppression under which they now groan!’ The future held the prospect of man living without compulsory work. 124 ‘How many of us have to struggle hard,’ he asked, ‘from morning to night, from day to day, from year to year – in infancy and age – and for what? A pittance even less than is given to the convicted felons of jails and hulks: and a home – well may Englishmen sing of “home” and “fireside” and “comforts” (those words, the French – our “natural enemies” cannot boast!).’125 And one need not worry about hostile Canaanites in this new promised land, there would be no need for extirpation and murder. 126 Incredulity was the response of man educated by ‘the nurse and the priest, and they have taught him only folly and falsehood’. Duncan also published his own poetry in the magazine. ‘Pandora’s Box, inscribed to Sir James Graham’ (the Home Secretary), ‘Sir Robert Peel’, and ‘Dan [O’Connell] the Fox’ were three political poems published in the first number. He probably also penned the various epigrams, hints and hits to sectarians, to anti-teetotallers, calumniators, and fault finders.127 The 1 March 1845 number of the Morning Star contained aphorisms by Greaves (from Letters and Extracts from the Ms. Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves, vol.1, although the source is not cited128), such as ‘Selfishness is deeper than Sectarianism, it must be exposed as the root of evil and opposed accordingly,’ and ‘For blessings to be rightly directed, man must seek the blesser, for it is only when the giver is accepted with his gift that the divinized humanity exhibits in the outward sphere cordiality, fervency, zeal, in all that is good, and pure, and true.’129 The Christian Socialist J.M. Ludlow recalled the work – a copy was given him by its editor, Alexander Campbell – as ‘unintelligible, disfigured by endless repetitions, conceits of fancy and of style, and coinage of barbarous words, but every now and then some deep or striking thought crops out.’ 130 The first issue contained the poem ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’ by William Thom (followed by a Miss Kezia Slade’s verse, ‘Happiness’). The Morning Star also seralised a sketch of Thom, who was ‘seduced’ to travel down to London with the financial backing of Scottish well-wishers, where he was initially fêted by the cream of progressive and radical society including Charles Dickens, the Quaker writers William Howitt and Mary Howitt, the Unitarian minister and orator William Johnson Fox of

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Finsbury Chapel and the poet Eliza Cook.131 The American transcendentalist Margaret Fuller wrote appreciatively of his collection of poems, in The New York Daily Tribune and helped raise funds for Thom in the States.132 One article in issue 9 of the Morning Star, 8 March 1845, reported the reluctance by some titled persons to attend a dinner in Thom’s honour in the Crown and Anchor Tavern at the Strand in London in late February, when they heard that the Unitarian Fox was invited to be the chair. The event (there were some seventy present) stemmed from the desire of ‘some Scottish gentlemen in the east end of the town’ to show their respects.133 Whether Duncan was present then, or at the dinner to him presided over by the Unitarian writer Dr John Bowring at the National Hall at 242, High Holborn, the headquarters of the National Association for the Promotion of the Political and Social Improvement of the People, with some four or five hundred ‘respectable persons of both sexes’, working-class, is unknown.134 Thom’s poem ‘The Blind Boy’s Pranks’ first appeared anonymously in the Aberdeen Herald in early 1841, prefaced with the comment: ‘The following beautiful Stanzas are by a correspondent who subscribes himself “A Serf” and declares that he has to weave fourteen hours out of the four-andtwenty. We trust his daily toil will soon be abridged, that he may have more leisure to devote to an art in which he shows so much natural genius and cultivated taste.’135 Duncan had enjoyed Thom’s ‘The Mitherless Bairn’ (which began thus: ‘When a’ ither bairnies are hushed to their hame,| By aunty, or cousin, or frecky grand-dame; |Wha stan’s last an’ lanely, an’ naebody carin’?| ’T is the puir doited loonie – the mitherless bairn!’), and his chapter in ‘The Life of a Poor Man’. Duncan sent Thom some doggerel in dialect, ‘rough spun, yet the sincere outspeakings of a heart throbbing with the deepest admiration and sympathy’, which he now reprinted in the Morning Star. The temptation to adopt a pose, in this case, that of the Scottish versifier, albeit the imitation of the sincere admirer, is apparent: My Brother Poet! I kenna gin I hae the right, To think ane o’sic genius bright – Ane, equal to sae high a flight As the ‘Blind Boy’s Pranks,’ Sae far surpassing MY wings’ might – As a brither ranks. … O happiness! Gin ye should think I’m worthy o’ your pen an’ ink –

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Yes, at yer favor’s first sweet blink – By heaven’s it’s true! I’se caper as I were in drink – Baith daft an’ fou! He had just missed Thom in Inverury, a small town fifteen miles outside Aberdeen, when he determined to deliver the letter by hand before going for London. But he was able to spend ‘days of pride’ with his hero in the ‘snug little country town his genius has now made classical ground’ – Thom lived in a cottage in North Street, making a living on ‘customerwork’, unrewarding work weaving domestic items for journeymen weavers for seven or eight months in the year and starving for the rest of the year.136 Duncan would ‘ever look back as upon a green spot – an oases – the few weeks it was my happiness to pass with this gifted son of the muses in his own little village’. He gazed, with the small, light-haired weaver, on the grave of Thom’s first (common-law) wife Jeanie Whitecross, he wandered with him along the Ury, and he listened to the ‘tones of his sweetly ringing flute, and … heard his own inspired words, sung by a voice, deep, rich, mellow – like the autumn wind sighing among the trees of the forest’ (Thom used his flute playing to raise extra money for his family: it may be glimpsed on the window sill in the engraving in Figure 15). This was three years before.137 A number of commentators on Thom’s work in improving or radical journals of the period (and Thom was enthusiastically and extensively reviewed in the Westminster Review in December 1843) extracted a democratic lesson from Thom’s life and works. Duncan wrote: ‘The aristocracy of nature and genius for me, and distribute your trinkets and your jewelled robes as ye will.’ He had observed Thom and his fellow weaver in Thom’s neat little cottage, and wrote ‘of the most manly disposition, – no love of cringing, – no intention to receive “patronage”, “condescension”’. There was no idol worship from Thom to conceited fops, ‘as Thomas Carlyle has it – catch them at that!’ (presumably an allusion to Carlyle’s essays on heroism and hero worship, published from his public lectures, in 1841138). Indeed, as a member of the declining handloom weaving trade, Thom was exactly the sort of worker attracted to the TES, whose members were, however, predominantly English (although there was a Glasgow branch of the TES). Thom’s poems were first collected in The Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver, an edition of 123 pages printed by the Aberdeen Herald in July 1844. He settled in London partly to further his weaving trade but also to superintend the second edition of his Rhymes and Recollections (a third edition was advertised by Smith and Elder in 1847 – a new edition

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was to be published by Skinner in 1880). The British Library’s copy of the issue of the Morning Star in which Duncan recalled his meeting with Thom in Scotland, confusingly, has bound in with it, a portrait and article on the ‘late William Thom’, from an unidentified journal of March 1848.139

FIGURE 15. William Thom, ‘taken from life’, Illustrated London News, 1 March 1845, p.144. Author’s collection.

Duncan followed Thom’s career in London, and announced in a missing number of the Morning Star that the poet’s circumstances had improved to the extent that he was now independent, a subsequent number in 1 March 1845 corrected the editor by revealing that only a good beginning and nothing more, had been made.140 Thom was daguerrotyped by the

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London-based Frenchman Antoine Claudet in 1845 – a mezzotint of his photograph (with his son) was produced for Rhymes and Recollections. Perhaps Duncan met Thom again in London – for at 40 Charlotte Terrace in Islington, for three years, ‘he kept an open table where penniless political discontents of the Chartist order, and neglected poets, equally penniless ... found already and a hearty welcome as long as the funds lasted’.141 As with Duncan’s book, the Morning Star also contained ‘philosophy’ or science. Etzler considered the diet to be pursued in the paradise of the future. He conceived the notion that sugar – derived from sunlight – was the most ‘palatable and the most nutritious’ foodstuff, and, presented in the form of pastries, would provide the food of paradise.142 Etzler claimed sugar would be crystallised through mechanical means – iron slaves harnessed by steam or water power – without the need for heat or boiling. About March of 1845, Stollmeyer published a pamphlet, dedicated to the Venezuelan ambassador to Britain, which claimed that Etzler’s theory was proved experimentally and would form part of the means of livelihood for the Etzlerite colony in South America; the title of the pamphlet capitalised on the debates about West Indian sugar production (the Sugar Duties Act would be passed in August 1846, ending the duties which gave some protection to West Indies sugar production).143 In the Morning Star there were therefore frequent articles on the vegetable products and foods of the tropics, which were presumably written by Duncan even when not explicitly extracted from his Flowers and Fruits. Although reassuring omnivores, ‘With respect to animal food, John Bull need be under no trepidations in fear of the loss of his cherished “roast beef,” should he betake his carcass with us “vegetarians” to this “new land,” for there he will get a bullock as large as ever he set his hungry eyes upon,’ Duncan offered a paradise of vegetable foods, from strawberries to pineapples, and vegetarian substitutes for ivory, leather and milk. 144 In consequence, in the recollections of the radical journalist Thomas Frost and the socialist and freethought leader George Jacob Holyoake, the Morning Star was to be described as a vegetarian magazine.145 Other authors appeared in the magazine. Probably Duncan was known to John Goodwyn Barmby, the self-styled ‘European Pariah’,146 and a radical prodigy who gave the word ‘communist’ to the English language. ‘Who has not heard of Goodwyn Barmby? The name is peculiar enough to escape being passed unnoticed among Smiths and Browns, and it is the name of a man of real genius,’ judged the North British Quarterly Review in 1850, comparing his poetic oeuvre to Turner’s pictures.147 The Times, scornful of one of the reformist associations in which Barmby became a leading figure, in the wake of the Anti-Corn Law League’s success,

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described him as the ‘obscure, but euphonous [sic]’.148 Like Duncan, he asserted his distinction by emphasising his middle name. The eldest son of a solicitor from the village and prominent coaching halt of Yoxford in Suffolk, as a youth Barmby supported radical causes such as the People’s Charter and repeal of the New Poor Laws, and extolled the Chartist virtues of Capel Lofft’s anonymous epic verse, Ernest, or Political Regeneration – a work described as too seditious for publication and so shocking to the printer that his trembling hands let the type fall.149 As a ‘Social Reformer’ who followed Robert Owen, he had published a ‘Journal of a social mission in France,’ in the New Moral World in 1841: documenting his effort that summer at ‘fusion with the choice spirits of Social Paris’ (he met among others, the short-lived socialist writer, and self-identified pariah, Flora Tristan) and having his ‘poesies from France’ published in the Monthly Magazine despite their ‘strong political feelings’ on liberty.150 His Chartist candidacy for the parliamentary representation of Ipswich was mooted in 1841. According to the American Ralph Waldo Emerson, writing in the New England transcendentalists’ journal The Dial, Barmby was ‘a sort of Camille Desmoulins of British Revolution, a radical poet, with too little fear of grammar and rhetoric before his eyes, with as little fear of the Church or the State, writing, – often with as much fire, though not with as much correctness as Ebenezer Elliott’.151 Privately, in his notebook, Emerson commented, ‘Revolution is no longer formidable when the Radicals are amiable’ – if Jack Cade loved poetry, went into ‘love marriages’ inspired by Milton and Shelley, and for Fourierist phalanxes or dietetics, he no longer feared revolutionary conflagration.152 The Morning Star advertised works by Barmby such as The Communist Chronicle; a Monthly magazine of Societary Science, and true religious progress and his new ‘Tracts for the Times to be obtained at the Central Communist Office, 4 Seymour Place, North, Euston Square and ‘all Liberal Booksellers in Town and Country’.153 Duncan’s magazine also serialised Barmby’s ‘Luther; or the romance of the reformation’ in early 1845.154 In this, John Wyclif was mentioned as the ‘bright morning star of reformation’, perhaps the well-known description appearing as an echo of the journal’s title but, more significantly, in this work Barmby noted the role of poets as precursors of the German reformer: ‘Poets! Moreover, followers of Lucretian and precursors of Voltairean mind; poets! The scythe-like, the labourers of old revolutionary mowing-down time; poets! The razor-like, the satiric.’155 For Barmby, the poet was a figure of importance, to be spoken of as a separate being, like the member of parliament, the tradesman, the pauper, and the peasant: in ‘The Tears of England,’ a poem published in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1847, the tears of England fall ‘a glorious curse!’ on

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the poet, ‘Grieved he much, but did his best | When he rhymed it in a verse.’156 In an essay published by The People’s Journal a year earlier, Barmby presented poetry (which he extended beyond verse to include prose, biography, gesture, and history) as divine, ‘God is Poetry … Every true believer is a poet. In God we worship our highest ideal. The mission of poetry is this grand worship. God and Poetry are one – above ourselves and immortal.’ Instancing the Prophet Mohammed, and the prophet-bard of Jehovah, Barmby argued: The poet, prophet-like, might say, ‘I am, hath sent me.’ We may say, however, that poetry may be known by a certain glorious selfabandonment of the poet. This is its most royal sign. Foremost, the God speaks through the poet; fills him, inspires him, is his breath of life. It is not so much the poet who speaks, as that he is the mouthpiece of that which is highest within him.157 In fact Barmby had already been making grand claims for the role of the poet for several years, for in 1842 he declared, ‘The reign of the critic is over. The rule of the poet commences. All Messias [sic] will be acknowledged.’158 At the same time, as ‘Pontifarch of the Communist Church’, in Year 2 of the new dispensation (a Communist Temple being established at the Circus at Great Marylebone), Barmby informed the inhabitants of Cheltenham that George Jacob Holyoake had (in August 1842, after a lecture at Cheltenham Mechanics’ Institute) been ‘wrongfully imprisoned upon a charge of denying god; for no one until now hath clearly known of the nature of god, and that therefore he hath but denied the shadows of men’. Also, he proclaimed, ‘That the doctrines of communion are being revealed to the nations, that division will cease, that unity will arise, and the millennium commence upon the earth.’159 Barmby, like Duncan, bore the imprint of Shelley, indeed one reviewer of the 6d journal The Promethean; or, Communitarian Apostle; A Monthly Magazine of Societarian Science, Domestics, Ecclesiastics, Politics and Literature, its contents covered in yellow, advised a more careful consideration of ‘his great prototype Shelley who seems to live in all his dreams’.160 Barmby belonged to a ‘Promethean Club’ in 1839. The Owenite George A. Fleming’s journal The Union extracted from The Promethean the following lines from the autobiographical ‘The Epic of a Life,’ which, in sympathy with the Shelleyanism of the journal title, recounted: My father died, unkindness was at home. They would not let me dream, but I would roam: I left them one blue misty-morn’d November,

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And walked the dreary country, day and night, Feeding on berries, herbs, and turnips white, Sleeping in sheds, and fleeing from the sight Of real men to visioned deities, Throned on Olympian heights amid the skies; Until I came to cities where the fame, Of master-bards illumined them with flame, And aspirations strong within my mind, Dazzlingly rose, like sun-light on the blind, Waking from blindness, and my pulses beat, And my heart throbbed while on my brow the heat, Sat in damp beads, while feverish shiverings Crept o’er my brain, as though the reptile things Crawled in my being, as I took a pen And poured out verse on women and men. 161 Barmby himself advanced the influence of Shelley and other poets in a review of the Lancastrian artisan John Critchley Prince’s poems in the Monthly Magazine in 1841: ‘Byron, Keats and Shelley have furnished the food from which Mr Prince’s mind has derived expansion and vigour. The whole of the fearful revulsions which society is now undergoing may be traced to the influence exercised by the works of these three poets. They have become the text books by which the incipient author shapes his opinions and his practice the scriptures on which he swears.’ The taste for Shelley among the socialists has been noted and studied before.162 New Tracts for the Times – or Warmth, Light, and Food for the Masses: The Best and only True Way of Gaining the People’s Charter were issued in some six 1d or 2d numbers from late 1842, including his wife Catherine’s ‘Emancipation of Woman’, novel expositions of the Lord’s Prayer (No.5), ‘May that Communitive Life which, under the name of thy kingdom, thy Prophet Jesus prayed for, begin not only in this, but in due time in the lower planets.’163 He corresponded with the communist White Quakers in southern Ireland, issuing a condemnation of a tract which was published against the introduction of his scriptures into Ireland. After missionary tours in the Midlands (taking in Birmingham, Coventry, Bedworth, Ratford and Chilvers Coten), in 1846 Barmby established a Communist Church at Poplar in East London164; he later became a Unitarian minister, possibly influenced by the famous Unitarian minister William Johnson Fox, also an important figure for James Elmslie Duncan. The two poets shared a connection with the communitarian experiment at the Concordium, and Barmby, like Duncan, was a supporter of emigration and home colonisation.165 In many ways, Duncan can be seen

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as a less talented version of Barmby (who was a few years older, being born in 1820), described by one reviewer of socialism in Britain, as ‘a man of genius, but it is of the strangest and most grotesque order,’ who briefly established his own communitarian experiment in 1843, called the Moreville Communitorium, at Hanwell, famous as a location of a lunatic asylum, but, according to Barmby now the ‘first Asylum for the sane’.166 Both Barmby and Duncan were youthful poets, Barmby publishing a juvenile work ‘well worthy of perusal’ according to the Educational Circular and Communist Apostle. In The Madhouse – the title in suitable Gothic script – in some thirty-five pages of verse, he moralised on inmates such as the genius poet, the religious enthusiast convinced he was elect for hell, the maniac maiden, the fallen woman, the survivor of a college duel, an avaricious ‘merchant peer’, and the suicidal, grief-struck, father. The work was published in London around April of 1839, when he was seventeen; in the same year he was extolling the Chartist Convention in verse in the journal The Charter (the Chartist-Poet-to-be Ernest Jones had his Infantine Effusions published by his father at the age of eleven, in 1830).167 WHEN some few miles from the pav’d town are sped, The watchful eye, and roving step are led To where, amid a circling grove of trees, Which shade the sun, yet open to the breeze, The Madhouse stands, and every heart appals, With grated windows, and colossal walls. Tomb of the mind! Receptacle of woe! Sepulchral silence hovers o’er thy brow, Save when a maniac’s shriek rends wild the air, With all the thrilling accents of despair, Save when the madden’d curse, the pensive moan, Disperse the stillness, with discordant tone: Save when the keeper’s angry voice grows high, And the lash sounds, and rattling chains reply. 168 Perhaps not surprisingly, the late Victorian Percy C. Vaughan’s copy of Duncan’s Flowers and Fruits in the Carl Pforzheimer collection in the New York Public Library was bound next to a copy of this verse, which had been published as an octavo volume by Henry Stocking in 1839. In his verse ‘Old Man and Young’, published in 1852, Barmby still asserted the reality of ‘dizzy dreams of youth’ against the assumption of the wisdom of years, and against ‘Old creeds, old laws, “the good old cause”’. 169

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Barmby’s appearance in a police court in 1844 also prefigured, albeit only through one court presence, Duncan’s own treatment by the press in the later 1840s. Hannah Snelgrove, described in court as ‘a pretty looking girl’, had briefly been a maid servant at the Barmby home at 4 Seymour Place, North, Euston Square (also the Central Communist Office), when she made an accusation of sexual advances against her master, an accusation which was not sustained in court for want of evidence. In Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper Barmby’s appearance at Marylebone police court was reported as ‘A White Quaker in Trouble’, the defendant’s appearance as ‘singular in the extreme; his hair was of extraordinary length, and from his chin a sandy coloured beard shot forth, which reached nearly as low as the top button of his waistcoat; he wore a white hat, and a shirt collar à la Byron’. It is not surprising that he should be recalled as ‘poetic’ in appearance (he still wore the beard in 1847, when the exiled Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini referred to it in a letter to his English friend Emilie Ashurst).170 Barmby’s wife Catherine, née Watkins, an Owenite whom he married in October 1841, and who also published essays on social reform, was present in court.171 No doubt readers unsympathetic with communism and believing the free love accusations against Owenite socialists, were prepared to accept this as typical behaviour (an essayist referred, later, to Barmby’s ‘dreamy and oily lubricity of style which it would be dangerous to describe’ – and to the many pages of his works devoted to ‘the Sexual Relations’ 172). Barmby sent a strange statement of explanation to Lloyd’s, describing the maid, and all those who acted against the Communist Church in the matter, as ‘private property’ – ending ‘Yet, not unto her, but unto private property, be the sin charged.’ Barmby claimed prejudice was stirred against him ‘on account of the divine principles I hold, which the wicked cannot understand’.173 Several years on the paper reported without any reference to this episode, his lecture on ‘Practical Christianity’, before the Finsbury Literary Institution, at which he spoke of ‘true Christian practice’ in Jesuit communities in Paraguay, Moravian missions, American Shaker communities, and the Irish White Friends, and made known the ‘existence of the communist church’.174 The artist and poet William Bell Scott later recalled his acquaintanceship with the younger Barmby, whose Communist Chronicle ‘used to keep us in roars of laughter’. The motto, he remembered, being, ‘God is the only true landlord.’ The author of this ‘singular journal of communism’ called on Bell Scott, ‘introducing himself as the Proto-Shiloh [i.e., messianic figure], dressed in a black velvet blouse with a cap to match’. Later in about 1842, he encountered Barmby propagandising in the street in Holborn, sporting his thin beard and black velvet blouse, and hustled by the mob, ‘his hands

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filled with pamphlets, while a covered horse van, loaded with such-like printed matter, kept close by the edge of the pavement, guided by an oddlooking mixture of crazy saint and idle compositor’.175 Like Duncan, Barmby attempted to use imaginative prose literature to discuss his philosophy – in this case two chapters of an uncompleted utopian work called the ‘Book of Platanopolis: Or, The Perfect Commonwealth’ (named after Plotinus’ community for philosophers) were serialised in the Communist Chronicle in 1846: the utopia was set in the future and involved a communitory shaped like a crescent.176 The only portrait I have been able to trace of Barmby, from the 1850s (Figure 16), shows a strangely youthful looking man, his face fine modelled – with centre-parted hair cut short, and a beard that is not particularly patriarchal. The vegetarian William Axon’s entry on him in the Dictionary of National Biography described him as ardent and truth-loving: the portrait may present the features of a man ‘fearless and uncompromising’, but does not capture his enthusiasm.

FIGURE 16. The Reverend John Goodwyn Barmby By courtesy of John Goodchild.

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Whereas Duncan found little support for his poetry in respectable journals, Barmby was able, as one reviewer noted, to infiltrate his poetry into these journals, so that editors of The People’s Journal, for instance, according to one reviewer, promulgated Communism ‘as Monsieur Jordan talked prose, without knowing it’.177 ‘Mr Barmby’s style,’ wrote the anonymous author of an essay on social utopias for Chamber’s Papers for the People, ‘like that of Thomas Carlyle and J.P. Greaves is peculiar to himself: new words occur in every sentence of his works, and are regarded by him as necessary for the expression of new ideas. It is extremely florid and evinces an imaginative mind and an enthusiastic temperament: he seems to regard himself as the Messiah of a new dispensation and his conceptions of his ideal future are grand and often highly poetic.’ 178 Barmby was an erudite young man, fluent in French, able to read German, and not only a well informed member of radical political circles (associate of Wilhelm Weitling; his work on association known to the professor of theology at Montauban, Guillaume de Felice; correspondent of Friedrich Engels on communism, and earning a listing among other socialists from Sir Thomas More to Greaves, in the German Ideology179), but the possessor of genuine literary talent. He was associated with the London intelligentsia of the left in a way that Duncan never was: recognised by the publisher John Chapman, for instance, and attending gatherings where the American transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller appeared. Fuller met William Thom’s son in his company. Her fellow American Bronson Alcott met Barmby at Ham Common in May or June 1842, described him as ‘priest of the beautiful’, and was said to have absorbed some of his vocabulary.180 The radical Robert Buchanan (1813–1866, father of the poet Robert Buchanan) who was also associated with the Ham Common community as a publisher of the New Age for a short time in 1843 (from 3 Holywell Street, Strand, which we have seen was the address from where the first edition of Duncan’s Fruits and Flowers was announced as being published) also briefly joined Duncan as co-editor of the Morning Star.181 Indeed, from the time of the sixth number, he appears as editor, in an advertisement in the New Moral World.182 A Scotsman, and former weaver-teacher, who had managed a newsroom in Huddersfield, he was appointed a social missionary for the Owenites in 1838, lecturing on the errors of political economy and the absurdities of Christianity.183 A man who ‘loved the Muses with all his soul’, and described by one scholar as the ‘most ambitious Owenite poet’, in 1840 he published the poem The Past, the Present, and the Future in Manchester (advertised in advance as The Triumph of Truth in the New Moral World).184 In this, he, with ‘no pretensions to the

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character of a POET’, prefaced a sixty-six page work of three cantos with annotations, with the assertion: A strong natural love of poetry, and a settled belief of its superior applicability (as well of its being its right use,) as a medium for conveying in an attractive shape, important instruction to his fellowmen, has been the prevailing inducement to the step which he has thus taken. The candid critic will make allowance for the faults of style and composition, as the author’s time, from youth to maturity, has been too fully occupied in procuring by manual labour his daily bread, to afford him the opportunity of cultivating, largely, the literary graces necessary to poetic embellishments … And: Be mine the task, to trace th’advance of truth, Onward, triumphant o’er her numerous foes : – Of human progress, from a world of wrong, (Where Misery, like the dead Sirocco’s blast, With pestilential breath, prostrates and kills,) To that fond state of Peace and Happiness, Sung by the Bards, those prophets of the past, Who, aspiring to the beautiful and true, Would measure human right and destiny, By the deep wishes of their earnest heart; – 185 In August 1841, with Alexander Campbell and Lloyd Jones he attempted to enter the Town Hall during the national Anti-Corn Law meeting of ministers of all denominations in Manchester, appearing in the press with his fellow socialists as ‘Rev. Socialist clergymen’.186 Buchanan senior, at least, was to achieve some success as an editor when he returned to Scotland to become editor of an advanced journal, the Glasgow Sentinel in 1850. Uttering that earnest question of the religious, ‘What shall we do to be saved?’ (derived from Acts xvi. 30) Duncan published a series of essays which have only survived in incomplete form in the Morning Star. He took a stance of even-handedness and open-mindedness. On 12 April 1845, in issue 14, he described Etzler’s scheme as ‘the very best and most practicable of all the propositions whereby to elevate its condition yet offered to suffering humanity, we are far from imagining that upon it will solely depend the future amelioration of the world.’ 187 Duncan was an optimist: ‘there is in the heart of man more of virtue than of vice: he is thus prompted on in the path of moral progress – to realise further good

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and leave behind him, year by year, some additional evil.’ 188 But one needed to be free from sectarianism in social reform. ‘Starting on the acknowledgment of the principle, that the future progress of mankind, will, depend as we before said on a variety of causes, – that is not merely on any one measure or influence, – whether free trade, political freedom, education, temperance, the march of science, home colonization or tropical immigration, but all these, combined with other analogous movements and agencies.’189 In a later section of the essay ‘What shall we do to be saved?’ on 3 May 1845, Duncan discussed the ‘requisites of a Plan to Effect the Social Amelioration of Society’, commenting that ‘We have no record of a time when the re-organisation of the world’s societarian arrangements has been so extensively, openly and systematically advocated as within the last 40 or 50 years; and the result happily is making itself manifest in the movements now going on in all parts of the globe, having for their object the realisation of these aspirations.’ He showed his awareness of the St Simonians, and the more scientific and practical Fourierism, ‘it is probable the Phalanstery as proposed by Fourier is the most perfect system for the organisation of man as they now are it is possible for the human ingenuity to contrive, or the mind of man to conceive.’190 Owen was praised, ‘by his teachings thousands have been prepared to embrace the new life when it shall be opened up to them.’ But Duncan argued, ‘with his Paradise and Mechanical system’, that Etzler ‘alone of all our social reformers has furnished a scheme for the world’s reformation having EVERY requisite to ensure success!’191 The next surviving fragment of ‘What shall we do to be saved,’ published 31 May 1845, noted, in Duncan’s rather complicated prose that nodded towards Malthus: The present system of society has within itself no refuge for the poverty and destitution it is its own tendency perpetually to create – the provisions it makes professedly for this purpose to counteract the evils which itself is ever evolving, being at the best but mere palliatives, dealing, and that but partially, with the more obtrusive of these evils: miseries and afflictions arising chiefly from its own defective constitution, and which it still less thinks of forming any arrangements to prevent. The only outlet for its ‘surplus population’ – those for whom its soul-chilling creed it declares there is no room at ‘nature’s table’ – is emigration, and this, little as it has done to promote or assist, society itself feels to have been the ‘safety valve’ to which its preservation is due.192

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He thought that all reformers would do well to give one another credit for sincerity, as he thought the Hindu looked on all religion as good. ‘The spirit of improvement must develop itself, not merely in one way, by your plan or by my plan, but by a variety of “ways and means.”’ But staying at home was not the solution, running away from the bull was the superior policy – and he referred to what had happened to the Harmony Hall Owenite community in Hampshire by 1845. For Duncan, it was a ‘system to work out a Societarian Revolution, to compass the Universal Socialisation (to coin a word) of the world.’193 He was rather vague on the new scientific agencies to back moral influences, to effect this revolution, although eloquent on the power of the printing press (misquoting a passage from Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris, published in 1831, concerning a young student reading a telling passage of a forbidden book in the awe-inspiring surroundings of a cathedral, ‘Ah oui! ça tuera en!’ [Duncan misquotes], ‘This will kill that!’ The printing press had been responsible for the destruction of superstition.194). Progressive journals were struck by the tremendous potential and variety of tasks already performed through the motive force of steam.195 The Morning Star was no different. Steam power had united the human race into one great family, ‘distant nations have been brought together and converted to friends and mutual benefactors; mighty bulwarks against war have been built…The very evils that have resulted from the introduction of steam have tended to evolve good by forcing on the necessity for the amelioration of the present social system.’ ‘Truly Science rules the world, for it modifies governments themselves, which must bend to the influence it exerts.’196 ‘Our prolixity,’ he wrote, ‘we find, will again constrain us to defer laying before the reader the gist of our subject.’ 197 By the fourth number of the Morning Star, it had become amalgamated with The Tribune and Record of Industrial Progress, although the Tribune’s news was crowded out by TES affairs in number 6 (15 February 1845). 198 The Tribune had been pre-empted in its own radical programme, by the appearance several weeks before its first number, of the Morning Star, though it was more ‘universal’ in scope and interested in social and industrial movements at home and abroad. The amalgamation allowed the Star to appear at a reduced price, and as a weekly. Ultimately the Star was to be, so its projectors hoped, sixteen pages, catering to the ‘liberal party’ and to the ‘general public’.199 Politics intrude in the journal under Duncan’s editorship, with a paragraph citing Epictetus, that it was sometimes good not to be virtuous, and that as economic distress increased, the munificence of the Crown increased, in relation to the Pension List. 200 A political essay by ‘A.A.’, a member of the TES, appeared in the sixth number (15 February 1845), a

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leading article entitled ‘Now is the Time for Agitation’ which spoke about political agitation being hushed when employment was extended in the manufacturing districts, as the Queen’s Speech had noted, and which the Tory Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, ‘his inseparable air of vanity and selfsatisfaction has, in the course of his first harangue of the session, insinuated to be solely the effect of his own wise and judicious measures’.201 Peel and his fellow MPs were classed as ‘patching and plastering politicians’. It had been ‘so often observed that, during a season of what is called prosperity, the country becomes quiet, and the voice of agitation unheard, that the one fact is now looked upon as a necessary consequence of the other’. The author spoke of the cant of the pulpit, the sage lips of employers, and the lying scribbling of ‘respectability’ in pamphlets ‘(see Chambers’ tract on wages)’. ‘A.A.’ was suspicious of the gammoning ‘aristocrats of the young England school’ (those who Benjamin Disraeli cultivated, in his pursuit of a position in the Conservative party, in the early 1840s). He also called the working class ‘the then haggard phantom’.202 The English Chartist Circular reported Etzler’s inventions in 1843.203 Now the chief Chartist journal Northern Star (whose title may well have inspired the Etzlerite magazine, although it is also probably an allusion to a phrase in the Book of Revelations, and Doherty the Fourierist had already published a journal with the same title in October 1840 204), which had earlier, in 1843 and 1844, published correspondence from Etzler and Stollmeyer, and debated the value of the Society’s scheme of emigration and machinery, noticed the magazine’s transition from monthly to weekly by the time of issue 12 (one of the missing issues), and noticed the series of articles on ‘Modern Legislation and Social Science’ (‘ably written’ – the series was penned by ‘A.A.’, who succeeded Duncan and Buchanan as the editor of the journal), and ‘the price of the publication being but a penny, renders it unnecessary we should say more, as all who choose may purchase it and judge for themselves.’205 Coverage of the journal also appeared in Douglas Jerrold’s Illuminated Magazine in 1845, in an article which was also picked up by the Northern Star – ‘not exactly an enthusiastic admirer’, the author of the essay accepted the ‘salubrity and fruitfulness of the destination, but complained of the use of Etzler’s inventions in distant wilderness rather than in Britain – and it was surely no coincidence that the mournful poem by George S. Nussey on ‘The Emigrant’ appeared on the same page.206 By the twenty-seventh number, it was being noticed across the Atlantic in the Fourierist The Harbinger, of the Brook Farm Phalanx, New York.207 But some short while before this, there was a change in the editorship of the paper. We do not know the reason why it should have been stated so

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forthrightly, but in the ‘Notices to Correspondents’ section in the twentyseventh number of the Morning Star, in 12 July 1845, it was noted that ‘Mr Duncan has now no connection whatever with this publication.’208 He had not stood as a director of the TES in April 1845.209 Duncan’s new magazine Sunbeam was ‘now ready’, readers of the Morning Star were told on 12 July, and Flowers and Fruits was also re-issued. It does not seem that Duncan, who as editor was clearly in receipt of the news emerging of the disastrous experiences of the pioneering members of Etzler’s emigration scheme in Venezuela, felt the need to disassociate himself, for he remained committed to the Etzlerite project, since readers of the New Moral World were told of this new advocate for Etzler’s plans too.210 This was even after the futile attempt to establish a settlement on a hundred or so acres at Guinimita Bay in the Gulf of Paria (the gulf dividing Trinidad from the continent), at a place below sea level which lacked water save for the stagnant water of a nearby swamp. Another group of British pioneers in March 1846 was despatched before news of the failure of the effort of the 57 men, women and children – pioneers and volunteers – who had arrived on the Rosalind, could reach them. Duncan had some responsibility for this as he had again become a director, and joined a committee of inquiry studying the price of vessels, passage and food for the voyage to Venezuela, in early 1846. 211 The Baptist minister George Sherman Cowen of Trinidad, who gave help to the emigrants en route to Venezuela, at Port of Spain, informed readers of the Herald of Churches in January 1846 of the hopes he had, through the TES and similar European enterprises, for missionary work in South America, even though ‘they have little regard for religion in many cases and in some few they seemed filled with hostility against it.’ He hoped that ‘their entrance into the province of Venezuela may be made a stepping-stone to future and greater advances on that immense continent’.212 A journalist writing for the Hampshire Advertiser interviewed the passengers on board the brig Condor, chartered from Hull to Venezuela, as it came into Southampton Docks in March 1846, carrying a considerable number of passengers (193), under the leadership of the selfeducated Welshman Thomas Powell, the secretary of the TES, bound on an estimated six-week long journey to Percati. Concerned to find out if they held Owenite beliefs, the journalist reported: It appears, first of all, that the majority know nothing at all of Mr Owen, or his doctrines, and those who do, very properly condemn them. The Tropical Emigration Society has members very extensively spread in the midland and northern counties, and the majority of the present detachment are from Leicestershire. The great body consist of

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journey men mechanics, very few agriculturalists, from the unfortunately explanatory fact that all the emigrants have subscribed to the Society, paid for their land, and besides carrying out farming, and other implements, have some cash in hand; a condition we are afraid but very few country labourers could exhibit. We have no doubt that the Society originated with some persons holding what they called improved socialised opinions; but such, if they are connected with the Society, have been absorbed in the general mass. 213 In this voyage, reported as the second party to be sent out by the TES, there were men, women and children of various grades, ‘from the welldressed mechanic, looking like the foreman of a factory, down to the rather ragged-looking hammerman, perhaps, of such an establishment.’ The women’s clothes ranged from black satin finery to the very plainest dress. ‘We confess our regret,’ the reporter wrote, ‘that so large a number of strong arms and considerable means should have been induced to seek a foreign, instead of an English, colony wherein to locate themselves.’ In April the Bradford Observer published the correspondence of Jonas Ramsden of Paper Mill Bridge, Keighley, ‘induced to leave his home, friends and native country’, by false representations from Etzler and ‘needy adventurers’: informing his father William of his departure from Guinimita, ‘a place where sickness and death reign triumphant’ – finding assistance from the Baptist minister at Port of Spain, and attention at the Colonial Hospital: twelve of the number having died at the time. ‘Thus writes our youth from this Paradise of death.’214 Holyoake’s Reasoner too, received news from disillusioned supporters. 215 Stollmeyer and Powell argued for the viability of the project in the Port of Spain Gazette, Stollmeyer having to defend his character against accusations of cold-heartedness towards the settlers – the Gazette reporting the verdict in the government council that it was ‘no less than deliberate murder sending these people to such a place’ as Guinimita, and that the TES had become a Frankenstein monster.216 The failure of the Venezuelan enterprise was publicised more widely in the British press in June 1846, following official inquiry by the Colonial Land and Emigration Office and involvement by the Foreign Office which recommended that ‘by making publick their disastrous results, to put a stop to proceedings which entail misery and destruction upon the victims of the delusion, and which cannot probably, be productive of any real benefit to the projectors themselves’.217 Colonial journals reprinted the warnings, one Australian journal hoping the instruction would follow for would-be emigrants from the mother-country, ‘that in this, and the other colonies of Australia, they would find a healthful climate, a prolific

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soil, unbounded scope for industry, and last not least – British society, intelligence, manners, and laws.’218 Etzler is alleged to have said, in reply to one disillusioned emigrant, ‘no great achievement had ever been affected without death.’219 A meeting at the Hall of Science in Whitechapel Road discussed the state and prospects of the enterprise.220 Few of the members but must know persons formerly combined in the movement who, since our disasters, have deserted from it. Many of the latter, I doubt not, if called upon by those among us who have not lost faith, and remonstrated with now that are prospects are brightening, could be induced to our ranks again. Duncan wrote this in a letter, ‘unabated in faith’, to John Bredell of Bethnal Green, previously a co-operative storekeeper, a branch secretary of the Universal Community Society of Rational Religionists and now the editor of the Etzlerite organ when there were ‘growing problems’ with the magazine in 1846. Duncan wrote to suggest that the journal (retitled The Morning Star and People’s Economist. Advocate of the Tropical Emigration Society) be made more attractive to ‘progressive minds’ by becoming a ‘Journal of Progressive Literature’. He sent a little sonnet, as he called it, on the ‘Social Band’, an echo perhaps of a hymn in the Owenite Social Hymns of the 1830s221 (No.129) which declared ‘Community! The joyful sound |That cheers the social band,’ Would’st thou have peace to dwell on earth? Then lend a helping hand; Would’st thou enjoy content and mirth? Then join the social band. If superstition, woe, and hate – If these be thy desire? Go join the foe! Yet ’tis too late To oppose our holy fire. We will succeed – we shall succeed – Despite all earthly powers; Then onward, forward let us speed And victory is ours! He also sent a further sketch of Etzler and an article on the War of Independence in South America: the poem alone was published.222

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The journal continued into late January 1847, the final surviving issue bewailing the Society’s disasters, ‘The rock on which the Society split was the preliminary settlement; yet, not that it was advisable to have a preliminary settlement, but that it was set about being established in so imprudent and precipitate a manner, and that so bad a selection of land was made.’223 It had been a terrible lesson – and makes a sad contrast to Duncan’s wild assertion that the master spirit Etzler’s practical and acute character was most forcibly shown in the choice of the settlement.224 The original TES was wound up in May. Fifty seven emigrants went out in the first wave and, with news of their disastrous experiences not adequately conveyed, the Condor transported another group in March 1846 (at a cost of £1,321 18s 5d), to be followed in August 1846 by another body of emigrants for the tropical paradise. The Dublin Review’s comment in 1847 was this: Perfect equality of rights in everything, were the leading principles, and its Secretary was a man who had been years in prison as a Chartist. These simple facts will sufficiently explain its nature, and yet, under the influence of that social misery which leads to despair, there were to our knowledge enlisted among its members, mechanics of minds so acute, and of habits so pure, that they would advantage any new country and be a loss to their own. 225 In the same year, the Northern Star contrasted the failure of the venture, with the emigrants dying like rotten sheep, with the National Land Company, describing the emigration scheme as ‘mad or wicked’ – leading to misery for the survivors in what had been their El Dorado, the ‘Venezuela juggle is now utterly exploded.’226 When the erstwhile supporter of the ‘Iron satellite’ Edward King emigrated, he did not go to Africa, nor to Venezuela, which was descending into a state of civil war after 1847, but to the United States, in 1851 (his son ‘Africanus’ being one of the physicians on the spot, treating the stricken Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in 1865).227 The Englishman Charles William Day, after five years’ living in the West Indies, recalled the Trinidadian refugees from Venezuela – shoddy tailors and shoemakers who at home were ‘Chartists’, and who, after the misery, sickness and poverty of their tropical utopia, established themselves on the island, but had evidently not yet made the mental adjustment from dreams of equality, to the familiar necessities of respect to social superiors: At first, they are disagreeably familiar in manner, rarely choosing to say other than simple ‘yes,’ or ‘no;’ the addition of ‘Sir,’ being

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considered a compromise of their right to social equality. However, by degrees, they soften, as they find their dependence to be, not on those of their own rank and sentiments, but on persons accustomed to be approached with respect. Some of these silly people went so far as to abstain from showing the slightest deference to or acknowledgment of the position of the Governor Lord Harris, but at last they got so far as to add ‘Sir,’ to the ‘yes,’ or ‘no.’ I never heard one of them say ‘My Lord.’ They are an extremely disagreeable race to deal with, Utopian and unmanageable, and not particularly clever in their trades. The fact is, that in England, these people never had a chance of coming within hail of a gentleman; and when for the first time in their lives they encounter one out here, they are astonished to find that he is infinitely more free and courteous than the aristocratic master tailors and shoemakers heretofore their employers. 228 The emphasis on deference was not surprising, from a man who wrote Hints on Etiquette, but the passage quoted is poignant for the suggestion of the emigrants’ pride being worn down. Should Duncan, having been a director and part of the propaganda machine, share some of the blame for the venture? If this was a Victorian novel of commercial fraud, one might cast Duncan in the role of the naïve young journalist, whose misguided faith in the cause was exploited by designing men. The TES was not formally linked to a shady enterprise to develop a Trinidad Great Eastern and Great Western Railway, Etzler being the acting engineer, and the savings envisaged by constructing the railway from wood rather than iron were calculated at £3,000 per mile (one Horatio Utting, and others, it was to be alleged after the failure of the scheme, had concocted the scheme in Queen’s Bench prison 229). Yet Etzler and Stollmeyer were not fraudulent in their motives (‘no scheme for deceiving you, or cheating you out of your money,’ the preface to the first London edition of Paradise within the Reach asserted). Venezuela remained a possibility for emigrants – The Times, in August 1869, reporting efforts to establish a London Venezuelan Mutual Emigration Society at the Workmen’s Hall at Stratford, as a solution to unemployment.230 Duncan threw himself into the task of arguing for Etzler’s plans – and why not, given that this was a new movement in which a man of unproven talents could become prominent through its own journal in a way that might be harder in the more established Owenite and Chartist movements. The journalistic venture which he possibly turned to with a view to exercising more control over the content was published by the radical publisher William Strange.231 This, Sun Beam, as the title was actually printed, was planned as a miscellany of entertaining and

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instructive literature, its subtitle an echo of Chambers’s Miscellany of Instructive and Entertaining Tracts, and surviving in a single eight page copy of issue 1 (undated, but c.1 July 1845) with the motto from Shelley’s Queen Mab, ‘A brighter morn awaits the human day’ – the same motto that appeared on the first number of the Morning Star.232 ‘May the Sun Beam prove an erradication [sic] of pure light!’233 It was intended as a bi-monthly penny magazine, and was advertised in the New Moral World, a journal which was not favourable to Etzlerism after Stollmeyer’s comments on the failure of the Owenite Harmony Hall in March 1845.234 A copy seems to have been sent to Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper too – although it went missing.235 It had excerpts from Flowers and Fruits (a new edition, ‘greatly enlarged’ and cheapened in cost, was published by Sherwood of Paternoster Row, publisher of the Morning Star) and the introduction to his novel, now appearing as Edward Noble, the Utopian, or the Nineteenth Century, part of the chapter entitled ‘The Tea Party, or Brandy and Scandal.’236 The first article, no doubt rehashed from the Morning Star, was a defence of emigration to the tropics, ‘What shall we do to be saved,’ noting the bankruptcy of the Owenite home colony project. Emigration was the ‘READIEST, MOST NATURAL, and SELF-EVIDENT,’ he asserted. Written at the high point of Etzlerism, Duncan admitted the success of the TES in terms of public shares surpassed the hopes of the originators and took them by surprise. Though it would ‘appear insanity’, he declared his support for teetotalism. Every thing around us would seem to indicate some great change; and surely it must be for the better with man’s present powers and aspirations? This is an age of progress and knowledge, and true reform. The Crusades were one mighty movement of the infancy of Christianism, but where is the creed, and how count the numbers that throng around the humble missionary of Temperance whose voice is even now speaking? Strange indeed would it be were he neglected who is well deemed the master spirit even of this mighty age [Father Mathew]: long has appealed to us, but a glorious response is now being made – England is here doing nobly – other nations will in good time come to the work, and Man be indeed SAVED.237 Stimulus was to be found in the future not from alcohol or physical hardship, but ‘curiosity and the thirst of knowledge … the love of the beautiful, the arts, the sciences “the great Globe itself – yea all that it shall inherit” – the mighty and infinite and stupendous universe, his own

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scarcely less wondrous nature and being – THESE SHALL BE MANS FUTURE STIMULANTS.’238 Though respectful towards Robert Owen, Duncan treated Etzler as the messiah to the social father and others’ crying in the wilderness like John the Baptist, perfecting their work, and leading the ‘awakened multitude to the land of peace and happiness – the New Jerusalem’. His plans were ‘mighty and godlike’. But was talk of a new Eden not impossible? …how in a universe of mixed evil and good could there be perfection? In a spiritual heaven? We have at least our present doubts to struggle against, nor do we yet know what the reality may be. Spirits have there been discontented and risked its loss to become happier; and in their place of banishment declared themselves less miserable. 239 Why the talk so loudly of the possible evils of earthly paradise? True to his Etzlerism, he also praised the steam plough and machinery, and repeated his prediction that the man of the future would revolve in harmony and beauty like a well ordered mechanism. Indeed, for someone venturing on a new journal, he displayed a worrying tendency to selfplagiarise and rehash old material. He hoped to carry news of the TES too, but although Gregory Claeys considers this new journal to have been ‘under the auspices of the Society’, this was not the case.240 Not surprisingly, although it was supposed to be issued again on 1 August, the Sun Beam’s light was extinguished immediately. Duncan sought to sell off copies at 1d, of The Sunbeam, or Etzler’s Tropical Communization in 1848, presumably spare copies of the first number.241 At the same he was advertising as a pamphlet from Collins at a ha’penny, Etzler’s Tropical Colonization, at which period the Etzlerite scheme was well and truly exploded (copies of Etzler’s Paradise within the Reach of All Men would be advertised in the pages of the London Investigator and Reasoner in the 1850s242). Duncan persisted with his writing. Unfortunately we do not know anything about his life from the summer of 1845 until late 1846. He did not, as far as we can tell, plan to set off for Venezuela by way of Trinidad with other members of the Tropical Emigration Society in late 1845 or in the spring of 1846. Thomas Powell’s reports from Trinidad published in the National Reformer: relating all the pioneers and settlers who had succumbed to or recovered from fever, lost their reason, or settled in the island, or set off for the United States or returned to their native London, Glasgow, Halifax or Liverpool, included no allusion to him. It is conceivable that Duncan made a brief foray out to the tropics, as Powell did report in early 1847, ‘two young men of the name Duncan’, apparently

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with no trade, who worked their passage out, quarrelling with the Captain, who ‘used them roughly’. But if so, he was also one of those who found themselves returning quickly to England. 243 For Duncan surfaced in radical circles through lecturing. On 16 December 1846, Edward Truelove, the secretary of the Literary and Scientific Institution at 23 John Street, Fitzroy Square, informed readers of The Reasoner that on Sunday 27 December, ‘Mr Elmslie Duncan author of “Flowers and Fruits,” originator of the Morning Star, &c., will Lecture on “The Signs of the Times or the World as it is and will be’. He appeared again to give a lecture on 14 June 1847 on the same theme, at Finsbury Hall at 66 Bunhill Row, a place which had been secured for the promotion of free inquiry in theology.244 There had been no spare room for a report from ‘J.E.D.’, in the Reasoner’s Utilitarian Record, in March 1847, and we have no report of the lecture’s content or reception – one presumes it interpreted the repeal of the corn laws in May and June of 1846, and the consequent collapse of the Conservative government, as part of the sign of the times (Richard Cobden, one of the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League seems to have been one of James Elmslie Duncan’s heroes). Duncan’s book of poetry had appeared in the year that The Times heralded the League as ‘a great fact’. Nationally and in London, the League was animated by the crisis in the Corn Laws since the end of 1845 and it is possible that Duncan was drawn into the agitation. The lecture may also have included a reflection on the dire economic situation which was to stimulate the revival of Chartism.245 The tropical emigration scheme had failed, but there were, in these circumstances, many other emigration schemes to be promoted, as one essayist observed towards the end of the year of revolution in 1848, ‘There is a perfect deluge of pamphlets, speeches, prospectuses, and handbills about emigration.’246 A hungry stomach, as one unemployed bookbinder of London told a newspaper in April 1848, ‘tempts men to desperate things’.247 The Rambler, no friend to Chartists, surveying European events at the same time, stated that the ‘nation is actually groaning under a terrible commercial pressure while there is scarcely a man in the three kingdoms who is not more or less involved in pecuniary difficulties while the poverty of the people is frightfully on the increase’. 248 Since Duncan never repeated the role of lecturer one must assume that this was not a success.249 He also sent a copy of Flowers and Fruits to John Saunders, the editor of The People’s Journal, an improving journal for the working and middle classes, a fact noted in the same issue in July 1847 which reported that ‘a Conference of persons favourable to the use of vegetable diet and opposed to the employment of animal food’ took place at Alcott House in Ham Common.250

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In the same year, the free-thought leader George Jacob Holyoake made a passing reference to Duncan and his poetry in the Reasoner – in a review, entitled ‘Influence of Turnips upon the Imagination’, of Henry Septimus Sutton’s The Evangel of Love Interpreted – as ‘samples of Farinaceous fancy’ – providing too a sample of verse left by a visitor to Alcott House which underscored the poor quality of vegetarian-inspired versifying (‘I came here to-day firm in my belief | Man, amongst other things, needed beef; | I have feasted this day, and can say he is able, | To require nothing else but to live on vegetable.’)251 Holyoake was not hostile to poetry – in the tuppence weekly journal which he projected with the Chartist poet William James Linton in 1848, entitled The Cause of the People, poetry was described as vivifying ‘purpose with the fire of passion’. 252 In his recollections, he admitted, ‘I suppose, like many others who could not well write anything, I thought poetry might be my latent – very latent – faculty.’253 He also discussed the doggerel of even poetic men of genius in his guide to public speaking and debate, where he admitted that a ‘young mind of any force or emulation commonly takes to the experiment of verse’, and ended with the assertion that poetry was the highest form of the ‘enforcement of Truth’.254 Sutton’s Quinquenergia, or, Proposals for a New Practical Theology (1854) has a character reflect on Sutton’s work, the ‘Evangel of Love Interpreted’ as written by a young man, troubled by ‘vegetarian green-sickness’, with a trick of ‘running after butterflies instead of minding his road’. 255 Reviewers when Sutton’s work of mysticism was first published had judged it would be thought insane.256 One reviewer thought that as a transcendental evangelist, the Nottingham mystic out-Carlyled Carlyle in following the model of Sartor Resartus.257 In Howitt’s Journal in 1847, the sympathetic reviewer of The Evangel of Love Interpreted recognised ‘one of the spirits of the age that is coming, fresh, vigorous, daring, independent, but seeking in the law of love the law of happiness … It is pleasant to sit in the still places of a mature age, and watch the young ardent spirits of the onward world walk forth with their new views and aspirations, which are but the flower and fruits of our age’s planting.’ 258 Holyoake later preserved for posterity one of Duncan’s epigrams as he remembered it, on a draped statue of Venus: ‘Judge, ye gods, of my surprise, | A lady naked in her chemise!’259 In his Bygones Worth Remembering Holyoake gave more details, supposedly from an unpublished review he wrote, of this ‘sonnet’, which began thus: Great God: What is it that I see? A figure shrimping in the sea.260

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(By contrast Goodwyn Barmby imagined, in an Ode to Woman-Power, ‘Venus Rising from the Sea.’261) And returning to town, in Holyoake’s account, Duncan had seen this statue in Whitechapel. ‘Nothing remains,’ his review finished, ‘but to congratulate the public on the advent of a new poet who is equally great on subjects of land or sea.’ Holyoake, who recalled that he knew the young man, selected this verse when making the first attempt to earn a living as a literary critic – the editor not knowing what to do with the result. Even if the verse actually existed in the second edition of Flowers and Fruits, Holyoake was still gleefully poking fun at Duncan’s propensities to doggerel, half a century later. Holyoake had been appreciative in his essay on Etzler in The Movement, ‘the most appreciatory written in Europe,’ Etzler claimed.262 The soirée in honour of Holyoake’s departure for Glasgow in 1845 to be a socialist lecturer, a short-lived post, had been reported in Duncan’s Morning Star (and later, after Duncan ceased to be editor, in 1846, the magazine puffed the new journal Reasoner, and praised Holyoake’s Rationalism. A New Statement of the First Principles of Societarian Reform as ‘a book which should be read by all thorough going reformers’263). But if they were friendly then, and we do not have any evidence for any intimate acquaintance, Holyoake became exasperated by Duncan’s antics in the late 1840s, as we shall see. By the time he wrote his reminiscences Duncan’s activities probably featured only as a leavening of anecdote and oddity.264 Though his mediocre poetic talents were deservedly scorned by Holyoake, since Duncan had received those semi-favourable reviews in 1844–1845 which were quoted earlier, he published edited comments in editions of the ‘peans’ (as he spelled the word) which he was to hawk around London in 1848. The Morning Chronicle, readers of the paeans would learn, for instance, described his work as ‘smart and clever’, the News of the World called it ‘above the average merit’, the Morning Post alluded to his ‘poetical vigour’.265 Lloyd’s Newspaper was perhaps the most flattering of the comments he extracted, identifying ‘flashes of genius’. With a selective reading of the critical response Duncan could feel some confidence of his poetical potential. He was about to find a place in a movement which prized poetry too. The Chartist press published much poetry in its early years, and in this period, after the doldrums following the rejection of the first mass petition for the People’s Charter, there was a revival of poetry in its chief journal, the Northern Star.266 The editor of the poetry column in the Northern Star in 11 July 1846 (probably George Julian Harney) thought that Duncan’s proffered song, entitled ‘I am a Briton’, was ‘objectionable, being rather too national to suit our taste. The other two pieces we may insert at some future opportunity.’267 Presumably it was felt to be too narrowly patriotic

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– when the Northern Star reprinted poetry by Francis Davis of Belfast which appeared in the ‘Young Ireland’ journal Nation, in January 1848, it described nationalism as humbug and delusion: the purpose of popular struggle was for popular liberation from ‘slavery’.268 The Northern Star in 27 September 1845 declared: ‘Ours is not the party, and this is not the paper, for lackadaisal versifying’: We want something patriotic: something to ‘stir the blood like the sound of a trumpet’ in vindication of universal Liberty, and in furtherance of her good cause. In short, we want the Nation’s poetry without the Nation’s bigotry. Duncan’s rejected verse probably became the poem, ‘The Song of A True-Born Britain [sic]. A Chant of Progress for “Young England”,’ which was published by James Bronterre O’Brien in his National Reformer and Manx Weekly Review of Home and Foreign Affairs. This journal, published from Douglas on the Isle of Man, trumpeted itself as ‘the Organ of the Real Reformers, Political and Social, of the United Kingdom. It circulates in every county in England and Scotland, and in most of the Welsh and Irish counties; as also, to some extent in France, and the United States of America’: it became an organ for the TES after the demise of the Morning Star.269 O’Brien had been enthusiastic about Etzler’s schemes in a work published by Henry Hetherington in 1836, so his support for the TES is not surprising.270 Duncan’s verse appeared in April 1847, a page after the publication of a report of the TES from the Erthig estate, Port Spain, Trinidad. It was a seven stanza poem which indicated – no, asserted – better times were coming, ‘than ever were known’, England was not decaying, but was ‘more potent, and great every day’271: O, there is not on earth a more glorious land, Than the Isle of the North, with its ocean-girt strand, ’Tis of Britain I’m speaking – the isle of the free; My dear native England’s the country for me. For I am a Briton, a Briton am I; And a Briton I’ll live, and a Briton I’ll die. When my country requires, without murmour or dread. The sweat of my brow or my heart’s blood I’ll shed. I’ll grasp, for her service, the spade in my hand;

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Or, in her defence, seize the patriot’s brand. Much rather I’d serve her with toil, than with blows – To add to her wealth than to slaughter her foes; Yet, if she should need it, by field or by flood, I will draw from my veins the last drop of blood. My duty to do, O I need not the dread, Of a punishment fierce hanging over my head; And if any assert it, I’ll tell them they lie: A good cause and fair play, and I’d cheerfully die. No need of a cat has a Briton – and why? For his country he’s ready to live or to die! O yes, there are evils that ought to be ended; But our grievances daily are being amended. There are better times coming than ever were known, When truth, love, and justice, shall rule us alone. Some folk sing the praise of the good olden times; I contend there’s more sound than there’s sense in their rhymes. What? England decaying? You rather should say She’s nobler, more potent, and great every day. No! there is not on earth a more glorious land, Than our Isle of the North, with its wave-girdle strand. ’Tis of England I’m chanting – the home of the free, ’Tis of Britain I’m vaunting – the nation for me. Yes! I am a Briton, a Briton am I; And a Briton I’ll live, and a Briton I’ll die! If the song was attractively upbeat in its faith in a present advance from ‘good olden times’ and a future of progress, in line with the optimism of the Etzlerite, it was also jauntily bombastic about Britain’s special status, and about Duncan’s willingness to sacrifice himself, without question, for the national good (rather than run away, as he had but recently advocated in the Morning Star). It may also have been modelled on earlier conservative effusions extolling patriotic sentiments, such as this, from Birmingham in 1836:

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The sea-girt isle! the sea-girt isle! Land of the brave and fair Where native freedom loves to smile And owns that land her care There let the baffled rage of Faction cease There live the arts of commerce and of peace!272 Although Duncan’s verse suggested no questioning of the political status quo (which was odd, given its place of publication), the confusion of violent possibilities – the goad and threat of punishment, the danger of external foe – was ominous. The novelist G.P.R. James, characterising the Chartists of his fictional seaport of Barhampton, in The Convict (1849), described them in terms which are echoed in Duncan’s verse here: ‘They believed themselves prepared for all contingencies; they imagined themselves ready to shed their blood in support of that which they never doubted to be good; they dreamed of the crown of martyrdom in their country’s service; and, in short, they were political fanatics, though not a small portion of true patriotism lay at the bottom of their yearnings for revolution.’273 The poem seems to be a sincere assertion of willingness to suffer martyrdom, if required, rather than a work of parodic or ironic patriotism (and notably, his Scottish ancestry is concealed behind the identity of Briton and ‘native England’). It was also rather feeble verse, its lack of sophistication and the inevitability of its rhyming scheme perhaps excused on the grounds of being a song or a chant. The declamatory and demotic nature of Duncan’s poetry a year later perhaps excused their lack of polish, although one wonders if he was deliberately adopting doggerel.

4 PEANS FOR THE PEOPLE

All o’er the earth, with mocking mirth, You dashed old thrones about; Made monarchs run from pike and gun, Put Ministers to rout. A desperate year, a drunken year, With wine of madness stung– You scattered words more sharp than swords, And firebrands of the tongue. In cellars damp, by stealthy lamp, In garrets bleak and bare, You crept and cowered, you lurked and lowered, To plot, and plan, and snare; You tempted fools, the traitor’s tools, To put their trust in knaves, Urged Chartists on to Kennington, And served out Specials’ staves. So declared John Bull, kicking out the old year at the end of 1848, in the satirical magazine, Punch.1 Accomplished verse was, as ever in Punch, being used to satirise the follies and foibles of the age: in this year, the dangers of revolution even in Britain. It may or may not have been a close run thing – one scholar has reminded us recently to ‘recover a sense of the unease and uncertainty, the excitement and possibility’ of Chartist poetry in 1848.2 Duncan’s favoured journal for domestic reading, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, looking back from the vantage point of October 1848, and having kept to its studious avoidance of domestic politics otherwise, spoke of the exaggerated press reports of continental and domestic revolution – ‘Nothing ever comes of it. It blows past,’ and reminded

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readers that Clio ‘wears pockets and must eat and drink’: her priests the news reporters ‘having so obvious an interest in the intensity of events can anything be more likely than that they give them a certain depth of colouring which does not belong to them.’3 The Economist, at the end of the anti-climatic month of April, decided it was merely a ‘faint echo of the political excitement which is forming in every other European country’. 4 But for many, these were heady times, ‘the most momentous few months in Victorian history’, as Malcolm Chase describes them;5 when political affairs preoccupied people to an extent which was striking for commentators, thus an essayist on politicians published in the London University Magazine, writing on the events of 10 April 1848, declared that: every one, man, woman, or child, has turned politician. In characters where before it was least looked for this new phase now comes bursting out with an extraordinary intensity, and individuals who had always been considered as walking newspapers are now enlarged into perambulating folios. The regular omnibus frequenter, who used to fire-up and wax wroth on the subjects of ‘Corn-Law League,’ ‘Irish Crisis,’ etc., now borders on insanity while raving about the French Revolution.6 Anti-revolutionary tracts, verse and essays appeared. 7 The sexagenarian ‘J.S.’ in publishing his Lays and Rhymes for the Times in May 1848, argued that given his age, striking the lyre was a surrogate for the staff of a special, in his country’s service against the ‘mean delusion’ of Chartism. 8 Puppet-Show’s ‘Modern Lay of London’ parodied the confrontation between London Chartists and the parliamentary class in the manner of Macaulay’s Horatius. Newspapers printed ‘patriotic chants’.9 In the hands of Chartist poets, verse was to be used to promote and defend the people’s cause, even if this meant defence of the use of arms. This was what Leigh Hunt called ‘poetical chartism’.10 Moderate journals such as Howitt’s Journal serialised essays on ‘Poets of the People’. 11 It was assumed that startling world events ought to produce dramatic poetry – subjects where ‘action, rapid, startling, and defying calculation … the downfall of monarchies, the uprising of the earth-born, the destruction of forms and conventions by an unregulated outburst of the people’, should encourage poetry, a reviewer of verse extolling the Italian revolutions, by the young Henry Morley, complained.12 Poets across Europe had their roles to play – whether to hymn the revolution or to have a more active, fighting role. There was the young (and handsomely bearded) revolutionary poet Georg Herwegh, of whom William Thackeray in the Foreign Quarterly Review opined in 1843, ‘There is

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scarce so much sedition in his poems as can be bought for fourpence in a Chartist newspaper and not more irreligion than might have been read the other day in Holywell street until Mr Bruce turning his cross into a sword as our poet has it assaulted the obnoxious printshop.’13 Called the ‘iron lark’, the violence of Herwegh’s sentiments against tyranny was already brought to the attention of English readers – the translation by the radical MP, John Bowring, of the Song of Hate (‘Eternal war with tyranny! |A truce – a resting never! |And holier far our hate shall be | Than was our loving ever!’ began the final stanza).14 Herwegh led a republican club of Germans – the German Democratic Legion – in Paris in March, the Morning Post then carrying news of the ‘demagogue poet’ and his wife Emma, described an amazon who declared it would be ‘the happiest moment of her life in which she shall kill an anti-Republican officer,’ prepared for armed confrontation.15 The uprising he assisted failed in April in Baden. In France there was, of course, the prominent role thrust upon Alphonse de Lamartine, the ‘poet-statesman’ (represented in Punch in late 1848, as a laurel-crowned dreamer, Figure 17 below), and, as we shall see, the poet of popular song, Béranger. The poet Charles Baudelaire looked back on 1848 and, analysing his frenzy, attributed this in part to ‘Ivresse littéraire; souvenir des lectures’ – a literary frenzy, memories of his reading.16

FIGURE 17. Richard Doyle, ‘The Seven Ages of the Republic’, Punch, 25 November 1848, p.224: ‘Lamartine inditing a sonnet to Liberty’s eyebrow’. Author’s collection.

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In England the poetic response to revolution varied from simply hymning continental events, such as the Birmingham Unitarian Thomas Hornblower Gill’s Songs of the Revolution, which praised Lamartine as ‘poet celestial’ and ‘angel of the strange wild democracy’, to the desire to be physically close to unfolding events.17 There was John Goodwyn Barmby, who was in the midst of a missionary tour in the south west of England and went off to France to witness the Revolution, as evangel for the Communist Church, staying in a lovely little hotel apartment in the Rue des Beaux Arts (as he recalled it) to witness the ‘inspiration of a nation’, and reporting back for the readers of progressive journals such as Howitt’s Journal, on topics such as political clubs, pamphlets and placards in Paris, and writing or translating essays on Lamartine, Louis Blanc and others.18 At Southampton in the course of a lecture at the start of the year he ‘instanced the first French Revolution with its grand episodes … as the greatest example of poetry in secular history, as a magnificent historic epic’.19 Appropriately, his essay on systematic history for Frederick Lees’ progressive journal Truth-Seeker in that year, when reviewed in the Unitarian Christian Reformer in July, was described as ‘better suited for the taste of the Communist Clubs of Paris than for the calm rights of property loving subjects of Queen Victoria’ (Barmby had convened a Communist congress which met in London in May). Ironically, within a year Barmby would begin his long ministry in the Unitarian denomination, first at Southampton and then in Devon.20 His fellow poet and radical, James Elmslie Duncan, stayed in England. Duncan’s own intense response to politics, as his muse was inspired by continental and domestic convulsions, was manifested at street level. His poems were cheaply reproduced in their thousands and declaimed and hawked by him in a metropolis disturbed by Chartist demonstrations in which Duncan eagerly participated. He revelled in the title of ‘Chartist Poet’ which was given to him by the press (‘will his brother Chartists sanction the title?’ he asked, in the paean The Murdered Chartist) in 1848. As we have seen, he had attempted already to gain a platform for his poetry in Chartist quarters. Three years before, he reached the base of Parnassus along with a select few, in the Northern Star’s publication of a ‘feast of poets’ on 19 April 1845, with a ‘sterling’ Hymn of Liberty (his name misspelled James Emslie Duncan) according to the editor who was probably George Julian Harney. Actually it was doggerel:21 The heart of man is burning, The chains of ages spurning, Ah! Yes, a glorious morning, Is breaking on him now.

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See, see! Its rays are gleaming, In bright effulgence streaming, In joy and glory beaming, Upon his god-like brow! Long has his soul been panting, Long, long, his spirit wanting, What heaven at length is granting – To flee from woe and shame. Then rouse ye from your slumbers, And throng in countless numbers, And fan the glowing embers Now bursting into flame! The metaphors of morning star and solar rays gained extra force now, in the year of revolutions, and Duncan’s optimism about man’s joyful destiny were asserted here in verse that declared the almost divine nature of mankind. Now, in 1848, his series of lurid ‘PE-ANS for the PEOPLE; or, RHYME-RAYS in the FADING GLOOMS, and FROTH-FOAMS on the WAVES of PROGRESS’ displayed his enthusiastic and theatrical temperament. By naming them ‘peans’, he was presumably making a claim for their ecstatic, hymn-like nature; the subtitle contained a striking, though apparently unintended, image of the ocean’s spume. Other writers were stimulated by the year of revolution to pen pamphlet verse, rhymes for the times which were, according to a notice in the Northern Star, ‘good in principle’ but having no claim to poetic status.22 The paeans certainly lacked the considered craft and the promise of quality of some of the verse in Flowers and Fruits, showing that fine (or furious) feelings do not make poetry. How they seemed to the audiences, when Duncan chose to recite his works, is not, beyond his testimony, known.23 Significantly, Duncan was associating himself, through the short and thus rapidly produced form adopted, with contemporary events. There were to be no laboriously crafted Spenserean-stanza epics from him, instead he chose to speak for the ‘ears of the streets’.24 The surviving series of paeans is incomplete but the subjects of seven are known. The first four were according to Duncan out of print by December 1849. 25 They were published by W.G. Kerton, a minor publisher in Paternoster Row.26 In adopting the format of the cheaply produced street literature of the ballad – printing on one side of an unfolded flimsy sheet of paper (a broadside), and at the cost of a ha’penny (when ballads could retail at 1d or 2d), the poet was perhaps consciously speaking to the tradition of the

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street literature of working people. The surviving sheets are mostly about the size of A4 sheets of paper. Peter Scheckner has noted that ‘Chartist poems often resembled the format of these ballads when they appeared in the Chartist press.’27 On the other hand, there was not a mass of Chartist street ballads produced in 1848, as Victor Neuburg argued, ‘in all the street ballads I have examined it remains true that anything more than a fairly mild reformism, and occasional support for Chartism, is entirely absent.’ Another example might have been a broadside publication of Ernest Jones’s ‘The Song of the Lower Classes’, with its opening, ‘We plough and sow – we’re so very, very low,’ and published according to Neuburg, ‘round about 1848’ (actually it was produced later).28 In appearance, too, the peans resembled street ballads because of the cheap worn type used by the publisher – with missing letters and bold capitals. On the other hand, the type was small, and used to convey prose and poetry which was not notably demotic, and it is clear that Duncan was using the sheets as a surrogate for journals. The first ½d pe-an, praising the French revolution, and, he claimed, reaching four thousand copies, was ‘mottoed’, before the large type of the title, with four lines from William Thom’s poem ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’ which had appeared in an early number of Morning Star. Significantly ignoring the preceding lines of Thom’s poem which emphasised a conflict of intellect (‘Let mind be your armour’) and which rejected the ‘ramping of demagogue rage’ and propaganda of ‘mountebank patriot’, Duncan quoted: ‘When fair science gleams abroad over city and plain, | When truth walks abroad all unfettered again,| When the breast glows to love and the brow beams in light,| O hasten to heaven! MAN LONGS FOR HIS RIGHT.’29 The paean was annotated with a reference to Thom, who had returned to Scotland after drink got the better of him in London, to die in poverty in Dundee in late February 1848, ‘leaving in our care a Widow and Orphans to mourn his departure’. If they had really been left in Duncan’s care then he would have done more than just make a passing reference to the matter, one suspects, but his aside, ‘Alas! Amid my exultations,|a pang of grief I turn, |drop a bitter tear of sorrow, |O’er the Bard of Ury’s urn,’ if incoherent (does one turn a pang?) perhaps expressed genuine sadness. The Northern Star also promoted the cause of Thom’s family – there were three children, of whom the eldest was four – printing an appeal to funds from Scottish supporters, and also verse from Ernest Jones, on the martyred poet. 30 Thom’s widow was to die shortly afterwards of typhus, on the 17 June; the press reported the munificence of the Queen in donating £10 to a Thom Fund, ‘as humanity seeks to compensate its neglects by these penitential and posthumous attentions’, in the words of one obituary.31

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Duncan was probably exaggerating his involvement in Thom’s posthumous affairs, since the Chartist Thomas Cooper, active in organising financial aid through such means as lectures, made no mention of him in his autobiography though Duncan was acquainted with Cooper, and indeed made Cooper the subject of one of his paeans, along with the middle-class radical Richard Cobden and the veteran radical Henry Hetherington.32 It is possible that Duncan’s acquaintance with Cooper was formed as a result of attending weekly meetings that Cooper organised for Thom’s benefit, where George Julian Harney the ‘red republican’, the Chartist and ‘medical botanist’ John Skelton, the Chartist and tailor Walter Cooper and the Owenite-Chartist watch-case finisher Thomas Shorter, were visitors.33 Thomas Cooper’s reticence about his activities in 1848 meant that, among other things, he never mentioned Duncan in his autobiography.34 The theme of the tocsin, which gave Duncan’s paean its title, had already been expressed by the Northern Star after the Paris revolution, when in 26 February, following news of a republic, it asserted, ‘For us, too, the tocsin sounds’ (one of the many journals produced during the Revolution in Paris was entitled Le Tocsin du Travailleur).35 The air of the Tocsin, was ‘holy and soully for one which shall be married to it by the Musician of Progress’, but boasting a mistress in the music of ‘A fig for those by laws protected, |Liberty’s a glorious feast, |Courts for cowards were erected, |Churches built to please the priest,’ from Robert Burns’s Jolly Beggars. Such was Duncan’s over-elaborate prose (and perhaps rather racy language too, with his talk of mistresses). It was concluded, after an extract from William Thom’s Rhymes and Recollections, with Burns’s hopeful verse on ‘man to man the world o’er |Shall brothers be, and a’ that!’36 This was a reflection of the status that Burns had within radical and working-class culture – as Janowitz has noted, he was invoked as a revolutionary and poet of the people. 37 Duncan’s own lyrical contribution to revolution began with a call to men and women: Rally in your millions Britons, Braves and fair ones side by side, Rise and cheer your gallic brothers, Peal the plaudits o’er the tide Truly Britain’s isle’s invaded, But by royal fallen foes, And of France’s soul fires flooded, Whose flame resistless burns and glows. Celts and Saxons! now arouse ye,

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As ONE man in your sea girt home: Up and hail your gallic brethren, Huzzaing over ocean’s foam! The appeal to Celt and Saxon (emphatically united by the typography) – in line with the strategy of Feargus O’Connor, had also been expressed in the Northern Star’s poetry column, in the ladies’ shoemaker and medical botanist John Skelton’s ‘The Respond to Liberty’, after 10 April.38 Britons could no longer boast they were the envy of the world, Duncan’s paean declared, they ought to rouse themselves, fix tricolours on their breasts, and remove their fetters. Liberty was descending the mountains, with red cap and sword. The paean’s final, tenth, stanza was: Lift the voice in proud hozannas, Reverberating o’er the tide, Marshal neath progression’s banners, Our war cry – ‘Justice! far and wide.’ Thine, O Universal Father! Was the most sublime decree, To mar Satanic strength and cunning, And from hell monarchs set free. Join all nations in the chorus, Stars! Shine on earth uncursed with king, Love and wisdom rule ye o’er us, And world’s triumphal peans sing! The verse may have been intended to be declaimed, but note how the text was replete with typographic emphases – italics and capitals. It was the artefact of a reasonably educated man who had made his mark in printed literature for a progressive coterie, but was now turning his poetic powers to demotic songs. With its subtitle, the ‘British Marseillaise’, it could be seen too as a response to a call for a native democratic song, appearing in the Northern Star (the ‘Marseillaise’ was well known to the Chartists, although some reportedly confused the song with ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Wapping Old Stairs’).39 Even so mild a progressive journal as the weekly Eliza Cook’s Journal could publish a poetic call in its first volume (by the artisan poet Henry Frank Lott, in November 1849), ‘What shall our nation’s anthem be?’40 Punch, though, pointed out that for the three revolutions which France had experienced, she ‘has three songs to show for it’ (Parisienne and Mourir ou la Patrie being the others) – ‘we would sooner be without any songs at all.’41 Proud hozannas and triumphal paeans, huzzas, peals and plaudits: the paean suggested a chanson sans

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frontières that was pacific, but hinted, with its war cry of justice, at democratic force. The second paean was to be explicitly, indeed luridly, violent in its imagery. A Scourge for a Gag; or A cat o’ nine tails to flog Russell and Grey, was an attack on the political class, from ‘M.P. imps’ to vermined Whigs. First issued in May (a stanza contrasts balmy April with the ‘chill blast’ like death the next month, the fog interpreted as a sign that heaven’s wrath would soon swell), it had reached, Duncan claimed in a later paean, two thousand copies.42 A ‘black draught song,’ (the title being an allusion to ‘opening medicine’ commonly made with senna, ginger, and Epsom salts) it especially condemned Whiggery for mere office-seeking, the new poor law, famine in Ireland, and the Gagging Bill (the Crown and Government Security Bill, passed in April, which made a transportable felony the ‘open and unadvised speaking of seditious language’). Notorious incidents such as the starvation of inmates in Andover Workhouse, reduced to eating the marrow from bones they were supposed to be crushing, as revealed in 1846, were rehearsed, ‘that hell on earth, ’twas Whiggery did give it birth’ and the mother forced to eat the corpse of her child in famine stricken Ireland.43 For Duncan, the contrast between Peel’s granting of free trade bread and ‘mind-shackling Russell’ was stark. Images of hunger, in this era of Anti-Corn Law agitation, famine, unemployment, low wages, and poor law less-eligibility, were prominent in radical and middle-class journalism: Duncan may also have seen images of starvation in Ireland and elsewhere through the illustrated press.44 The ‘miscreant Whigs’ had given the fetter and grave to ‘dear Ireland’, the Prime Minister Russell and the Home Secretary Sir George Grey were ‘burking Free Thoughts lips sublime’.45 The verse opened thus: A song I’ll sing with scorpian [sic] sting, with dragon jaws and falcon wing; And fling it on high and bid it fly, in myriad swarms to multiply; And gather thick where the den doth stand of yon fiendish crew who curse our land, Who laugh and gibe whilst thrones are burning, and jeer and sneer a nation spurning; Shiver their ears with your screeching rare, and dart with your talons their hearts to tear; Tell of the fruit with yell, and hoot that boasteth Whiggery as its root!

It ended thus: Then England’s second Castlereigh [sic], I have a word or two to say! With pens of steel, not goose’s quill, the masses swear to write their will;46 With blood for ink, for parchment fields; with justice for their mail and shield; So Russell veins may flow again, yet not to honour, but to stain, Dripping with no martyr’s gore, but as that tyrant’s did before. With this dread warning ’gainst your wrongs, in mercy drops my scourge’s thongs!

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FIGURE 18. A Scourge for a Gag. Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic History, [G.L.] Broadsides Collection, 616 (1), vol. VI. © Senate House Library, University of London.

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This was in sympathy with the general Chartist and radical scorn of the Whig government for their contemptuous response to calls for reform – Russell and Grey being threatened by the more unguarded speakers at Chartists meetings with retaliation which sounded like assassination.47 The echoes of Castlereagh and other Tory counter-revolutionaries of the early nineteenth century were observed by others. ‘On Aliens or Chartists,’ the Tory Edinburgh Magazine itself pointed out in verse entitled Huzza for the Rule of the Whigs! a couple of months later in July 1848, ‘to hear them declaim, |You’d think Castlereagh come from the dead.’48 On 24 May 1848, in the ‘Editor’s Box’ of The Reasoner, there appeared the following dismissive remark, ‘Mr Duncan the Divinarian has published a “Scourge for a Gag” which he denominates a “froth foam”. There is some truth in the description.’ On 21 June 1848 the journal notified its readers that, in response to this, Duncan ‘sends word that his poem, entitled “Froth Foam”, should have been printed “Fire Foam”. Surely the Thames will blaze at last now that foam is on fire.’49 The paeans did something else apart from convey his ecstatic and condemnatory verse to the Londoners in the months of high panic and alarm in the capital and during a year of European revolution. Duncan used them, not simply as ballad broadsheets, but as serialised commentary. He presented himself as the poet of Progress, in his seventh paean: ‘J.E. Duncan as a Divinarian, scarcely needs say he shall attend every possible Reformatory and Progressive Assembly to Report and Recite.’50 As his subsequent public appearances were to reveal, this resolve was unfortunately the case, whether he was invited or not. He hoped literary institutions would employ him to draw up reports, deliver lectures and give dramatic performances ‘consisting of Original Recitations’.51 There is no evidence that he was actually taken up on this offer. Readers of Scourge for A Gag would learn of the serialisation of his romance of progression, now entitled Edward Noble, The Utopian; or, The Dawning Glories of the Age of Love, the hero and heroine, beau ideal of man and woman, are phonographers, vegetarians, and communists, the dramatis personae of the ‘best men of our epoch’ were to include O’Connor and William Johnson Fox alongside Etzler, Owen and Greaves. The Chartist writers would turn to novels from this period – the Northern Star having been critical of the time wasted in reading novels before – but in the absence of any surviving numbers of the new serialised version, we do not know if Duncan’s novel now registered his involvement in Chartism (the hero and heroine, significantly, were not presented as Chartists) – or why the book’s subtitle now heralded an ‘Age of Love’.52 He also used the sheets to advertise Thomas Cooper’s penny weekly periodical Plain Speaker by the time of the seventh paean, A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate!

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The journal did not publish anything by Duncan, although it did feature poetry from Cooper, Gerald Massey, and others.53 In A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! he also supported the fund set up by George Jacob Holyoake for a memorial to the bookseller, republican and follower of Tom Paine, Richard Carlile, who died in 1843.54 Holyoake had just published a 6d pamphlet on Carlile’s life and writings in April 1849. Duncan’s support for the memorial appeared in the same paean which advertised his services in bookbinding and printing, and the retail of vegetarian food, from 353, Commerce Strand, Redmead (that is, Redmead Lane). Sepulchral Epitaph Inscribed to Richard Carlile O sturdy Pioneer of Rationality; Thy Decimade of years in Prison past, Purchased for us Freedom of Tongue and Pen! Christans in life gave thee a stone-wall’d dungeon, We bread; and, now, a marble monument. The important point to make about Duncan’s appearance in the poetico-political world of 1848 is that he began from the position of a Romantic individualist poet, rather than from any longstanding Chartist involvement which now found expression as a member of the ‘rhyming brethren’.55 The suggestion made by Mike Sanders that the working-class autodidact’s skills in writing poetry ‘may have played a vital role in the development of the Chartist movement,’ and that there may have been a ‘meaningful correlation between Chartist poetry and Chartist leadership’ is not echoed in Duncan’s life – Duncan was no leader. He had his enthusiasms, but he was not a follower either. 56 Not identifying himself as a member of the working-class, although offering himself as a poet for the people, he did not belong to working-class associative life or share workingclass Chartists’ sense of community. Yet the Peans were presented as having agency, poetic beams of light to expose and enlighten, or – in A Scourge for a Gag – like incantations: stinging verse to fling at tyrants, strong medicine to cure misrule, utterance which acted as a merciful warning to authorities but which would find its physical counterparts in violence (ink replaced by blood, quills by the metal of weaponry, parchment by the earth). This second ‘rhyme-ray’ begins as a song delivered by the poet, but then incorporates the people as victims (‘A song we’ll sing’ of the third stanza, a ‘black draught song’

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which the people are invited to mix in the fourth stanza, ‘Our song’ in the fifth stanza, and ‘our cat-o’-nine tail song’ in the seventh). The violence of the imagery in A Scourge for a Gag even made him pause to ask, rhetorically, whether his vehemence (and the physical punishment he was, at least poetically, advocating) was too much: It spoils the child to spare the rod, declares the scriptured word of God, Dost urge my anger I abuse? She hath HIS sanction has my muse.

We shall see how far he would take his belief that he had some divine sanction or mission, as poet. If his engagement with the events of 1848 had been purely poeticolyrical that would have been enough eccentricity given the language and sentiments he expressed, and, as the verse was arguably inflammatory, bold enough. It was the verse of agitation. But Duncan was active too. The London Chartist agitation in 1848 triggered increasingly bizarre behaviour by the young man. He was evidently thrilled, intoxicated, by the spirit of the times and relished the opportunity of an audience and a market for his verse. He was, in fact, the only street-vendor of Chartist poetry to be reported in the metropolitan press. We do not know what his family thought of his public role in Chartism, or his distinctly déclassé activity as a hawker of potentially seditious paeans (with those references to guillotines and the Queen as catspaw hag, for example) and dirges. But that he should be drawn into the stirring events of that year, with Etzlerism discredited and the metropolis now the centre for dramatic progressive activity, is hardly surprising. Duncan was young, ardent, optimistic, and on the spot. Wapping itself had its Chartists – although it was also the main location for the coal-whippers (those who removed the coal from coal-ships to barges alongside) and coal-heavers (‘knights of the fan-tail and shovel’) who carried the coal from the barges to wharfs and waggons, and were the noted working-class contingent of special constables sworn in for protection of law and order on 10 April 1848, having struck against middlemen such as ‘coal undertakers’ in August of 1842 when economic distress in Britain was terrible, and obtained legislative protection in 1843.57 There is no evidence that Duncan had been particularly interested in the Chartist cause before, except as a location, in its leading press organ, for his poetry. In calling for funds for a new edifice for metropolitan democratic efforts, more elevated than a tavern or building in an obscure locality, the Chartist leadership in January 1848 claimed the period of quiescence was ‘induced by an unmerited confidence in the promises of

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government, and by a desire to give the so-called remedial measures of political Economists a fair trial’.58 In an era of Chartist revival following five years of quiescence, Duncan started to give some money to Chartist funds – not much, admittedly, with 2s for the National Charter Association listed in the Northern Star for 6 May (he also gave 1s for the charter agitation, according to the Northern Star, 20 April 1850).59 At a meeting in the Hall of the Co-operative League60 at Farringdon Hall, King’s Arm’s Yard, Snow-hill (c.2 March) to celebrate the revolution in France which had overthrown Louis Philippe’s regime, Duncan recited a poem against tyranny, and was, so he claimed in the edition of his paean Tocsin ’gainst Tyranny, ‘encored amid thunders of applause’. 61 The paean was dedicated to ‘our ancient foes, but natural friends’, the French, and inscribed to the sexagenarian poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger (who had been elected to the Constituent Assembly, and was the subject of an article in the Northern Star in September). Béranger was to be honoured by the inscription in response to his Inspired Prophecy: ‘The deluge; or poor kings they shall all be engulphed in the flood,’ which Duncan presumably read in translation in The People’s Journal. William Young’s translation of Béranger’s poetry – published by Chapman and Hall in 1847 – noted the comparison that had been made between the Frenchman and Robert Burns, on the basis of the ‘same intense nationality, the same withering contempt for mere wealth and state, the same dear love of song, the same exquisite susceptibility to female charms, the same keen relish for convivial excitement’.62 The Paris grocer class was identified by Balzac as partial to Béranger, and a temporary admirer of his work, Matthew Arnold, argued for the great impact of his songs on the French people in the year of revolution, but in England the ‘high water mark’ of the chansonnier’s reputation had been over a decade earlier.63 Yet the Economist could lament: ‘We have no poet like Béranger to put into verse the popular aspirations.’64 Four days after Duncan’s appearance at Farringdon Hall, as the same broadside reported, he was arrested beneath Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square during an open air meeting in which a number of Chartists were left ‘maimed and bleeding victims of the brutality of the police’.65 He had ‘scorned to turn his back as a “free born Briton” on the myrmidons of the law’ but condemned the ‘legal moral force!’ of policemen grasping staves of death. The 6 March meeting had been called by the former Liberal candidate for Westminster Charles Cochrane to protest against the income tax (introduced by Peel’s government in June 1842 as a temporary measure, to be levied on incomes over £150 per annum), but he did not appear when the police declared the intended meeting illegal, and the middle-class writer of the sensational and semi-pornographic Mysteries of

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London, G.W.M. Reynolds, had instead in the early afternoon addressed the crowd of perhaps 15,000, many of them unemployed.66 An engraving published five days later in the Lady’s Newspaper depicts a mass, outside the National Gallery and around the fountains: orators or spectators perched on the top of cabs, and uniformed Metropolitan Police with batons, apprehending a couple of men near a haycart. In the artist’s depiction, the fencing round the incomplete Nelson’s column is still intact. The police, present in large numbers, began to clear away the crowd at 3 pm after a disturbance, and were then hailed with stones. ‘A sharp skirmish followed during which the police used their truncheons with some effect on the heads of a few of the rioters and ultimately about 30 men and boys were taken into custody.’67 The rioters made themselves odious to the respectable London press by their attack on London club windows, street lamps, and railings – the hoarding around Nelson’s Column also having been torn down by around 6pm. Bow Street Police Court charge sheet had 51, on 9 March 1848, by which time the capital was quieter. Duncan was one of those apprehended on the first day, 6 March, and according to the Metropolitan Police records, he was to ‘find sureties in £10 to keep the peace 2 months’ but at this stage in the press reports he was an anonymous member of the crowd.68 His involvement was risky. An unnamed man was reported in The Standard as saying in the court: ‘When taken in charge he was treated with great, unnecessary violence. He allowed himself to be taken without the slightest resistance, and was going to the station-house quietly, when one of the constables struck him so violently on the hand with his staff that his thumb was dislocated by the blow. Another constable, who followed him, repeatedly kicked him, in fact, continued to do so all the way to the station.’ (This prisoner was charged with throwing stones at the police but, with a good character witness, was ordered to find bail in two sureties of £20 each, to keep the peace for two months.)69 This was not Duncan but it probably accurately reflects the sense of outrage of a ‘respectable’, middle-class man, never personally confronted by police use of force before. The brand new satirical magazine Puppet-Show, which was hostile to Chartism, poured scorn on the ‘Charing-Cross Revolution’: We have just received by extraordinary express intelligence that a Revolution has broken out in Trafalgar Square. A tremendous body of men, amounting to several thousands, marched down, singing in chorus, and immediately proceeded to raise a barricade, about a foot high, of two boards which formed a portion of the hoarding of the Nelson column. This was kicked on one side by two policemen, but

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not before blood had been shed! A small boy’s head was broken by a body of police!70 The youth of the rioters is apparent: Goodway has noted that 61 of the 127 rioters arrested between 6 and 8 March were under twenty: Duncan was just short of 26 on 6 March (putting him with 22 of the 127 rioters who were 26 to 59 years of age); evidence from later Chartist riots in the capital also point to the significant factor of youthful disorder. 71 Duncan offered no verse commentary on the Trafalgar Square affray (nor did the poet Matthew Arnold, also amidst the ‘great mob’ in the Square, although a letter to his mother commented on the needlessly rough manner of the police) – which the balladeers of Seven Dials, as well as the middle-class journals, mocked.72

TABLEAU I. Cochranite. “HOORAY! VEEVE LER LIBERTY!! HARM YOUR SELVES!! TO THE PALIS!! DOWN WITH HEAVERYTHINK!!!!” TABLEAU II. Cochranite “OH, SIR – PLEASE, SIR – IT AINT ME, SIR–I’M FOR ‘GOD SAVE THE KING’ AND ‘RULE BRITANNIER.’ BOO–HOO–OH DEAR! OH DEAR!!” (Bursts into tears)

FIGURE 19. John Leech’s comment on the Trafalgar Square Revolution in Punch, 10 April 1848, p.112. Courtesy of Plymouth University.

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The next week, 14 March, the day after a Chartist gathering at Kennington Common which led to rioting and looting in Camberwell, there was a ‘densely packed and most enthusiastic’ public meeting at the Literary and Scientific Institute, John Street, Tottenham Court Road (where the Chartist Convention met), to hear a report from the Chartist delegates, Ernest Jones and the Irish tailor Philip M’Grath, back from Paris after delivering the National Charter Association’s greetings to the Provisional Government. Duncan addressed the audience after a resolution moved by the West Indian tailor William Cuffey (or Cuffay) in favour of the Charter to be obtained by ‘every available means consistent with the law’, told the audience that the ‘police were the authors of the riots in Trafalgar-square,’ and read a ‘very spirited poem’ which the editor of the Northern Star intended to publish the next week (it was not – but when Duncan himself published it, as A Tocsin ’gainst Tyranny, he included the journal’s recommendation).73 One may assume he was active in Chartist meetings in the rest of the month, but he was not reported. On 3 April he was at the open square in Clerkenwell Green – a district of clock and watchmakers but no longer a green suburb due to the rapid building in that part of London – at a gathering designed to choose three delegates to attend the National Convention.74 The rough-paved ground of the Green, long a site for radical politics, had been the location for mass Chartist gatherings in August 1842.75 Duncan’s actions were not the only ones reported as indicating the ludicrous nature of the Chartists gathered there – one press account focused on the precious actions of a ‘stripling’ Chartist orator called Salmon, sporting a tricolor in his cap and his bombast imitative of Daniel O’Connell; and the green spectacles of the chairman, the erstwhile pill-box manufacturer and veteran radical, Elijah Dixon of Manchester.76 After the singing of ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Rule Britannia’ at the closing of the meeting, Duncan, mounting the rostrum created by a wagon hired from a local carter, announced the publication of his A Tocsin for Tyranny. But as the chairman thought that this was not proper Duncan reluctantly stopped addressing the meeting, ‘appearing quite astounded at the new system of fraternization imported into the Charter agitation. He was shortly afterwards, however, amply compensated for the slight cast upon him by the chairman by the impulsive way in which every one rushed at him to obtain even a single copy of the “Tocsin” by paying for it a penny each’.77 The newspaper report presented him as the author of several ‘smart and clever publications,’ which was being generous. We do not know what he was doing a week later on Saturday 10 April, the famous day of the Kennington Common gathering in Lambeth, which immediately became part of the myth of a Chartist fiasco, or how he

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reacted to the revelations of the petition’s farcical signatures, and the calculation of a nearly (and merely) 2 million rather than O’Connor’s exaggerated 5.7 million signatures.78 Was he there, on that sodden common ground of some twenty acres south of the Thames, among the mass of participants captured in William E. Kilburn’s daguerreotypes: those tantalising images of the Chartist mass platform which were subsequently purchased by Prince Albert?79 Did he observe the proceedings of the Chartist National Convention after it assembled at the Literary and Scientific Institution at 23 John Street in early April? The Chartists met in an ‘obscure, blind bye street near Fitzroy Square’, as Charles Edward Jerningham described the venue,80 the forty-nine Chartist delegates assembling in the large hall, with its galleries of spectators (admitted at 1d), its government shorthand reporters such as William Counsel and Frederick Bond Hughes, and its incongruous large music organ from which music could peal through the place (the Owenites had paid for an organist and professional singers at John Street in the early 1840s – the organ gallery was now set apart for the reporters).81

FIGURE 20. ‘The Meeting on Kennington Common – from a Daguerreotype’, Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, p.242. Author’s collection.

On Wednesday 31 May, however, we know that Duncan held the attention of an audience of some two thousand who again congregated in Clerkenwell Green in defiance of the police proclamation against

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assemblies and processions. The Times sought to down play the meeting, ‘When somebody was found bold enough to speak his audience dwindled away, and what with the sight of the sabers, and the poetical turn taken by the only orator, the 100,000 men we were promised fell to 5 p.c. of that sum.’ (Joseph Williams at Clerkenwell Green, the day before, boasted of 10,000 who would rise in support of John Mitchel – the editor of the United Irishman in Dublin, who had been sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation for treason after a state trial in London on 26 May – from the districts of Bermondsey and Wapping.)82 Another report for The Times gave a detailed account of the incident to which this was an allusion, an episode which took place about 8 pm. The reporter presented Duncan as a ‘singular-looking being with long hair, a profusion of beard and that “air distraught” which is generally supposed to mark a child of the Muses’.83 He had addressed a crowd of some 6,000, another paper estimated, from a lamp-post in the centre of the Green, wearing a cap which was perhaps, as we shall see, a symbol of his pro-Irish sensibilities: He began with stating that it gave him great delight at seeing so many thousands of his fellow-slaves congregated together on that hallowed spot [cheers]. It went a long way towards convincing him that the great bulk of the metropolis were not willing, neither could they any longer be considered the mere serfs, by whose exertions the aristocracy of the land were supported [cries of ‘bravo’]. The people wanted two things. And these two things they would have. Need he tell them what these two things were [cries of ‘No; we want Mitchel and the Charter’]. Then he would recommend them to be determined to have both [cries of ‘We will’]. Now was the time to agitate – now was the time to be determined, to a man to put the shoulder to the wheel. Need he tell them what would be the result [cries of ‘Mitchel’]? Yes, and perfect victory [loud cheers].84 The speech, as reported in the Morning Chronicle, was an effective piece of oratory, with its repetition of ‘two things’, of ‘now was the time’, and ‘need he tell them’, – simple perhaps but inviting the participation of his audience. The gesture was accidental, but the lamp-post being there in the metropolis and townscape (and, providing gas lighting, extensively so by the 1840s), took on significance during times of unrest, as target of mob violence, and symbol of potential violence. Lamps had been broken by Chartists in Newcastle in 1839 and the Chartist Henry Vincent had been alleged to threaten hanging an opponent on the lamp-post, in 1841. The

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baker Joseph Williams reportedly chose a lamp-post in Smithfield to address the procession on 29 May (in which Duncan appears to have been involved) when news of Mitchel’s conviction reached Londoners. 85 The procession had sung ‘Rule Britannia’ and the ‘Marseillaise’. The repellent Chartist barrister of Josepha Gulston’s novel The School for Dreamers, published in 1853, Samuel Alfred Hall, fell off a lamp-post from where he had been haranguing the crowd, into the clutches of the police on 10 April.86

FIGURE 21. Clerkenwell Green, showing the Middlesex Sessions House on the west side of the green. From Tallis’s Illustrated London, 1851. The lamp-post on raised ground where Duncan perched is not visible in this engraving, it would be on the left, beyond the fence. Author’s collection.

The lamp-post figured in a more sinister way in the fears of the public, as the gallows of a revolutionary mob – threatening to string up reactionary enemies as the French strung up the minister Foulon during the first French Revolution in 1789 and Joseph Sturge the Quaker radical had noted, in an essay on the suffrage in 1842 the involuntary association of the ‘idea of democratic change with dire imaginations of lamp-posts, guillotines and reign of terror’.87 Karl Marx – himself guilty of smashing street lamps with Friedrich Engels – spoke of suspending ‘selfconsciousness’ on a lamp-post during the necessary revolution, in an

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unpublished section of The German Ideology, written, but itself not published, in 1846.88 The Westminster Review, at the start of the year, writing about the ‘extreme political opinions’ of the artisans, gestured towards the domination of millions of the working classes by ‘lamp-post orators’ and Lamartine’s history of the first French revolution, translated and published in The Economist in 1848, detailed the placard with Marie Antoinette gibbeted, bearing the legend, ‘Beware of the lamp-post.’89 The central lamp-post on the Green was to become a noted platform for orators later in the century, a ‘great centre on Sundays for foolish and angry talk’, as Murray’s Magazine noted in 1890.90 At the time of the Paris Commune the central lamp-post in the Green was decorated by a red flag and red cap of liberty.91 The Times’ report provides a different account of Duncan’s speech. In perfect silence, the crowd listened ‘very attentively’ to Duncan. He began, after saying he didn’t have the cacoethes loquendi (rage for speaking), by chiding the crowd for hissing at two policemen who passed by – ‘He considered the police, as a whole, absolutely necessary for the preservation of society, and it was only when they went beyond their duty, as on Monday last, in Whitecross Street (i.e., 29 May), that they deserved to be censured.’92 The people, so the Chartists still maintained in 1848, had a right to public assembly.93 The police, as David Goodway has argued, ‘displaced all other objects as the symbol – indeed agent – of oppression and the Londoner’s hatred for him helps to explain the single-minded concentration on battling with the force which typified the Chartist riot’.94 He then went on to set out the legitimate claims of the people to defend themselves if unjustly attacked, as he had witnessed it at Whitecross Street, when a ‘spirit within him ... would not permit him’ to hide in a public house. The consequence had been a blow to his head, but ‘he hoped they would acknowledge that it had not muddled his brain.’ 95 He now carried a staff, and every one should equip themself with a baton just in case they required defending. (The press at the time of the Clerkenwell Green meeting on 29 May were divided between those who thought there was no tendency to use physical force or trace of arms and those who claimed to be informed that almost every man ‘carried weapons of some description, but many were concealed’.96) Cheers were rapidly followed by cries of ‘Oh, oh!’ when Duncan revealed that he was a teetotaler and a vegetarian who was: often attacked by the brewers in the district where he lived (laughter); and the Lord Mayor had refused him justice when he complained, because on principle he had refused to take the oath on the Christian Bible. He was therefore obliged to take the law into his own hands. 97

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It is a detail which otherwise finds no record in Duncan’s reported speeches or journalism – one suspects he probably provoked the publicans of Wapping (which was indeed a place of many public houses and publican power98) to violence by his temperance proselytism (his essay on vegetable diet had contrasted the resilience of vegetarian Hindoos with the ‘flesh eating porter-swilling London brewers: a scratch is almost death to them’99), but the newspapers do not feature any police court report in relation to this and we lack any local London newspapers for the period. Whether the audience even appreciated what a vegetarian was, is a moot point, since decades into the organised movement in Britain, propagandist vegetarians would be complaining that the ignorant public thought a vegetarian was a member of a strange religious sect. Yet there were defenders of dietetic reform within the wider social and political reform press, in the late 1840s.100 He said he came there expecting that there would be a demonstration, and he felt greatly disappointed that those who were to lead them on to victory should not up to that time have made their appearance. He implored them to keep order, for he was quite assured that their meeting might be turned to glorious account before the night was out. (Cheers and cries of ‘Pikes, pikes!’ ‘To arms, to arms!’) They had been most brutally treated the other evening by the police. He trusted that none of them would unnecessarily interfere with the police, but if the police annoyed them he trusted that they would at once defend themselves like men. The police were a useful body in preserving the public peace; and he hoped that all his friends would provide themselves with some sort of arms, so that they might resist the police if they attacked them without cause. ‘I,’ said the speaker, ‘have done my duty, and have provided myself with a proper instrument of defence.’ All those who were not provided with arms should immediately join a Chartist or Confederate club, and they should be no longer defenceless.101 He then delivered his new verse in praise of equality, ‘The Smock Frock and the Fustian Coat,’ the title using those sartorial emblems of the plebs (it was subtitled ‘or Honour to Hodge and Jim’, and issued as the fourth paean) to the attentive audience, with theatrical gesture and ‘fine frenzy’ in his eye, ‘which to the mob appeared marvellously fine’, as one superior reporter commented.102 The reference to fine frenzy is an allusion to Theseus’ words in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling’ – and is a reminder of the literary construction by the reporter, of Duncan’s behaviour. He then had the sense to advise the

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crowd to disperse quietly and declared that it was dissolved – advice that the crowd ignored as uproar ensued. However, another newspaper account, the Morning Post, had him delivering the verse of doggerel on his return from flight, after ‘some of the rabble imagined that the military were coming again, and that their patriot was about to abdicate, they commenced running in all directions’, when he berated the reassembled audience for cowardice, when it was shown to be a false alarm.103 The London Telegraph presented a different version, in which Duncan, unnamed, was described as a ‘gentleman of foreign appearance, though by his dialect evidently an Englishman’, who addressed the multitude in a speech which, though a ‘regular Chartist one, was characterised by great caution’. I dwell on this paper’s report because it provides an interesting slant on Duncan as responsible and courageous when the press liked to emphasise the cowardice of the mob orator.104 Duncan returned from the false alarm of soldiers, and delivered his ode which the reporter could only hear indistinctly, the latter made his way through the crowd to ask for a copy of the poetry, the reporter was about to have a copy handed to him when a wag in the crowd who had previously raised the cry that the reporter was a spy, now claimed that he was a ‘special’ about to take the speaker into custody. The reporter’s hat and glasses were knocked off, and he was trampled on and punched, rescued through the kind interference of the speaker ‘(whose address we should like to have) … as it was, it required all the speaker’s authority and powers of persuasion with the mob; taking him under his arm, together with the assistance of a few persons, who kindly acted as a “body guard” to get our unfortunate reporter out of the crowd, and possibly to prevent consequences that might to him have been of serious import.’ 105 We have another, unpublished, account from a government-employed shorthand writer, John Faulk: Whilst waiting in the shop a man called by the bystanders ‘The Mad Scotchman’ clung to the top of the lamp-post in the middle of the Green and commenced addressing the assemblage; we endeavoured to force our way towards him, but the resistance we encountered rendered it impossible to do so singlehanded. At this time the cry of ‘Police’ was raised and we took refuge in the Baker’s shop. The speaker instantly dropped from the lamp post and retired to a coffee shop close by and a general rush took place. This proving to be a false alarm the mob gradually again assembled round the lamp post. 106 So Duncan, rendering himself visible as public speaker, was the focus of government attention, although in this instance, having reassembled, the

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mob heard no further speaker. The testimony is interesting especially for the indication of the crowd’s view of Duncan: as mad and Scottish. On Sunday 4 June he attended a meeting at Nova Scotia Gardens – infamous address of the murder of the ‘Italian Boy’ by Bishop and Williams107 – in Bethnal Green, where a fatigued, provoked, and perhaps in part inebriated Metropolitan Police’s overly robust response to stone throwing, probably by ‘idle boys’, rather than the assembled Confederates and Chartists, resulted in indiscriminate police violence and ultimately, it was alleged by the Chartists, to the death of a young weaver Henry Hanshard who had to be restrained in a straitjacket by a female nurse in Bethnal Green Union infirmary after he declared himself a Chartist ‘apparently in tones of triumph’. The young man had been beaten up by three policemen, he alleged, in Bird Cage Walk, Stepney-road, and his sister at the coroner’s trial indignantly rose to declare he had been murdered (and not killed by the typhus fever as the coroner maintained). The Northern Star advertised his funeral on 25 June at Victoria Cemetery to friends, in advance.108 The third of Duncan’s paeans was devoted to this fatality, ‘The Murdered Chartist,’ presented as an epitaph to be engraved on the twentysix year old’s tomb. The Northern Star published it in September with a few typographic changes from the paean, it was one of only two poems that the Chartist newspaper published by Duncan: Come and harken to my dirge, ’Tis of a martyr I would chant; One, who the reign of right did urge – And bade the rule of wrong avaunt! The Sabbath dawn’d; his way he took, To where his brother men had pressed, There to obey God’s holy book, And sacred keep the day of rest. ‘The better day, the better deed?’ He and his fellow slaves were wronged, Victims of tyranny and greed, And for a ‘better time’ they longed, Of lives and rights, protectors paid, What did they on that holy day? To serve their God! – Gave Justice aid! Who asked it, they did maim or slay! Beneath their blows our brother fell: An ‘honest man’ he slaughtered lay;

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A marytr’d patriot as well, And grey-haired aged parents stay, The murderers were welcome made Within the temple of the Lord: Ah! Well may we its priests upbraid, Than Hell-fiend more to be abhorred. O! let a monument be reared, To tell the virtue of the dead; And vice of his assassins seared, Under whose hands his spirit fled. The Priests and Herods of his time, This manly youth have made a martyr, Because he sought the right sublime, Inscribed upon the People’s Charter.109 With its predictable rhymes (and echo of the ‘avaunting’ | ‘chanting’ rhyme of his ‘Song of A True-Born Britain’) it was not an impressive response, yet the editor of the poetry column gave him a prominent space with explanatory paragraph (and no other poem to share the readers’ attention). It expressed the sense of anger at the role played by the Church – which had given protection to the police through the church in the middle of Bonner’s Fields (St James the Less), and which was equated with the priests of Herod’s kingdom. In the version published as the third pe-an, it appeared under a motto from William Thom, from ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’: ‘O hasten it Heaven! Man longs for his right’ and in a frame of black. The pe-an also advertised Duncan’s other works – four ‘pe-ans for the people’ already published, and others shortly to be published: ‘Smock Frocks and Fustian Jackets; or, Honour to Hodge and Jim! A Lyric’; its companion piece, dedicated to the American pacifist, ‘An ode to the Anvil, Inscribed to ELIHU BURRITT, the learned Blacksmith’ and ‘There’s a Storm Brewing’; ‘Success to Erin’; ‘The Dirty Rag; or the Martyr Fillet; The “Dirty Rag” of the Scribe of Lies, or, The Martyr Fillet crimsoned with Gore from the Author’s brow, by bludgeons of the Police, on Sabbath, June the 4 th, 1848’; with ‘other Poems’. Shortly afterwards The Times and other newspapers, including provincial papers, reported Duncan’s presence at Bow Street police court in Covent Garden, charged with creating a nuisance by ringing door bells and attracting a mob of some two or three hundred in the busy thoroughfare which was the Strand. One paper, the Morning Chronicle, reporting the most singular spectacle he presented with beard and blood, indeed entitled the

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paragraph, ‘Capture of a Chartist Leader,’ although (deliberately?) misnaming him ‘Dunkard’: his wound caused by ‘a policeman’s sabre’ after attending Bonner’s Field.110 Parading the streets according to one account, he sported a bloodied head bound in rags which, so he told the ‘mob of boys and noisy children’,111 showed the brutal treatment of the police at Victoria Park (by Bishop Bonner’s Field), where he had been ‘assisting the people’s cause’.112 He had then proceeded to stop at the various newspaper offices in the Strand (the Morning Chronicle, and Morning Post) to request interviews with the editors before being taken into custody at the offices of Reynolds’s Miscellany at 7 Wellington Street, North Strand. This was perhaps just by chance, but it linked Duncan with the new firebrand of Chartism, G.W.M. Reynolds, a man who told his fellow delegates at the Chartist Convention that he went beyond the Charter in advocating, in his writings, republican institutions.113 Constable 66 of F division (Covent Garden), seeing he was without cap or hat, and that blood was streaming over his breast and shoulder advised him to go to a hospital to have his wound dressed – numerous victims of truncheons and cutlasses had their wounds dressed at the London Hospital – Duncan ‘replied that his object was to let the people of England see the severe treatment he had received at the hands of the police, on his attending the Chartist meeting at Victoria Park, and that he wanted the editors of the different morning papers, that the true particulars of this outrage should be published.’ 114 One paper reported him being ‘captured by two constables of the F division’: the magistrates and the chief clerk William Burnaby of Bow-street police court being called to the police station by Superintendent Nicholas Pearce. A surgeon dressed his wounds.115 Brought to the bar, describing himself as ‘author and reporter,’ and noted in The Times’s account as often figuring in the paper’s accounts of the ‘late disorderly gatherings in Trafalgar-square and Clerkenwell-green,’ Duncan showed two pocket-handkerchiefs ‘smeared with the discharge from the wounds’. The magistrate Thomas Hall (the chief magistrate of Bow Street who had received the delegation from the Chartist Convention when the meeting on 10 April was declared illegal in advance by the Commissioners of Police) dismissed him, since there was no evidence the bell-ringing had been an annoyance, in the absence of any of the persons at whose houses he had rang the bells appearing to give evidence against him, although Duncan ‘seemed anxious to have delivered an oration in court’.116 He declared, at least, that it was his duty to break a bad law, as much as it was to obey a good one.

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A reporter in The Times, as Duncan later noted in Tocsin ’gainst Tyranny, described him as a ‘foreign enthusiast’ who gave considerable amusement and ‘would have no person interfered with whatever offences he might commit’. There had been press coverage of foreign propagandists attempting to whip up revolutionary fervour in London, with ‘all the dirty shirts and unprofessional moustachios to be found throughout the metropolis … collected in or about Trafalgar Square’, and The Times commented that the government ought to put in force the Alien Act, if the reports were true that ‘some bearded foreign propagandists are on missions amongst the Chartists, and are counseling them to the use of physical force.’117 The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, wrote privately to Lord Normanby (minister in Paris) on 11 April that the regular and special constables had ‘sworn to make an example of any whiskered & bearded Rioter’ and Palmerston thought they would have ‘mashed them to jelly’.118 Elizabeth Davis Bancroft, wife of the American Minister Plenipotentiary to London, wrote back home that it seemed axiomatic in England that beards, moustaches and barricades went together in April 1848.119 Punch was to report the rabid discourse of long-bearded and ‘polychromatic republicans’ in émigré clubs in August.120 Duncan’s strange appearance must have led onlookers to assume he was part of this band.121 A subsequent poem by Duncan was to recall the bludgeon of the police on the author’s brow on 4 June, ‘The Dirty Rag; or the Martyr Fillet, The Dirty Rag of the Scribe of Lies.’122 While there was no doubt an element of exploiting the incident, it is obvious that Duncan was shocked by the treatment he had received – as a lower-middle-class radical of ‘respectable’ background whose advocacy of progressive causes was previously ‘inkbestained’ – he now experienced the violence of a State alarmed at the threat to law and order. The experience did not appear to have dissuaded him from public involvement – indeed, if the title of the paean was anything to go by, he seemed to be embracing the prospect of martyrdom, something already indicated in his ‘True Born Britain’ poetic effort of 1847 or earlier, as we have seen. The dangerously close rhyme of ‘martyr’ and ‘Charter’ in his mind almost compelled him to think in these terms, perhaps (George Wheeler’s ‘harvest home’ poem at the Chartist colony of O’Connorville at Herringsgate, near Watford, in September 1848 also made the rhyming link between martyrdom and lack of charter123). What he was also embracing was the publicity – the incident is telling in that it involved his seeking out the press to present his case. He was also present at the failed Whit Monday (12 June) Chartist gathering at Bishop Bonner’s Field on the banks of Regent’s Canal, an open space surrounded by unfinished ‘fifth rate houses’, the entrance to Victoria Park, a workhouse and some churches. 124 The Chartists might

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well have been apprehensive – as the Northern Star recalled on 17 June, the press seemed to be inciting police, military and government violence: ‘WAT TYLER – This day is the anniversary of the death of Wat Tyler, who was killed on the 12th of June, 1381’ the Morning Chronicle noted.125 The gathering took place after the government banned all assemblies in London. Duncan appeared with the surgeon Dr Peter McDouall of the Chartist Executive126, who was indeed the only member of the five-strong Executive who was still in the capital, and other ‘men of the people’ (‘welldressed persons’127) at the west end of Birdcage Walk, as the newspapers noted. McDouall, ‘considerably agitated’, called the meeting off, faced as he was with the massed presence of police equipped with cutlasses and the knowledge that the army could be called upon from the east of London and elsewhere, prepared as the authorities were for Whit Monday being a day of very serious armed disturbances.128 Parliament, and other major public buildings and institutions such as the Bank of England were defended. The event was immortalised in a ballad, The CHARTIST’s Flare upon Witsun-monday, published (with typically erratic capitalisation and spelling) by Paul of 7 Dials, to the tune of ‘Paddy will you now’: THE Chartists all are going mad, And Old John Bull looks very sad; They are asking for a tidy lot, and that I really can’t tell what. They want says John and nothing minces, To be made Kings, Lords, and Princes, And each of them wants his old woman To spin a yarn in the House of Commons. CHORUS.

Tow, row, row, what a glorious row, There is with the Chartists on Whitsun monday every where The Constables are all sworn in, To carry a monsterous rolling pin. The little Prince of Wales we’re told, Has a truncheon made of irish Gold, Prince alfred has a summer cabbage. Prince albert carries a German sausage, Lord Landsdowne carries his kitchen saddle, and Bobby Peel a leg of the table.

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The ladies too have warrants bright, and they must all turn out and fight, Ladies maids with clarence boots, House-maids, kitchen-maids, and cooks, Queen vic, declared she’d have a tustle, and kill the chartists with her bustle. While old Duke Nosey swore hed punch’em With a shining gutta percha trunchenn.129 The weather was appalling, with a torrent of rain and thunder – indeed one newspaper hostile to the Chartists claimed that many had noted that Chartist gala-days experienced remarkably bad weather, unlike the favourable weather which the Queen seemed always to enjoy.130 According to The Times: It is due to the ‘poet, teetotaler, and vegetarian,’ as Duncan styles himself, to say that in this retreat across Bonner’s Fields he showed much more ‘pluck’ and self-possession than any of his prosaic associates. Shouldering a bag filled with the effusions of his muse, and knitting his brow most tragically as he went, he really looked wonderfully brave, his profession and his diet being taken into account.131 Thus, of course, a figure built up by the anti-Chartist press as an oddity, admittedly with little stretch of the truth, was made to render the cause of the Charter less impressive, by his own display of courage. When a deluded poet alone showed heroism, then revolutionary bluster and posturing were merely farce. One would wish to have an unbiased account of the episode, but the vision of a be-mused poet seems all too faithful to the mental picture one has of Duncan at this stage, playing to the crowd.  While his depiction of Edward Noble strikes one as something out of Benjamin Haydon’s paintings, his posturing in the public theatre of London in the year of revolution reminds one of the gestures of the twodimensional tragic actor in the toy theatre – ‘fine frenzy’ and ‘theatrical gesture’. He had his audience – there for entertainment – and stage, within the police courts too. George Hodder’s account of Life and character at the Police Court, Bow Street, published in 1845, had suggested that the ‘duties of a Police Magistrate are as various as those of a clown in a pantomime and sometimes almost as entertaining.’132 The theatrical element to Duncan’s

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persona needs to be seen in the context of the theatrical associations and perceived theatricality of Chartism as a movement.

FIGURE 22. The Chartist as a stage villain: ‘A Family Man. Professor Fusssssssell and His Talented Family About to Assassinate a “Minion.”’ Punch, 10 June 1848, p.240. By courtesy of Plymouth University.

The Chartists’ relationship to the theatre – the latter reported in the Northern Star as ‘so important and attractive a feature of London journalism’ from December 1844 onwards 133, their occasional use of pantomime as a metaphor for parliamentary politics, their use of theatre as a means of raising funds, are aspects of the movement which have been studied before.134 The metaphors were varied. Chartists could retrospectively identify the events in Europe in 1848 as ushering in new historical actors with roles to play instead of the traditional performers.135 For their critics, the Chartist Convention could be described as a farce, the ‘curtain expected to fall upon the last scene of the John-street farce before the month is out’, predicted the newspaper John Bull in late April 1848.136 The reflections of the anonymous author ‘Superior Spirit’ on European Revolution were: Histrionic Chartism, playing its part in National Convention, not only Nat-Lee-wise talked angrily and big, uttering its fustian thunder like a stage-divinity; but also Hamlet-wise, and in a more Shaksperian vein, ‘spoke daggers’ (pikes), not designing, as it pretended afterwards, to ‘use them.’137 Metropolitan conspirators were satirised as disguising their plot in the garb of a playbill: plotting a ‘Historical Melodrama and Spectacle, called “London Turned Upside Down;” or, The Squelching of the Great Metropolis’.138 Leading Chartists were depicted as theatrical characters by

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Punch, Man in the Moon, and Puppet-Show in this period (as were their opponents in formal politics, John Leech of Punch cruelly depicting the diminutive Lord John Russell as Tom Thumb, treading the boards as the hero of burlesque and defeating Physical Force at the Old Bailey, see Figure 23 below139), whilst a more recent interpretation of Chartist communication has stressed the necessary role that theatrical gesture played on the mass platform.140 When commentators could see the events in 1848 as parliamentary politics burlesqued (in the Convention) or rebellion burlesqued (especially the Irish rebellion), it is not surprising that burlesque commented on the political events too. 141 Pantomime had developed into a ‘democratising medium socially, as a satirical and even subversive medium politically, and as a form of advocacy for consumerism materially’, in the pre-Victorian era, according to John Davis.142 During the reform bill crisis in 1831 the stage had dramatised reform.143 As John Bull noted in December 1848, pantomime had become knowing, endeavouring to ‘conciliate the reason of the audience … by making the whole a vehicle for satirical and ludicrous allusions to the current topics of the day’. 144 The Chartists themselves, or at least the author of a piece on pantomime and burlesque in the Northern Star, could acknowledge the satirical role that pantomime offered: ‘where their drolleries are made to serve a double purpose, and aim at the destruction, by force of ridicule, of those follies and vices which grave remonstrance can never reach’.145 Sometimes the theatrical performance being endorsed or associated with the movement was more serious. ‘The Plays the Thing,’ readers of the Northern Star were told, in an advertisement to attend the Standard Theatre, for a New Drama, ‘of deep and intense interest’ entitled Punishment in Six Stages, in aid of funds for the Executive Committee on 7 February 1849.146 No doubt this reflected the association between the movement and G.W.M. Reynolds, for the play was a dramatisation by H. Melville of a story by Edwin Roberts appearing in Reynolds’s Miscellany, ‘Punishment in Six Stages; or, the Victim of a Vitiated Society’, a ‘stupendous affair, which has been for some time in preparation’ – a ‘new gigantic drama, of intense interest’ according to the Theatrical Times.147 For thespian critics, the Chartists were one of the passing follies of the day to be satirised at the time and in retrospect in metropolitan pantomimes. Stage commentary surfaced during the height of Chartist disorder. Cinderella and the Fairy Queen, or Harlequin and the Little Glass Slipper, was the only Easter pantomime playing in London in April 1848 and hence, apparently, overfilled. The entertainment, at Kerschner’s Royal Surrey Theatre, ridiculed the battle of Trafalgar Square, the monster petition (the Clown, played by the ‘celebrated clown’ the Irishman Tom

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Barry, compelling every passerby, whether child, female or ‘even soldiers’ to sign using stolen paper, ink and pens) and Kennington Common. It was reported that this stimulated ‘occasional ebullitions of disapproval from a considerable portion of the occupants of the pit and gallery’. 148 For The Satirist, there were ‘capital hits at Chartism, Cochranism, and Humbugism – monster meetings, and monster petitions, and other monstrous proceedings’.149

FIGURE 23. John Leech, ‘Tom Thumb at the Old Bailey’, Tom Thumb (L–d R––l). ‘Rebellion’s dead, and now I’ll go –―to Breakfast.’ Punch, 21 October 1848, p.164. By courtesy of Plymouth University.

A month later, and the playwright Shirley Brooks had written a farce, The Special, put on at the Royal Olympic Theatre (a venue which had already seen jokes on ‘popular emeutes in the burlesque A Mission to Borneo;

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or, the Second Voyage of Sinbad the Sailor 150), depicting the adventures of ‘Miss Gloriana Dollop’ (played by Kate Howard), a ‘kind of female mad wag’ who signs up as a special on 10 April and ‘goes out a loyalising and returns with a caught tartar ‘ringleader of the revolutionists’, in the person of Frank Gossamer whom she had taken up by virtue of her office for an undue ‘demonstration of Chartist feeling’ (one newspaper account explains that this was the pretence of revolutionary sentiment).151 Among the characters was a newspaper penny-a-liner, Ichabod Scratch. ‘The memorable “10th of April,” which might have resulted in deep tragedy, has happily resulted only in farce – and right merry rattling farce it is,’ was the review in Bell’s Life in London.152 At the end of the year, Greenwood’s The World Turned Upside Down, or Number-Nip and the Enchanted Fountain at the Theatre Royal, Sadler’s Wells (at a time when the principal theatres seemed to be avoiding pantomime for equestrian shows and fairy extravaganzas), opened with a scene of European revolutionary conflagration and confusion, where the allegorical figure of Revolution, and his attendant spirits ‘Liberty, Fraternity and Equality’, were pulled to pieces by ‘Failure, Disappointment, and Moonshine’. The work very clearly displayed no ‘particle of sympathy with red republicanism’ (it featured representations of Louis Blanc and LouisNapoleon too, and involved a descent into the earth for a dance between carrots, turnips and lettuces).153 The Examiner, in its review, declared pantomime had taken to real life and left the stage; and though monarchy might be satirised too, ‘republicanism (if it be not slandered) filches and fills its pockets’. There was a more elevated stage for a comic take on Chartism. A public audience at Westminster School which included Prince Metternich and Guizot was entertained by the pupils’ depiction of female Chartists in the epilogue and anti-Chartist commentary in the Latin prologue written to Terence’s comedy Phormio in December 1848, free from the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of theatrical performances on the public stage.154 The London Standard reported Phormio’s ‘flatulent discourses on fraternity and equality, and alternations of swagger and cowardice’ as ‘comic in the extreme’.155 This was a year when the public prints were much exercised or amused by the anti-French riots stimulated by the lengthy performances of Alexandre Dumas’s own stage version of the novel The Count of Monte Cristo at Drury Lane Theatre (Punch depicted Shakespeare being declared an alien by a distinctly negroid Dumas in control of the theatre 156) and it has been argued that this theatre ‘played its part in acting as a virtual or symbolic public sphere … reproducing in its auditorium a simulacrum of actions occurring in the public sphere of mass politics’. 157 The New Monthly

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Magazine – with police and rain aborting the Chartist demonstration, saw the agitation at Drury Lane, on ‘Free-Trade and Protection … with a violence unknown during the entire operations of the Anti-Corn-Law League’.158 The Royal Italian Opera audience insisted, in response to the Chartist agitation, in ‘continually bawling’ the National Anthem. 159 The ‘roar of the multitude must have scared the Chartists assembled in the convention, even in the locality of Fitzroy Square,’ claimed the Musical World, after Alboni’s rousing rendition of ‘Confound their politics’ and ‘Frustrate their knavish tricks.’160 The Lord Chamberlain, it was reported, forbad the composer Monsieur Louis Jullien’s inclusion of the revolutionary strains of ‘La Marseillaise’ and ‘Mourir pour La Patrie’ in one of his popular quadrilles.161 ‘The revolutionist foiled at Kennington Common – lurks in the theatre,’ claimed Punch at the beginning of 1850: ‘The Chartist deprived of his pike, seizes his iron pen’ (Punch claimed that George Herbert Rodwell’s Boxing Night pantomime King Jamie, or Harlequin and the Magic Fiddle at the Princess’s Theatre – which mixed up Arabella Stuart, Guy Fawkes, and Bluff King Hal opposed Magna Carta, income tax and other palladiums of Merrie England).162 While the connections between Chartists and charivari are clear, it may be argued that the pantomime treatment of Chartists was low key compared with the satires against the red republicans and socialists of France, in the ‘great serio-comic drama enacting in France since February’, by the French stage and press – as one observed, ‘everything here has been on small scale’.163 The London stage had been used to present serious – if silent – depictions of French events as the revolution unfolded. 164 The English certainly knew how events were being satirised across the Channel in the ‘Metropolis of satire and lampoon’.165 An expert on French and English socialism, Louis Reybaud, whose works were familiar to English readers either in the original French or in reviews, presented the various quackeries of the republic in his continued adventures of Jérôme Paturot, previously (in a novel of 1843) a man who had been reduced to provincial employment in the reign of Louis-Philippe – in a novel that was reviewed in Britain (indeed the Illustrated London News serialised and reproduced Gavarni’s images from the novel).166 Paris, Reybaud wrote, like one of the demented cities of antiquity, seemed a ‘great madhouse’, its government and population gone mad.167 Perhaps Reybaud would have included, had he been aware of him, the equivalent to James Elmslie Duncan as apostle of vegetarianism, recorded by the novelist Champfleury for posterity, in the follower of Jean-Anthoine Gleïzès, Jupille ‘le Thalysien’, a greengrocer, who published a brochure, Aux Gourmands de chair, which argued that meat eating was atheistical.168

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 Duncan’s interests were on the reform platform rather than in matters theatrical – although he was shortly to endorse freedom of drama, and Sunday openings of theatres among his many reforms.169 He was present at a meeting to denounce the outrages of the police (who had responded to Chartist disturbances in Finsbury and Clerkenwell with violence) held at the Literary and Scientific Institution at John Street, Tottenham Court Road, in late June, reported as moving a vote of thanks to the chairman – which was rather more sedate behaviour than he was to demonstrate at other public meetings, as we shall see. 170 The authorities were not complacent that the Chartist threat to order was over, especially with the support shown to Irish Confederates in London. There was a suspicion of insurrectionary conspiracies which had indeed begun about 12 April.171 The same column in the Northern Star that carried the news of Duncan’s presence at the June meeting, incidentally, reported the death of William Thom’s widow. The Halfpenny London Journal, which had been reporting revolutionary events in France but avoiding commentary on London Chartism turned in late June to Horace Walpole’s reports of the bloody Gordon riots in June 1780: of interest at a time when ‘utmost exertions of the civil power appear necessary to repress similar scenes of violence in our streets’. 172 The civil power’s exertions were indeed extensive. The Chartist activity in the metropolis stimulated the presence of plainclothes policemen, a situation which was unusual in England since the uniform was seen as a protection from political police and a spy system. 173 Duncan was being observed. Known to make a point of principle of carrying firearms, in late July he was arrested by Robert Gifford 89H, a plainclothes policeman who traced him to Upper East Smithfield and followed him to neighbouring Nightingale Lane, after instructions from his superintendent. Collared, and asked what he had in his coat pockets (‘Whatever I have is my own’) his arrest in the very early hours of the morning came after failing to give a satisfactory explanation for the pocket pistol (described as large sized in one report) in his coat, though he claimed it was for his self-protection, ‘as I have marks upon my body of unprovoked violence, inflicted on me by the police’.174 In a report of his court appearance (at the Thames Police Office), which was reprinted in the Northern Star, and other papers, he was described as a ‘wild looking young man’ instantly recognised at the bar as a ‘person who takes a prominent part at all Chartist meetings, as the generally accredited laureate of the Chartist body’. 175 Interestingly, the Northern Star did not comment on the label attached to Duncan by a

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hostile metropolitan press (despite its name, the leading Chartist newspaper relocated to London in 1844). At the time of his arrest Duncan was returning from a meeting of Chartists, socialists and supporters of Irish Home Rule at the John Street Institution, ‘a most glorious meeting it was,’ he told the court – he had taken shorthand notes and intended to recite his poem, ‘A Storm a Brewing’.176 He had been sporting that archetypal Scottish headgear, a Glengarry cap, decorated with a brooch from which two streamers hung (evidently his own response to the republican bonnet rouge) and a knot of green ribbon on his coat.177 He presented himself in the dock, according to one report (in a direct allusion to the French revolutionists), ‘à la Garde Mobile, with a large moustache, whiskers, and beard, and a good deal of head on his hair’.178 Since the garde mobile were being described as ‘recruited chiefly from the idle refuse of the people’, it was not a complimentary comparison.179 The leading French satirist of the revolution depicted one ‘literary and artistic gamin de Paris’ who had become a captain in the National Guard, as one of the ‘hirsute heroes of the “chevelue,” or hairy school, who wear disheveled locks and shaggy beards, once thought the costume of barbarous times, but now the insignia of superior civilization and intellectual progress’.180 The caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s sketch of disheveled and unshaven gardes mobiles appeared in the Illustrated London News in late April (see Figure 24).181 Duncan had been asked by the inspector who took the charge, about the ribbons; he said they were ‘emblems of nationality’: he was a Chartist who wanted to show support for the rebellious Irish, and his desire for a rebellion shortly in London: ‘I myself hold to the doctrine of nationality, which in my vocabulary means that every nation has a right to govern itself.’ This was what the critics of the Chartists were now emphasising, in their treatment of Chartist activities in the metropolis, the Irish element or Irish associations.182 The Irish Confederates were out in force at Kennington Common on 10 April. There was an Irish population established in Wapping and working in the docks, before the Irish famine. A Confederate club was formed in Wapping – we do not know if Duncan supported this.183 He may well be the ‘Duncan’ who was present at a public meeting at the Farringdon Hall, on the Tuesday evening of 25 April, ‘to furnish an opportunity for the delegates from the country and the city Chartists, to fraternise with their Irish brethren’, alongside the reformer John Passmore Edwards, McDouall and others. 184 But to publicly associate himself in court with the efforts at rebellion of ‘Young Ireland’ was foolish. As G.W.M. Reynolds was to later observe of the moment of panic on the part of the authority after the anticlimax of 10 April, apropos of the lecturer William John Vernon, arrested after

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Clerkenwell Green, ‘At that particular time, the smallest appearance of liberal sentiment expressed or displayed by any unfortunate wight, could easily by legal process be turned to a high treason and felony.’185

FIGURE 24. The French caricaturist Paul Gavarni’s sketch of the gardes mobiles, Illustrated London News, 29 April 1848, p.275. Author’s collection.

Speaking with the air of someone who was the ‘observed of all observers’ (the reporter is perhaps self-consciously quoting Ophelia from Hamlet, here, who comments on Hamlet thus, his noble mind ‘o’erthrown’),186 he admitted in response to the question from the magistrate William Ballantine as to whether he was a socialist, that he was a socialist and physical force Chartist: ‘The doctrine of socialism is not understood. One of its first objects is self-protection,’ and the report of the court appearance was reprinted in the Northern Star with the headline ‘The Right to Carry Arms’. The Chartists of London were probably, according to Goodway, ‘arming on a significant scale’ as they reorganised

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their structures of localities at this period.187 If this was preparation for insurrection it also reflected the Chartist assertion of constitutional rights. Francis Looney of the Irish Davis Club had been reported asserting the right to bear arms against ‘the myrmidons of a base government’, at his trial in the Central Criminal Court on 8 July.188 George Julian Harney, writing regularly in the Northern Star as ‘L’Ami du Peuple’, asserted the right to possess arms and to learn their use, citing laws made in the time of Edward I, Henry IV, and Henry VIII. 189 Other Chartists characterised the supposed ‘constitutional privilege’ – linked to liberty – enshrined in the Bill of Rights as ‘practically an illusion’ given the penalty of transportation for training and drilling, and control over even possession at the ‘good pleasure of the magistracy’.190 Identifying Chartism with socialism was not a very politic thing for Duncan to do, given the public fears about socialism and communism, as one detailed response to press ridicule after Kennington Common, published in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, noted, ‘a great number of placards of various sizes have been extensively circulated, in which the writers cunningly confound the wild dreams of French Communism and Socialism with Chartism, as if there was one word relating to any such schemes in the document called the Charter.’191 Indeed large-lettered placards had been placed prominently across the metropolis, warning Londoners about the French republic. One newspaper described Duncan’s poetry as ‘highly seditious and inflammatory’ – not that it offered any proof that anyone had been inflamed. Duncan was being brave or foolish, since there had been arrests of Chartist leaders for seditious language in metropolitan meetings in June. Government reporters, for instance, took note of the seditious language used by the ‘working dentist’ James Maxwell Bryson, on 28 July (the same day Duncan appeared in the Thames Police Court charged with possessing a pistol), in the Chartist Hall at Webber Street in Blackfriars, and he was charged at Bow Street, and committed to trial after documents and weapons were produced in court.192 Elsewhere, where Chartism seemed particularly threatening, seditious songs and speeches were dealt with firmly. The Times reported in June the Irishman Thomas Fleming’s arrest for circulating Chartist literature and doggerel verse which held the police up to popular hatred as bloodthirsty, in the West Riding. He went to a house of correction for a month. A compatriot, Daniel Horkin, experienced the disapproval of Bradford and Leeds magistrates for selling seditious songs. A poor Glaswegian weaver named Eadie was imprisoned after singing doggerel about John Mitchel.193 Baron Alderson, in December 1848 at the Chester Assizes, imprisoning the twenty-two-year old carver George Joseph Mantle (a true firebrand) for two years for

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seditious speech and being party to conspiracy and riot in August, addressed him as a youth ‘with a very voluble tongue and an empty head as most mob orators are.’ He was advised ‘to study more and speak less’, and to realise if that was possible that ‘a boy’ was not the person to alter the constitution, ‘You must be made to feel that towns and cities must not run the risk of being placed in flames by the act of a madman and a fool.’194 But Duncan, perhaps, could be seen as a harmless fool. Readers of the Morning Post’s account would have some sense of the paeans hawked by Duncan, ‘ten or twelve stanzas of eight lines each’ – and though their titles were clearly quoted at length to render him ridiculous by suggesting it was all so much nonsense, the material was ridiculous in its bombast and lurid vocabulary: ‘No.1, Poems for the People; or, Rhyme Rays in the fading Glooms and Froth Foams on the Waves of Progress’, and in large letters ‘A Tocsin for Tyranny; or, The British Marseillaise’, by James Elmslie Duncan, author of ‘Flowers and Fruits; Edward Noble, the utopian, or the dawning Flowers of the Age of Love on the Breath of Publication,’ &c’.195 The ‘contents … may be guessed at from their titles, and certainly displayed much poetical vigour and enthusiasm; there were frequent allusions to the morning newspapers in the notes appended to the poems.’196 Here was a case of reporters noting Duncan’s interest in his reception in their papers. It hardly mattered that the titles of his works, as reported, were slightly garbled. The press strategy of rendering the Chartist cause ridiculous in 1848 has been commented on by historians, as it was noted by perceptive commentators at the time. Delegates at the National Convention attacked the press for distortions or the failure to report at all.197 When the Attorney-General praised The Times and other papers ‘with very few exceptions … for the generous and noble manner in which they had all exerted themselves … in the preservation of the public peace,’ he was putting a gloss on the reportage.198 The novelist and naval captain Frederick Chamier’s contemporary Review of the French Revolution, in contrasting the French and British, stressed the role of the ‘keen ridicule’ of The Times.199 Graham’s American Monthly of Literature and Art, surveying the varying responses to revolutionary disorder across Europe, in December 1848, had noted that the Chartists were ‘ridiculed into silence’.200 Another American, Caroline Matilda Kirkland in her Holidays Abroad: or, Europe from the West, noted that the ‘shop-window caricatures, the penny ballads, the minor theatrical pieces, and the spontaneous fun generally, all turn upon this demonstration of alarm on the part of the government and the property holders.’ Derision, she noted, was the generally held attitude of the middle classes to the idea that only the special constables had stood between the half-starved mob and murder.201

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If the strategy was to make the Chartist threat seem risible and contemptible, with Duncan, their opponents had someone eminently caricaturable. As Janowitz has noted, the opponents of Chartists were opposed to the apprehension of its members as articulate and literate: ‘Poetry, the index of inwardness in liberal culture, would display the activists in too human a perspective.’ The incident in the press reports when the magistrate laughed at the titles of Duncan’s papers and his selfdescription, and declined the offer of hearing a ‘short unpublished poem’ recited by Duncan ‘with a most inspired air’ takes on a wider significance, then, as representative of the ridiculing of Chartist literary pretensions.202 ‘I suppose they are political,’ Ballantine had asked Gifford, of the verse. Ballantine (who had appeared for the defence of William Dowling, an artist-engraver and secretary of the Davis Confederate Club, in the Chartist trials brought about by the evidence of the Clerkenwell carpenter and informer, Thomas Powell) reportedly said: ‘I cannot help expressing my regret at seeing a mind so accurate as yours appears to be on some points, thus miserably misled on others.’ ‘But you have not heard me. I wish to convince you.’ Duncan was bailed to keep the peace for the next four months, Ballantine telling the ‘chop-fallen’ poet that he needed to find bail for himself in 40l and two sureties of 20l each.203 Refusing this settlement, according to the accounts published at the time by the press, Duncan was detained in Coldbath Fields in the parish of Clerkenwell (in the same parish prisoners remanded from police courts were detained in a model prison of a thousand cells completed in 1847), in the House of Correction.204 He was thus absent from the Chartist struggle in the metropolis during the month of August, which was just as well, because with a certain status as the Chartist laureate, he may well have been a target for the attention of authorities who were following the course of a conspiracy which was finally broken by a police raid on the Orange Tree pub in Orange Street near Holborn, on the evening of 16 August, the day of the projected insurrection. He was imprisoned, but not forgotten by the Chartist movement. The Northern Star printed the following, on 26 August 1848, from James Grassby: that the Central Victim and Defence Committee at 83 Deanstreet had met on 13 August, where it was resolved that a committee of Messrs Martyn, John Milne, Josiah John Merriman of Clerkenwell205, Brown and Owen Jones of Cripplegate (the locality to which Thomas Powell, the ‘Chartist spy,’ belonged),

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form a committee to endeavor to get Mr Duncan removed from Clerkenwell House of Correction, by Habeas: in case the above should fail, this Committee guarantees Mr Duncan, sen. all reasonable expenses in bailing his son, and that in the interim we pay five shillings per week, to prevent Mr Duncan from the degradation of picking oakum …206 O’Connor gave funds to London victims in order for them to be exempted from the ‘liability of offensive labour’ – as George Jacob Holyoake publicised in 1849, in relation to Ernest Jones.207 Jones spent his time in prison reading, making allegorical pictures and poetry – eventually publishing a collection which he claimed to have written in his blood on the leaves of a prison prayer book. Duncan does not seem to have versified his briefer experience – there was to be no identity as a fettered or released minstrel.208

FIGURE 25. Gateway of the House of Correction, Coldbath Fields. Author’s collection, based on an illustration in H. Mayhew and J. Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life (London: Griffin, Bohn and Co., 1862), p.277.

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The London Metropolitan Archives preserves the record of Duncan’s recognisances for the sum of eighty pounds, with George Haslem of 82 Bethnal Green Road and George Baker of King David Lane in Shadwell standing forty pounds each ‘UPON CONDITION that the said James Elmslie Duncan do keep the Peace and be of good behaviour towards our said Sovereign Lady the Queen and the liege Subjects for the space of four calendar months,’ signed by Yardley at the Thames Police Court on Tuesday 29 August.209 Baker was a cheesemonger – presumably an associate of Duncan’s father – who had filed for insolvency in February 1848.210 On his release, Duncan wrote to the liberal Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper (for whom Thomas Cooper wrote), a letter appearing on 9 September to correct a misstatement appearing in the paper a week before, saying that he – a ‘well-known Chartist, frequently called the Chartist poet’ – lay about a month in the House of Detention at Clerkenwell, waiting for sureties (the House of Detention which he refers to here was in fact not a common gaol or the house of correction, so perhaps Duncan had moved between the institutions. The site, rebuilt in 1847, became notorious much later when the Fenians blew it up in order to release prisoners, in December 1867 – killing twelve people in a nearby street, in the process), and was now brought to be bailed: I could have obtained them the first day; but myself and friends were undecided as to what course to pursue. The Chartist Defence Committee would have freed me by a writ of Habeas Corpus if they had had the necessary funds; but the heavy demands on their small means constrained recourse to bail. I may take this opportunity of stating that all I proposed to do with the pistol I had upon me when apprehended was to fire it (loaded with powder) to give effect to a recitation – ‘There’s a storm a brewing.’ I wanted to tell Mr Ballantine, the magistrate, this; and, with the latter intention, spoke of the poem not to repeat it before him, as said in the newspapers, but he prevented me making the statement by twice interrupting me and removing me from the court.211 Duncan did not elaborate on his allusion to a writ of Habeas Corpus (that bulwark of English liberties having been suspended in Ireland by parliamentary act, on 25 July 1848) but presumably this meant the judge being persuaded of the sufficiency of the bail, and perfecting the recognisances, before issue of the writ and discharge of the defendant. Duncan was detained in Clerkenwell not because he had been sentenced

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to a term in prison but because he could not afford (rather than refused to find) the bail and sureties. Duncan stated he would never resort to arms himself, ‘as I am not constituted to act as a warrior’. But the Chartists maintained a right to bear arms. Was Duncan telling the truth when he claimed the pistol was only for dramatic purposes? If so, it was still an incredibly risky thing to do, since, in the context of 1848, the forces of law and order could not know this was mere histrionics, although the Home Office collected reassuring statistics about the number of arms acquired by ‘mechanics, labourers, etc.’, believed to be Chartists, in the metropolis, over the first half of 1848.212 It was, in any case, a very foolish piece of street theatre and performance poetry (the metropolitan police had also been following the half-pay Lieutenant Frederick Mundell in that year, apparently intent on harming the Queen with his loaded pistol213). It was typical of his egotism too, to refer to Ballantine as interrupting him. The decision by the editor of Jerrold’s newspaper to publish the letter at least gave one articulate figure in London Chartism who was in the public eye an opportunity to set out his position in a non-Chartist paper without the mediation of hostile reporters, an unusual occurrence. The leaders of the Orange Tree conspiracy (Cuffey, Dowling and others), meanwhile, were sentenced at the Central Criminal Court at the end of September to transportation. In November, as Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper reported, a modern Guy Fawkes villain was created with Thomas Powell the Spy – revealed to have infiltrated London Chartism and Irish Confederates, when they were brought to trial in 1848 – carried in effigy through the City, Bethnal Green and Spitalfields, ‘On the hat was affixed Duncan’s “Blood Money” (in which the suggestion was originally thrown out); and the bearers repeated his “Hangman’s Hymn”. I am informed that the proxy of the obnoxious individual had its head torn off in the weaver district.’ 214 In the only indication that Duncan’s verse influenced people’s behaviour at this time, the weavers (it was commonplace knowledge that the silk weavers of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green were experiencing great distress as their industry terminally declined – existing, indeed, on starvation wages) followed his suggestions in the section entitled ‘SPECIE FOR SPIES’ in this paean, where the poet suggested burning Powell in effigy, as the future Guy Fawkes, ‘Change the bull’s eye, into that of the spy, at which to let fly! Be his birth name forfeited; and henceforth designate him, John Scorpian, after John Russell, whose special pet he hath been.’ He was the carpenter to make Whiggery’s coffin, with his fellow spy Davis providing the pall. Duncan’s suggestion was readily acceptable to the inhabitants of Bethnal Green who had used Guy Fawkes before to condemn tyranny and police espionage: in 1833 for instance. A

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correspondent of the German paper Atlantis noted in 1853 that Guys were most numerous in the East End in places such as Bethnal Green.215 ‘Eternal infamy rest on the heads of a Government that could make use of such a vile instrument,’ Gammage wrote of Powell in his history of the Chartist movement, published six years later. 216 ‘Lying Tom’ became the focus of Chartist odium, eventually, if temporarily, fleeing with his family to South Australia.217 By selecting this theme, Duncan no doubt hoped to attract attention to his versifying – the ‘Hangman’s Hymn’, which imagined an encounter between William Calcraft the famous public hangman (referred to here also as the near legendary hangman Jack Ketch) and the spy, also expressed his hostility to capital punishment: Calcraft and Powell met together, ’Twas in Newgate’s dungeon gloom: Powell look’d on him as a brother, He who wrought the murderer’s doom. The Spy his hand the Hangman offer’d, But shrank back with scorn Jack Ketch: He spawn’d the hell-black’d fingers proffer’d, And spat upon the traitor wretch. ‘I’d rather shake the Devil’s claw, Sir, Or kiss a Burke’s or Tawell’s palm 218, Then press that foul and fiendish paw, Sir, To which ev’n Hell itself is balm. My office I’ll this day resign, Sir, I will not work with such as you, But my services are thine, Sir, And will gratis giv’em, too!’ Powell’s hanging on the gallows Were a pleasant thing to view; But sights of this sort turn men callous, Then how much more such work to do? Make him your Guy for dark November, With thought of plots and treason rife. Judas repented; and remember, God’s punishment of Cain was life! Ironically the Trafalgar Square riots coincided with, and almost interrupted, a meeting of capital punishment abolitionists in March 1848 – ‘fortunately the ring leaders were not aware of the circumstances, or there is little doubt they would have attempted to identify themselves in some

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manner with the proceedings.’219 The verse was effective – its use of anaphora in the second stanza, simple rhyme scheme and uncomplicated vocabulary would assist the intention to make it a widely circulated ‘hymn’. That it was widely circulated may be assumed from the fact that the verse was contained in Duncan’s extravagant fifth paean, entitled Blood Money to Pay Powell the Spy! Against Powell and Lord John Russell, the surviving copy in the British Library was the second thousand, ‘with additions’. This appeared under the motto from Robert Burns, ‘It’s coming yet for a’ that!’ and was described as a ‘Political Squib, for the Pleasure of Lord John Russell’.220 One cannot convey the exact typography here, but the paean was presented after this fashion:

BLOOD MONEY TO PAY POWELL THE SPY! In Cheatery Checks and Notoriety Notes, only ONE HALFPENNY EACH, but better than Gold to discharge our Debts to the Diabolic! Purgative Prints for Punishing Political Spies and their Patriot (!) Approver, the Patron (from the Public Purse) of Prelates, Priests, and – SPIES! – Pygmy Premier Spay Progress. [To Spay is to be guilty of female castration, what my Lord John Russell formerly tried towards his own daughter Reform with his notorious Finality; and has lately attempted by England and Ireland, in cutting away British Liberty. The Spay employed the Spy! Which is the worse – Russell the Spay or Powell the Spy?]

The three columns of prose that followed were dripping with venom against the spy as the Chartist poet seemed to channel the spirit of Milton: What is the tool our dignitaries have chosen to do their devilish work? A base, degenerate thing in human shape, the corpse of Iscariot 221, vivified by the soul of Cain, and infused with the venom of the Snake of Eden. Say, who is the agent employed on behalf of fair Victoria Queen for the protection of her imperial crown? The special favourite of the infernal monarch! A wretch transcending in vileness the criminals all that ever defiled earth’s surface! The very essence of hell’s iniquity, with its exceeding cunning superadded. A strategic Bravo by Russell hired!

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There came a danger born of tyrannic wrong: ’twas feared the sufferers would to force to free themselves. The despot power, with self-consistency, was bent to persevere its old ways, and annihilate all who should seek to stay it: whereas it deemed such far more politic than entering the untrod path of Equity. Did Power do evil that good might come? No, no; but evil did that evil might be upheld and good defeated. By its iniquities and refusals of dealing justly was roused the people’s anger, which Power despised as but the rabble’s wrath. The hotter hearts resolved on the last resort – Rebellion! They had tried all things but fighting. MIGHT had the choice of making RIGHT his bride, and thus defeat his foes by changing them into friends; or could adopt the old tyrannic policy of fraud and force for the maintainment of Established Wrong. The balance bumped upon the side Satanic! Powell was a ‘superlative villain and perfect prince of swindlers, unparalleled detective, an “evil necessary” (?), this ne plus ultra spy or biped spider,’ whose role reflected Whig lack of principle. The paean toyed with scripture, in order to evoke the satanic nature of the behaviour – Powell chosen by God’s appointed rulers of Britain, sent as Lord John Russell’s own, amid the Chartists to betray them, ‘like as the Lord his son ’mong men to save them!’ With scoffs and exhortations he provoked the Chartists, leading them into temptation and ‘delivering over to evil: of the Lord’s Prayer a practical fulfillment, thanks to our Governors the agency directing.’ The final paragraphs of the first section of the paean continued the analogy: Christ spilt his blood to save us. Russell spends our money to betray us. The Carpenter of the year One was Joseph the Father of Christ: the Carpenter of this all but last year of Whiggery is POWELL THE SPY! THE SERVANT OF SATAN AND OF BRITAIN’S POTENTATES. Judas a saint to this half price betrayer. The Eden Snake from hell held forth an Apple: the St Steven’s tempter did a Dagger proffer. And elsewhere in the broadside, Duncan commented, ‘when the prelate and then premier join to persecute, be ye sure ’tis not a John Scorpian; for Judas was rewarded – Christ, Crucified!’ Powell’s fate was to be reviled by all the world: no peace or safety in this world or another unless he mended his ways, with men in ‘phrensy’ uttering dire curses, the author himself raising his voices with those who called on God to make his life a hell on earth, ‘Ye, yea, and thousands swear to work on him their vengeance, careless of even the gallows –

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nay, if they’d had their wills, would walk to its foot with exultation, and are assured it would be ’mid cheers of an assemblage vast which even might rescue them!’ In a tour de force of unhinged cliché, Duncan imagined such a vengeful figure before him, heaving of chest, glaring of eye, clutching hands, teeth grinding, lip gnarled and convulsed foaming jaws, uttering burning words of ‘rage intensate’ [sic]. ‘O would to God that I could meet the wretch; I would tear his bowels out, so help me Heaven!’ In a movement rife with suspicion about other spies and agents provocateurs, the Northern Star published the following, in an article on Thomas Powell, the behaviour of the anti-Chartist ‘Press-gang’, and the Orange Tree conspiracy, in late August 1848: And now we warn the London Chartists that Powell is not the only deceiver! We have accurate information of the doings of at least one other informer – a creature who twelve months ago was unknown to the Chartist party, but who within that time has made himself notorious at the east end of London by his apparent morbid craving for notoriety – but his real motives are known to us. We warn the London Chartists that such a creature – in personal appearance a satire upon ‘physical force’ is amongst them. He has urged on others to the talking of violent nonsense, and preparations for violent deeds, and has then communicated every word and act to the police. Spies are amongst you, men of London – beware of them.222 This was not, surely, an allusion to Duncan (who was in any case in the House of Correction presumably enduring the monotony of shredding tarry old rope for oakum), unless one can construe his long hair and beard as a satire on red republicanism, and unless the allusion to recent involvement, to morbid cravings for notoriety, can only be matched with his circumstances. But had he been able to read this, he would have been warned about the dangers of association with East End Chartism, which grew in this period to include thirteen new localities.223 Another paean, now representing ‘Rhyme-Rays in the Red’ning Glooms’, was:

A CHRISTMAS CAROL WARBLED IN NEWGATE ! A Gem of Verse set in a Jewel of Prose, in the Shape of an Epistle from Little BEZER the Chartist Sam Slick, addressed to WALTER COOPER the David of Socialism, who Hurls the Pebble of Truth at the Brow of the Goliath of Error. 224

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It was a curious production, existing in a ‘stereotype edition’ (using stereotyped metal plates, not a new method of printing, but one which was becoming more common in this period, and which James Catnatch introduced into ballad printing at Seven Dials) published by Kerton, with the self-penned motto ‘Confidence doth elevate even on the cross’ to add to the mottoes ‘mind is strength’ and ‘love is might’. Capitalising on a controversy covered in detail in the Northern Star in December 1849, the paean purported to be a letter from the one-eyed shoemaker Joseph Irenaeus John Bezer, a Chartist and member of the Irish Democratic Confederation in London, who lived in Spitalfields, who was imprisoned for sedition uttered at Milton Theatre on 29 July 1848, as reported by the government shorthand writer James White.225 His sentence at the Old Bailey in August 1848, after the Attorney-General described Bezer as a man of considerable cleverness and a ‘dangerous ability for mischief,’ was imprisonment for two years.226 Bezer, and the undertaker John Shaw, were allowed some indulgence following the recommendation by the judge, Baron Platt, but were then punished for refractory behaviour by such techniques as being placed in the ‘condemned’ cells in Newgate.227 The letter in Duncan’s broadside purports to be written to the Scottish tailor and Chartist leader Walter Cooper (one of the models for Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke). Bezer’s own account of his imprisonment may be inferred from the summary of the lectures he delivered shortly after his release, and which were advertised in the Northern Star as ‘Vile Doings in Newgate’.228 Lock and Key Inn, Old Bailey. MY DEAR SIR,

My wife, whom I saw yesterday, tells me you have paid her a visit with some sterling friends; she is always considering the old saying, ‘The good man is absent from home and likely to remain long out of the way’ therefore such a visit as yours is particularly welcome to Goody Bezer and her little ones just now. Seriously speaking, I am much obliged: you are very kind; but I cannot help joking even in Newgate, and why shouldn’t I? It ain’t the place, but the state a man’s in. No my dear Cooper, the mind if it be right, a ‘praty’ for prison or palace. Truly as your Robby Burns has it, ‘The heart’s ay the part aye, that makes us richt or wrang.’229 I can’t write as I’d wish, but suffice it to say, I remain unchanged: and this word is as good as volumes, especially as I am not writing to a fool. Excepting the climate, for my cell is deuced cold etc., the yearnings of the flesh, hunger and thirst; but I shall get used to them (and what’s the odds as long as you’re – honest?) except these trifles, I’m very well both in health and spirits, and am determined to be content in that

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state of life to which it hath pleased the Attorney-general to call me. And so I ought, seeing I’ve many advantages; for instance, spiritual consolation gratis, board and lodgings free, go to bed perfectly sober, no bacon or butter for fear of bilious bowels, no chance of being run down, medicine for body as well as soul prompt good and cheap, and better than all, don’t pay no taxes; that is a treat, and altogether a novelty. In short, if it wasn’t for one thing, I should do, and be happy as a king, which one thing is, as Sterne has it, ‘I can’t get out,’ says the starling, ‘I can’t get out – I can’t get out!’230 Well well, necessity tells me, I must stay in, and philosophy tells me to stay in with a good grace, and so I will! Upon my word, as I go on writing, my heart begins to ring – ring – ring as merrily as the New Year’s Chimes; and so heartily, that I must really out with it in a song: – WINTER WARBLINGS OF THE BIRD IN BARS

Tune: ― ‘I am a son of Mars.’231 I am such a comic bloak that I cannot help a joke, Even mong old Newgate folk under lock and key, No, my heart, let it be right, a dungeon cell by night, Or a palace chamber bright, all as one to me. May the Charter be the law, yea the Martyr see no flaw. Britannia’s men, ye are free! I the radical remain, and will ever bide the same: While burns life’s goodly flame, I’ll hold by honour’s rules. Spite of all that has occur’d, I’m unchanged, tho’ but a word, This speaks a vol when heard, ’specially by no fools. May the charter, etc. Tho’ with chill my blood be froze, almost biting off my nose, And tried hard by hunger’s woes, can stand it like a spark! Yea by heavens! I’m able to sing, and make The roof to ring, My spirits ’pon the wing, like the merry lark!

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May the charter, etc. Not so much for bread I yearn, as for freedom I do burn, [my dove That I my wage might earn, to spend with thee Whom God hath joined in heart, Hag Law has torn apart, Cause too good to suit the mart, but train ours true, my love! May the charter, etc. Even in the Stone Jug here, we shall get good Christmas cheer: Friends give no cause to fear, ’twill not be so with mine; [to pick For if but my hen and chicks, have plenty grain It would relish as brown bread brick, and make water drink like wine! May the charter, etc. When you pass my Rock Hold by and it scowls upon your eye, With its black gloomy die, think of the ore block’d in. I have proved me sterling gold, tho’ praps of awkward mould, And will come forth as of old, may I find ye kin! May the Charter be the law, yea the Martyr see no flaw. Britannia’s men, ye are free! We do not have any poetic treatment of Duncan’s own experiences of prison. But here, Duncan imagined Bezer in his letter asking for books, including a copy of Thomas Cooper’s epic verse Purgatory of Suicides (published in autumn 1845), making a laboured joke that two purgatories would make a paradise of the prison. What are we to make of this broadside, with its strange italics that would almost lead one to believe Duncan was sending a coded message to his Chartist brother? ‘Now I am a punster poetaster,’ he imagines the political prisoner writing, ‘as well as petty treason spouter some folk will say. Ha ha ha!’ Yet the resort to verse echoes the petition of Bezer presented in the Court of Aldermen which considered the complaints of Bezer and Shaw, in the winter of 1848, that he, ‘who, it appeared, had a poetical turn, wished to have opportunities, not of translating the Psalms of David, but of turning them into verse’.232

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More intelligible was Duncan’s appeal for funds to support Bezer’s family and so stop them having to go into a poor law Bastille, either through him, or sent directly to Mrs Bezer at 9 Green Arbour-court, Upper Thames Street. Bezer was not released until April 1850, and his mysterious future, after association with the Christian Socialists and the incomplete publication of an autobiography, seems to have involved embezzlement of funds, the abandonment of his family and a flight to Australia. Duncan had imagined him asking Cooper ‘what’s the odds as long as you’re – honest?’ But the Aberdonian Walter Cooper, who was given the compliment of an engraved portrait and biography in Reynolds’s Political Instructor in March 1850, behaved no better with Christian Socialist funds, so that the assertions in Duncan’s verse on holding to ‘honour’s rules’ and sterling worth were ironic.233 Duncan was sufficiently prominent in London Chartism in this period for him to be referred to, although not by name, in Punch, in June 1848, imagined as a poet-laureate for pickpockets, and burglars, ready to ease the cash from tills, despite the arrival of special constables and policemen, and parodied Charles Mackay’s poetry: THE CLERKENWELL POETS.

In the recent processions, or rather prowls, which have taken place in London, a poet has been the most distinguished actor, and indeed the only one who has evinced any desire to stick to his post – a lamp-post – when the rumour of the arrival of the police has been prevalent. We have had an opportunity of seeing some of the poet’s productions, and we beg to add a specimen. It is somewhat on the model of a song, in a little book called Voices from the Crowd, entitled ‘WAIT A LITTLE LONGER.’

There’s A.1 coming boys, there’s A.1 coming, But at his staff we’ll only laugh, Though A.1’s coming. What care we if we go to bed, Having received a broken head, From A.1 – coming? Let us disdain the crack or kick, If the Police prove stronger; There’ll be some pockets yet to pick, Don’t hurry, then, to cut your stick – Wait a little longer.

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There’s a Special now coming, boys, a Special now coming; Let’s knock the hat extremely flat Of the Special now coming! We’ll teach him how To stop our row, The Special now coming. His interference has been rash, ’Gainst us, who are the stronger; There’ll be some windows yet to smash, And p’raps some tills to ease of cash– Wait a little longer!234 The association with Clerkenwell in this skit was no doubt to touch on the events at Clerkenwell Green. But Clerkenwell was notorious as a place of violence, as the journalist William Hepworth Dixon noted, in his book on London prisons in 1850, ‘We take it for granted that Clerkenwell is known to every breakfast table in this kingdom. To the careful reader of the police reports the name of this district must be as familiar as the commonest household word. The constant conflict of its turbulent population with the guardians of the public peace has given it a universal reputation. It is low London of low London.’235 Duncan, then, formed part of the magazine’s counter-revolutionary strategy of presenting the Chartist threat as simply a carnival time for the pickpocket and the juvenile.236 As he himself commented a year later, in The Divinearian, of Daddy Punch, it ‘might have cracked jokes, honouring myself, Fussell, Cuffey, and the Chartist brethren as subjects without these elements of calumny’. What pleasure he must have had, for linking himself in fame, with the figure of the tailor, trade unionist and Orange Tree conspiracist William Cuffey, and the veteran Chartist John Fussell (Fussell as we have seen, satirised in caricature as some stage villain in Punch, Cuffey’s wife, a washerwoman, also included in squibs).237 And yet, ‘methinks we must confess our share of fallibility, still there has been undue severity towards us, both in the gibe and the jail.’238 On 22 April 1848, the magazine had referred to French ‘seedy firebrands with long hair long beards and long faces who go about London trying to persuade Englishmen in the spirit of the fox without a tail that this country would be benefited by giving up some of those things that France has sacrificed.’ Clearly Duncan’s appearance at this time could only add to his singularity. On Monday 11 December, Duncan again appeared in court, and described himself as a poet and divinarian. He was charged with obstructing a public thoroughfare at nine o’clock on the previous evening,

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at the corner of the court leading to the City Road, Finsbury Square, Hall of Science, by selling ‘Chartist publications’ to a crowd of at least one hundred and fifty – successfully disposing of a large number for ½d each, shouting at the top of his voice in selling his songs, and appearing to have ‘an excellent market’.239 The customers included visitors to the freethought and radical venue which had been established by James Watson in 1834 as the Mechanics’ Hall of Science – indeed in court Duncan claimed he had only been selling his work to people leaving a lecture there. Duncan had been selling ‘God Save the People’, ‘Blood Money for Powell, the Spy,’ ‘A Scourge for a Gag’, and ‘The Chartist who was murdered by the Police’. Described by the reporter as a ‘person of grotesque appearance’, Duncan stated that he had been selling his broadsheets for a ‘considerable period’, distributing them ‘even to MPs in the corridors of the House of Commons’ (a detail otherwise unrecorded) and was not at all aware that he had violated the law as he had never been interfered with before. He added ‘that he was formerly protected by the police for doing that which he had now been taken into custody for’.240 Was he breaking any law beyond the obstruction? Certainly selling verse that attacked police action was provocative. He was cautioned by the magistrate John Hammill at Worship Street police station, and discharged, in the hope that this would serve as warning to him for the future. The Northern Star’s account, taken from other press reports, was subtitled ‘Censorship of the Police’.241 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper published a letter they received – the editor thought from Duncan himself – explaining the incident: James Elmslie Duncan, who describes himself as a Divinarian, and has been designated by the press the ‘Chartist Poet,’ was apprehended last Sunday night by one of the police while selling ballads at the door of the Hall of Science. Mr. Duncan was disposing of his ‘Peans for the People’ (so he names them), and very fast to the persons then dispersing. The policemen on duty, perceiving a crowd of nearly 150 persons, and finding Mr Duncan selling prints clearly obnoxious, such as ‘God Save the People,’ requested the author to betake himself and them off. Assured he was safe, Mr. Duncan continued to sell his poems and the policeman decided to take him into custody. But our poet drew himself out of the ‘peeler’s’ hands, and, vehemently protesting against being interfered with, strode into the lobby of the oratorical temple of free enquiry. The constable followed the bard. Duncan decided as the prudent course to cease to sell, and bid his customers depart. The policeman, not satisfied, made the song-vendor

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his prisoner, Mr Duncan yielding himself to the law’s servant, exhorting his friends to abide by him, but be perfectly peaceful. ‘The circumstances,’ he said, ‘will serve the good cause; there is no knowing what may arise out of even this trifling event, when public affairs are universally in such a condition! Rally round me, but be perfectly peaceful – be perfectly peaceful – be perfectly peaceful!’242 Well, this was almost certainly, as the paper suspected, Duncan’s own account. While it was clearly an attempt to counteract the hostile accounts in the other London papers, beginning in a sober and supposedly objective journalese (viz. ‘designated,’ ‘apprehended,’ and ‘disposing’), the letter was revealing in its melodramatic self-dramatising (striding, yielding, exhorting), the gestures of noble resignation that of the ham actor, the allusion to a crowd of ‘friends’ rather pathetic if one appreciates that these witnesses were probably those attracted to his bizarre behaviour and the scene being created. The police constable, Baker, denied that Duncan had been (despite the religious flavour of Duncan’s exhortation in his own account), so peaceable – ‘You shook your head at me like a savage, and dared me to touch you,’ he told the prisoner in court, claiming Duncan had done everything he could to excite the people to resistance. In January 1849, Holyoake’s journal, the Reasoner, commented on the incident, making it clear that Holyoake thought him a clear liability: The papers of a few days ago gave an account of another appearance of Mr J.E. Duncan at the Worship Street Police Office for collecting a mob of people at the Hall of Science doors to whom he was selling the wretched trash which he calls poems entitled a ‘Scourge for a Gag’ the ‘Murdered Chartists’ &c. Has he no friends who will keep him from the public eye in connection with Institutions who have enough to contend against without being associated with professional eccentricity? The Chartists have suffered Mr Duncan to appear at their meetings and make speeches for their amusement. Great men of olden time could afford to keep jesters but popular and struggling bodies must take care how they indulge themselves in this way. Some time ago Mr Duncan’s exhibitions enabled the wits of the opposing press to make ridiculous the people’s cause. As an individual Mr Duncan’s aberration of manner deserves sympathy but in justice to others he should be kept from public association with any party. 243 No one wrote in to defend Duncan then – and if Duncan privately wrote to Holyoake, there was no space given to him to argue his cause in print. The Chartist movement was, despite the failure of the previous year, and

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the mass arrests, still in existence, and the month in which Holyoake’s comments had been published saw an effort to revive the campaign of the Charter, at the Literary Institution in John Street.244 Duncan’s other poetry in this year, according to the lists in his surviving paeans, and in The Divinearian, included such themes as God Save the People, The Prison Prophecy of a Chartist (was this Duncan’s own ‘Prison Rhyme’?), What about the Pistol (did this provide a poetic treatment of his pistol carrying episode?), Wat Tyler, the Chartist Blacksmith (about the portly and red bearded Isaac Jefferson of Bradford, a former Quaker turned ‘red republican’ who manufactured pikes and was finally successfully arrested in September 1848 and sentenced to four months’ hard labour in prison, at Wakefield House of Correction – he would later be sworn in as a special constable in Bradford in 1868 and continue to support democratic reform, dying, a respectable mechanic, in 1874245), Be of Good Cheer, Erin, The Plough more Humble than the Sword (a rehash of his old verse, presumably), An Ode to the Anvil, The Feast of Infant Flesh (perhaps about the Irish famine), Tributes to Cobden, Cooper, and Hetherington, and The Three Victims: Williams, Sharp, and Hanshard.246 None of these exist, although the lines, ‘THE THREE are one in death for freedom’s cause,|And sacrifice to Christless tyranny:|Their ashes ’neath this monument’s applause |Their patriot souls, O God of Heaven, with thee!’ is probably a quotation from the latter paean.247 No doubt wishing to capitalise on his Chartist notoriety, in the spring of 1848 Duncan attempted to expand and serialise his ‘romance of progression’, as Edward Noble, the Utopian; or the Dawning Glories of the Age of Love. In his first paean sheet, Tocsin ’gainst Tyranny, it was announced as ‘on the Break of Publication’, and in later paeans, the work was presented as a bi-monthly penny issue, numbers one and two already being ready for publication. The list of characters was to include, ‘as the best men of our epoch’, Robert Owen, Etzler, the unitarian William Johnson Fox (who we have already seen in association with support for William Thom), the Irish temperance figure Father Mathew, Greaves, and the free-trade hero Richard Cobden. The Reasoner published the following comment in April 1848 in a notice of minor works: ‘Edward Noble, the Utopian, is a proposed romance by Mr Duncan. It is hard to speak of a performance from the first number but the profession is ample.’ 248 In the most extensive discussion that was to appear in the press in relation to the work, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper declared of the first number, in May 1848 (an octavo number published by Mansell): … certainly promises well. The author seems to have considerable power in sketching character. His Mrs. Pigins, for instance, is a true

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self-satisfied bigot, of comfortable creed and circumstances, who, when she heard that so-an-so were likely to be partakers of the Kingdom of Heaven, exclaimed, ‘God Forbid!’249 Perhaps the coverage of the number reflects the generosity to a young author, of Douglas Jerrold himself – and it is interesting that, as we have seen, the paper subsequently published Duncan’s communications as martyred Chartist – the only letters of Duncan to be published in extenso in any newspaper (the paper was struggling in 1848 and was sold off at the end of the year – so had Duncan found a sympathetic editor, it was not to remain available to him250). No copy of this new version of his novel exists (so we do not know who the Dickensian Mrs Pigins was), and it is unlikely it was ever completed. Numbers 1 and 2 were produced by c.March 1848, by the time of the ‘stereotype edition’ of the seventh pe-an, A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate!; the work was advertised as priced at 6d which would lead one to assume there had now been six numbers published by Mansell. We have seen that Duncan made a public point about his vegetarian diet. In 1848 this would have been a bizarre step, and yet the movement had gained public attention since its inception as a Vegetarian Society in 1847. Radical papers such as the People’s Press, and Monthly Historical Newspaper might deal with vegetarianism in a favourable manner in 1848, the writer Henry Lestar Harrison linking the efforts of the Co-Operative League, for instance, with the vegetarians, as efforts ‘instituted for the aim of restoring to humanity a more easy and contentful life’.251 Vegetarianism, reforming the internal as co-operation was to reform the external, was ‘no mere chimera, no young poet’s fancy, but a realized fact’. 252 The Owenite Alexander Campbell, associated with the Concordists, sought to include ‘Teetotallers, Emigrationists and vegetarians’ among the parties, rather than simply political parties, acknowledged by the Social Reform League established at the Farringdon Hall in 1850. 253 On the other hand, the reviewer of a new London journal, the People’s Review, in that same year, pointed out the absurdity of the conclusion of an article on the science of diet from a vegetarian perspective, which had asserted that the failure of the German and French Reformers was largely due to their use of stimulants.254 Duncan’s interest in what has come to be known, after an anonymous article by the chemist Dr Samuel Brown in Westminster Review, as ‘physical puritanism’, is also shown by his subscription to William Horsell’s TruthTester, a journal which promoted ‘temperance in all things’,255 and Horsell’s pioneering Vegetarian Advocate (the Vegetarian Society had been formed in 1847). Duncan sent a copy of his new edition of Flowers and Fruits to the

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Advocate for review, though the editor found no space. 256 Nor did the journal report that Duncan was present at any of the various London soirées or lectures designed to promote vegetarianism in 1848 or 1849. Horsell, who was a pioneer beard-wearer himself, was to be the publisher of Duncan’s final journal in 1849, from the Aldine Chambers at 13 Paternoster Row. The office was parodied as ‘Unheardof Chambers’, in G.M. Viner’s satirical portrait of William Horsell as the teetotal and vegetarian lecturer, publisher and general promoter of all ologys and isms, ‘Screwberry Morsall’, in the serialised Aunt Eliza’s Garret, or Scenes from the Life of a Needlewoman in 1854; Horsell’s printing business was briefly styled the ‘Vegetarian Press’.257 A rather alarming photograph of the man exists, from the 1850s – the conventionalism of a smart necktie and white shirt offset by his beard and long hair, his gaze looking rather severe. 258 Horsell boasted that he had an ‘extensive town and country connexion, and as he issues from 10,000 to 20,000 advertisements per month, of works which he publishes; and being in one of the most central situations in town for business, he believes he can offer advantages not inferior to any London House’. We do not know what arrangements Duncan made with Horsell for the cost of publication (‘of New Works, of which he shall approve’) – for books Horsell insisted on 300 copies being taken by the author, and a division of the profits for the whole impression. 259 The Vegetarian Advocate noted the allusion to the Chartist Duncan, when it cited an article from The Times on meat in Smithfield market in which a comment on the teetotal divinarian vegetarian had appeared. Indeed it felt the need to combat the assertion that all eaters of green food were insane and that vegetarianism was a thing of frenzy and fanaticism.260 The Times opened its article thus: ‘The laws of the human economy demand that we should consume animal food: it is true that SHELLEY composed several rhapsodies upon vegetable diet, and we suppose that DUNCOMBE, the Chartist, meant to confess to the same practice when he announced himself as a “teetotal vegetarian, divinarian” but the poetic or the political frenzy is the exception which proves the rule; sane men in the country eat meat when they can get it ...’261 (And, just a couple of years after the height of his brief notoriety, the journal could not remember his surname correctly – identifying it with that of the prominent aristocratic Chartist Thomas Slingsby Duncombe.262) The future Crimean War reporter for The Times, William Howard Russell, in an essay on Genoa appearing in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1853, also included an allusion to Duncan, alongside the radical MP Joseph Brotherton, member of the vegetarian Cowherdite sect, when referring to the ‘string of sausages coloured yellow or white’ in the market, which showed that the Genoese ‘are not vegetarians even as Mr Brotherton and the Chartist poet’.263

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Duncan’s advertisements for Edward Noble stressed that the hero and heroine were ‘phonographers, vegetarians and communists’. There had been attempts to reform spelling before – the land reformer Thomas Spence was one such reformer. It seemed to attract later radicals. The phonetic reformer Isaac Pitman had befriended Greaves and the Concordium enthusiastically supported shorthand in its journal. The Fourierists perhaps endorsed this too – Fourier dreamt of a ‘universal language, spoken in all the harmonized worlds’ (in Hugh Doherty’s translation). Communists such as Weitling and Barmby were interested – Barmby wrote on universal language and phonography for Howitt’s Journal in 1847. For Barmby, ‘that one common tongue which has been prophesied by poets and speculated on by philosophers for all the people of the earth’ would be assisted by phonography. Barmby saw the universal language in its commercial and eirenic aspects: that ‘fusion of nations, through the bonds of peace, in the one great brotherhood of man’. 264 Duncan’s later programme of reform included ‘an Universal Language’. There were phonotypic journals, a depot for phonetic literature at 1 ‘Cwεnz Hed Pasej’, Paternoster Row, a society; and phonetic apostles and disciples (as Barmby revealingly referred to them) held soirées across Britain to promote their cause. In London a phonetic festival took place in Southwark in May 1847.265 The Vegetarian Advocate took up the cause too: ‘The Phonetic Principle is connected with Vegetarianism, not only because all truth is dissoluble, but because the development and acknowledgement of both is common by the same individual.’ 266 But Richard Doyle, in a marginal cartoon in Punch, expressed the no doubt more common view of bewilderment at this latest reform (see Figure 26, below) in the same year – when Alexander John Ellis’s Fonetic Nuz (ridiculed as the Fanatic Nuz) appeared to promote Pitman’s spelling in twelve pages, ‘de siz ov doz in de Egzaminer.’267 Emanating from an ‘ofis’ at 344 The Strand, it was to be devoted to ‘educashun’, and reform including ‘fizical’, ‘Parlimenteri reform’, international peace, prison discipline and the abolition of capital punishment. In its ‘Old School spelling’ column in the first number, the Nuz called on readers ‘and every enlightened Englishman, to further the SPELLING REFORM’, making eminently sensible points about the difficulties of English orthography and the state of general literacy. The paper contrasted its campaign with that of recent Chartist ‘word torturers’ who screamed themselves hoarse in abuse, yet the Nuz’s ‘exterminating warfare against popular ignorance, directed mainly at its most formidable outwork’, amused the press.268 ‘Madness had adopted a variety of methods, and run the round of almost every absurdity,’ Punch suggested, ‘but decidedly the most insane thing out of bedlam in the present day, is a

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scheme for the annihilation of MAVOR, the demolition of DILWORTH, and the utter or unutterable confusion of all orthography.’ 269 The spread of the phonetic reform movement was equated with Mormonism and Southcottism for another commentator.270 The satirical Man in the Moon published a mock epitaph for the paper when it expired as a weekly in March (lingering on briefly as a monthly).271

FIGURE 26. The marginal comment by Richard Doyle, Punch, 31 March 1849, p.131, on the phonetic movement’s attempt to promote their reform via phonetic newspaper, 1849. Author’s collection.

Duncan became a teacher of phonography and ‘phrenotypics’ (on which more below) from an address in the district of the Tower of London known as the Tower Liberty, at 16 King Street, Tower Hill (the street contained maritime stores and instrument makers; a provision merchant Williams occupied this address in 1847), advertising his services alongside spare copies of the Morning Star, ‘sold by all Booksellers in Town and Country’, Smith and Elder’s 3s edition of Thom’s Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver, and his vegetarian tracts, in the New Moral World in late November 1844.272 He offered ‘liberal terms’ for teaching the arts of phonography and phrenotypics by post or at pupils’ own residences. He

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had joined the Phonographic Corresponding Society in 1844 and produced (or said he produced) a phonetic manuscript journal, also called the Sunbeam – when his address was 16, Little Hill Street, Tower Hill, which was on the east side of the Tower of London. 273 This followed the phonetic practice of establishing ‘Ever-circulating Phonographic Manuscript Magazines, which circulate among such members as agree to contribute useful, instructive, and amusing essays for the perusal of the other contributors’.274 I cannot detect his name or his initials among the lithographed phonetic signs, in the Phonographic Correspondent, or Fonografic Star, as a ‘corispondunt’. The Owenites had been interested in phonography: for instance the lecturer Henry S. Brooke, who was appointed to lecture in London and kindly consented in 1843 to ‘deliver another Lecture on the new and important science of Phonography, or Writing by Sound: a truly philosophic method of writing all languages by one alphabet.’275 Duncan would probably have concurred with the view of one shorthand propagandist, William Gawtress (in 1819), that all those brilliant and spirit stirring effusions which the circumstances of the present times combine to draw forth, and which the press transmits to us with such astonishing celerity, warm from the lips and instinct with the soul of the speaker, would have been entirely lost to posterity, and comparatively little known to ourselves, had it not been for the facilities afforded to their preservation by Short Hand.276 The reference to phrenotypics in Duncan’s advertisement might indicate he was an expert in the system devised by the Polish member of the London Democratic Association, Major Bartołomiej Beniowski, a system of mnemonic notation published in 1842. Punch poked fun at him in the same year, and the Satirist used the vogue for memory techniques he had created to lampoon leading politicians and literary figures.277 Beniowski is an interesting figure: named and attacked in Parliament by no less a figure than Lord John Russell, for involvement in Chartist violence, and found guilty of assaulting the Russophobe David Urquhart for making the accusation in one of his publications that the Pole was a Russian spy. 278 Duncan, assuming the system he was alluding to was Beniowski’s ‘brain printing’, will have had to master Beniowski’s thoughts on phantom notions, associating notions, and agglutinating notions.279 Beniowski also lectured on his system of ‘artificial memory’ – for instance before members of Branch A1 of the Owenites, in London in July 1843, and advertised morning and evening classes daily at the Phrenotypic Institution at 8 Bow Street, two doors from Covent Garden Theatre: the

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classes were 10s for working men and 1 guinea for a course of six classes for gentlemen and ladies.280 Beniowski declared, in an early pamphlet on his methods: By following this method men, shall henceforth be enabled to acquire more knowledge in days, than they could hitherto do in weeks; and what was the task of laborious long years, they will achieve in as many easy and cheerful months.281 Proud of the system, his entry in the Post Office Directory in 1845 stated he was ‘the discoverer of phrenotypics’. 282 Beniowksi also developed an ‘antiabsurd’ form of orthography, intended to deal with English spelling, in its ‘LABYRINTHIC INEXTRICABILITY’ and ‘INCUBUS-LIKE ABSURDITIES.’ – his pamphlet also expressing his views on Polish emigration and the role of France.283 ‘Britons, alter your alphabet–alter your orthography–make your language easy–speak to the world–be intelligible–and you shall conquer and liberate nations without bloodshed.’284 The major, attempting from the later 1840s to revolutionise printing by introducing compound letters and short words cast in type, would die at his Bow Street address aged 66, in March 1866. Duncan is one of the few people one can identify, linked to phrenotypics, another being Henry Buss, who switched from a career as an engraver to becoming a medical doctor, and who would recall the Pole’s system as an aid to his medical studies, in an autobiography in 1893.285 Beniowksi had wanted the autodidact (an assiduous attender of the London Mechanics’ Institute lectures, and on courses on shorthand, and systems for the mastery of French, Latin and Greek) to become a teacher of his system. Duncan made the shorthand ‘verbatim’ report of a lecture by the Scottish member of the Chartist Executive, Samuel Kydd, The People’s Charter, delivered in the out of the way venue of Milton Street City Lecture Theatre in Cripplegate (the original Grub Street), in 19 July 1848. It was printed as a 3d pamphlet by Edwin Dipple, at the Clarendon Press, 42 Holywell Street, and advertised in the Northern Star in late October 1848 – Dipple being described by one reviewer, when he published a lurid Life in London serial, as ‘the enterprising publisher of Holywell-street’.286 With other Chartist leaders arrested, Kydd earned the praise of Gammage in his history of Chartism for offering informative lectures in many towns in late 1849, ‘not in the usual style of bombast’.287 Duncan was advertising the report in his paeans by the time of Blood Money at 3d about November 1848, and as an ‘Oratorical Stenoscription’ for a penny, in The Divinarian, in December 1849. Duncan seems to have worked – as far as he had any work – as a reporter, but the fact that he

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stressed this single work of shorthand reporting leads one to think this was the only significant reporting he did do. 288 In Blood Money, as we have already noticed, he informed readers: Reports drawn up, Lectures delivered, and Dramatic Entertainments (consisting of original Recitations) given by JAMES ELMZLIE DUNCAN, the Divinarian. NOTICE TO LITERARY INSTITUTIONS ––

There is an obvious point to be made about Duncan’s embracing of phonetic reform, that having adopted striking, dietetic, sartorial and tonsorial markers of difference, it was a minor step to set oneself further apart or in advance by taking up spelling reform. Beniowksi’s Course of Six Lessons had discussed this frame of mind, where one should ‘ever be on the watch for new facts, or new notions’.289 In turning, in the next chapter, to his attempt to encapsulate his ambitions for poetry and music in organised form, I turn from Duncan the street poet to Duncan the utopian schemer, the ‘Apollonic’ / divinarian. In his Chartist heyday in 1848, he had expressed, in formal terms, the fate of the year of revolution – from ecstatic verse to the poetry of defiant mourning, from hope to despair. He wore his poetic tropes on his sleeves – the binary of paean and dirge summing up events.

5 APOSTLE OF THE MESSIAHDOM

Having trumpeted the neologism of ‘divinarian’ to all and sundry, James Elmslie Duncan was about to make another attempt, through the medium of a journal, to reform society, as the Chartist mass platform collapsed. In his paeans Duncan announced the appearance of a monthly journal, which was to be called The Divinarian, or Templar of the New Age.1 The eighth paean was to contain a prospectus of the Divinarian Apollonica, or Association to Elevate the People by the Influence of Music and Poetry. Since this paean has not been preserved, one cannot judge what the association was to entail by way of organisation; quite what the purchasers of his previous poems would have made of the scheme may be guessed at. The journal was actually produced as The Divinearian, or, Apostle of the Messiahdom. A Journal of Progressive Literature edited by James Elmzlie Duncan, Divinearian and Author of “Flowers and Fruits;” Also Known as the Chartist Poet, a penny paper published by the temperance and vegetarian advocate William Horsell. Only one number survives, styled ‘NUMBER THREE’, and dated ‘December 1849’.2 Above its masthead, the Divinearian in capitals in an inappropriate rounded begemmed font, there appeared the three mottoes, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’ (‘Jesus of Nazareth’), ‘Mind is strength’, and ‘Love is might’ (the latter two, figuring in the seventh paean, and seemingly his own coinages). As a title it was no more bizarre, perhaps, than John Goodwyn Barmby’s journal of 1848, The Apostle and Chronicle of the Communist Church (published by Shireffs and Russell at Douglas in the Isle of Man from August) or his earlier progressive journal which lasted four numbers from January 1842 and had gloried in the name of The Promethean or Communitarian Apostle, a Monthly Magazine of Societarian Science, Domestics, Ecclesiastics, Politics, and Literature. Indeed, a glance at the verse and prose contained in the first number of the monthly Promethean, as reported in

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detail but with no sympathy by The Literary Gazette and Journal of the Belles Lettres in May 1842, might lead the reader to think Duncan was rather more coherent.3 Other progressive journals were proposed with lurid titles: The Athenaeum claimed that there had been a prospectus, during the heat of the Anti-Corn Law League struggle, for a work entitled Bread and Blood; or, The Chartist Chopper. The observer of the springtime revolutionists in Paris in 1848 for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine thought that the French republican titles evoked the names of demons in a fantastic poet’s ‘inferno’.4 And 1848 spawned a number of ‘progressionist’ and ultrareform magazines in Britain, such as Harding’s The Republican, William James Linton and George Jacob Holyoake’s The Cause of the People, Gerald Massey’s Spirit of Freedom (at Uxbridge), Reynolds’s Political Instructor, John Cassell’s Standard of Freedom and Thomas Cooper’s Plain Speaker.

FIGURE 27. Masthead of the surviving copy of The Divinearian. By courtesy of the Seligman Library, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.

Duncan had no small ambition or moderate aspiration for his new journal, as he declared in the opening of the first page: The Aim of our Magazine will be to apply all the Resources of Literature in Elucidation of the noblest Sentiments, the loftiest Ideas, the wisest Thoughts, and the best of Projects – to Illustrate, with the Pen of the Author and the Pencil of the Artist, that Divine Life of Eternal Progression for which the God of the Universe hath destined

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Humanity. That which it is our Aspiration to be the Apostle of we cannot better catalogue than in those plain spoken terms of Common Sense and Sterling Conscience, happily already familiar to the many headed Monarch aristocratically calumniated as the ‘Swinish Multitude;’ whilst, be it understood, our Soul’s Ambition and Heart’s Desire, is to aid in maturing their meaning in the Minds of the Millions – Seeds of Truth Sown in Humanity, whence they shall Grow into living Realities and lasting Institutions. This issue was probably, in fact, the first, as it is numbered from page one, and it seems to contain the prospectus: wherein a very long list of radical causes was published, significantly beginning with the People’s Charter, taking in land reform (nationalised, and the subject of ad valorem taxation5), penal reform (including abolition of flogging in the army, and the ‘Task Sentence and Group System of Criminal Discipline’), free trade, financial and tax reform, reform of matrimonial law and equality for women, Jewish emancipation, educational reform (‘National Education, Popular Colleges, Government Schools of Art, Ragged Schools’), phonetics and phonography, temperance, vegetarianism and beardwearing. Capital punishment was alluded to in several sections including a criticism of Charles Dickens’s recent plan of intramural strangulation (‘The sole defect … is, that it includes the use of the gallows’). Duncan also advocated measures of economic and labour reform such as cooperative communities, the Owenite idea of national bazaars for equitable exchange (which had failed on a local scale in Marylebone in 1832 6), and a ‘Representative Circulating Medium’. Perhaps the latter reform was so that money was a definite representative of the cost of labour, as the American Josiah Warren had advocated in Equitable Commerce in 1846; Robert Owen, in standing as parliamentary candidate for the borough of Marylebone had listed as one of his political aims, a ‘national circulating medium, under the supervision and control of Parliament, that could be increased or diminished as wealth for circulation increased or diminished’ in July 1847.7 We have seen Duncan’s espousal of nationalism, and his support for the cause of Ireland (something shared with Barmby, who published verse on ‘The Woe of Erin’ in People’s and Howitt’s Journal in 1847, in which a weeping Erin is assisted to suckle her starving babes by Britannia 8). He thought that Richard O’ Ferrall, the Governor of Malta, was a criminal for having refused an asylum to the ‘noble exiles from Rome, preferring they should perish in a floating lazar-house’ – Lord John Russell excusing the governor’s caution to the radical Joseph Hume on the basis that on such a small territory there would be a risk from those present among the refugees belonging to a European-wide ‘circulating society of

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revolutionists’.9 He hoped that war would be used against tyranny ‘and in aid of popular freedom, WORLD WIDE, Hungarian, Roman, and Polish, as well as African’.10 (He may also be the ‘Mr Duncan’, listed as a contributor to the appeal for funds for ‘the Families and Defenders of the Roman Republic’, giving 7d, collected by George Jacob Holyoake at the John Street institute in 184911). In this journal, he listed related concerns – beyond the regeneration of Ireland there were to be ‘Federate Government, Self-Government of Colonies, the Restoration of Invaded Territories, Home Colonization’. Of course, it was no great effort to list reform causes that were unexceptional to most progressives (the Chartist Conference, a couple of years later, was to endorse a wide range of social reforms alongside the Charter), although it also suggested that the Divinearian programme was not to be in the realm of the immediately practicable – it also had the advantage for an editor who had nobody to call on for additional copy, of covering most of the front page. He remained committed too, to ‘Tropical Emigration, Paradise within the Reach of all Men by the Powers of Nature and Machinery’. Not that machinery was perfect, as he noted elsewhere in the journal, it was ‘yet a source of evil because of its being made the agency of selfishness and fraud: witness Hudson and the relay system’ – an allusion to George Hudson the Railway King, whose frauds had recently been revealed to the public; and to the system whereby mills evaded the ten-hour day imposed on child labour following legislation in 1847 (the relay or shift system was ruled legal in the Court of Exchequer in early 1850).12 Et omne quod exit in ism. Here was the perfect expression of antieverythingarianism, and pro-everythingarian; an expression of indiscriminate enthusiasm. He remained optimistic: his ‘trumpet-blast of truth’ asserted that good increased, and that ‘the law of the universe, physical, mental, and moral, is progression.’13 A judicious, potent and right declaration, as he desired, would provide a ‘mighty impulse to the tide of progress’.14 He was to do this. The journal also detailed the slights he had received from the press, whether the allusions to him as a poet laureate of pickpockets and brother of assassins (as in the leading satirical magazine of the age, Punch, although one suspects he was also flattered by its attention); or the treatment of the ‘progressionists’ by The Times, although, It has also spoken of me as a Chartist Poet, and with the pen of a polished and talented gentleman – recollecting this, such is the weakness of even Divinarian flesh that ’twould rather cheer than groan!

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Moreover ‘in the darkness of the night, I have heard the thunder of its steam-engine working off its milliard impressions, and have been lost in admiration.’15 He also hoped The Times would direct its great energies for sanitary reform against the cholera – after all, his father had been published in The Times on this subject in August of that year (or perhaps the letter had been his?). The General Board of Health listed 13 deaths from cholera in Wapping from 13 July to 6 August 1849; those who were to be killed by the disease included an eleven year-old Michael Kelly (presumably an Irish immigrant), selling fruit to the sailors at Wapping and along the river, who became ill while his brother’s unburied corpse remained in the family home.16 Duncan also brooded over the refusal to acknowledge gifts of Flowers and Fruits, in the case of the author and journalist Eliza Cook (receiving a copy of his work inscribed in phonetic spelling must have mystified her, had it not also included standard spelling, he next sent a copy of the first volume of William Horsell’s Vegetarian Advocate), or, in the case of Chambers’s Journal, its silence in response to free-thought journalism and its failure to send replies to Duncan’s and a brother beard-wearer’s letter in response to the publication of correspondence on beard wearing. The significance of this documentation of press treatment is Duncan’s clear sightedness about the importance of the press for radical fortunes, and for his career. His journal now gave him the opportunity to address these perceived slights. ‘Even the most advanced of our age have their faults,’ Duncan observed, ‘Robert Owen, the originator of the Infant School system and founder of New Lanark, with all his glorious philanthropy and rationalism, eats flesh and shaves himself’ (in actual fact, Owen did adopt a beard latterly).17 Owen received a copy of Flowers and Fruits from its author although Duncan was refused entry to a metropolitan dinner in honour of the great man in 1849 which he hoped to attend in order to record the proceedings as shorthand reporter, because ‘too poor to pay’, (or was it because they were wary of his presence?) but Owen subsequently sent him a copy of The Revolution in Mind and Practice of the Human Race, published in that year, with its addresses to the Queen and her advisers, and to the red republicans, communists and socialists of Europe. Duncan, lacking selfawareness, could not see that being ignored by a host of the great and the talented, did not make oneself great and talented.18 The Divinearian was also a republican paper, in support of the ‘many headed Monarch’, and Duncan worked himself into a state, ‘as the mouthpiece of the spirit of progression’, over Queen Victoria’s fate should she refuse to promote reforms such as the abolition of capital punishment. ‘Even Queen Victoria is not the beau ideal of woman.’ He

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had already criticised her for failing to breastfeed her children – not a cause which seems to have exercised other radicals, although the death of Princess Charlotte in childbirth had apparently stimulated the Duchess of Kent to announce, to national rejoicing, her intention to suckle her baby.19 He wanted her to refuse signing another death warrant, ‘thus save her maternal nature from what must otherwise soon be insisted, that she endure a blistering torture infinitely more intense than that which the soulsaving chaplain inflicted with a burning taper on the poor doomed woman whom she, royal sister, had consigned to CALCRAFT, at present FAITHFULLY HERS!’ – by not accepting the execution of ‘a fellow wife and husband’ (an allusion to the Reverend Chapman’s recent treatment of the condemned murderer Mary Ball, at Coventry Gaol, designed to make her think of her perilous condition in relation to salvation; and the fate in November 1849 of the murderers Frederick and Maria Manning – William Calcraft was the hangman20). At one point he breaks into verse, but it is verse presented as prose, so that I have rearranged it thus, to reveal the strange, disturbing doggerel he utters as ‘the mouth-piece of the spirit of progression, forewarned of the rage of Revolution which shrieketh thus in my ear –’: I do not speak as a saneless bragger – I will stab thee to the heart with a poisoned dagger, and shoot thee through the brain with a deadly pistol, and dash down thy crown of gold and crystal ….. But, O God! my breast will, in hell be cautered! – Not the Whig-souled Queen alone lies slaughtered: a ‘Russian Bear’ I would say, and cheer ye all, but that it hath a look imperial. O would it were but an empty vision – madness, O madness were joy elysian!21 Here in prose run mad, Duncan envisioned himself as the hand of God meting out vengeance on her, Tsar Nicholas, the Pope and Prince Louis Napoleon. Alas, Alas, ’tis God’s own truth that speaks through my pen – ‘Vengeance is mine saith the Lord,’ which vengeance by virtue of its words in this small drop of ink, shall save the world the terrific realities! Yes, with reason’s dagger, venomed of conscience, the bulletspitting tube loaded with the powder of passion, and the leaden logic of death, their grasper moved, of the revolutionary fury – or, as it

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were, the jagged lightnings of the storms, concentrated in this pen, and he who wieldeth it inspired of the GREAT GOD!22 It was as well that the Divinarian evaded the notice of the Home Office – although we shall see that Duncan was discussed by the press in the context of attempted acts of regicide – because the prose here suggested a dangerous man. Yet earlier in this essay Duncan seemed able to make the distinction between the figurative language of violence, and an actual spirit of assassination (‘Assassins are secret: they do not turn the dagger into a figure of speech against iniquity in face of day, and hearing of a city.’) 23 In the passage quoted above he attempted to convey the metaphorical nature of his assassin’s tools (reason, conscience, passion and logic). Duncan included a letter to the Queen suggesting a new cabinet of the free-trader Richard Cobden, the former premier Sir Robert Peel, the radical Joseph Hume, the capital-punishment abolitionist Lord Nugent, William Johnson Fox, Feargus O’Connor and those who had voted for Universal Suffrage in the House of Commons recently, instead of the Whigs under Lord John Russell. For Duncan had the radical’s contempt for ‘Russell’s old rag-shop’ and the ‘fatlings of antique institutions’. Russell had publicly declared that neither the middle class nor the working class wanted the People’s Charter, but instead ‘gradual progress in reform’, in the House of Commons on 23 May 1848.24 Predicting she was destined ‘to live to an advanced age;’ during which the Charter would be passed and an elected President established, Duncan hoped that the eight-year-old Prince of Wales would therefore, in addition to classical learning and acquisition of phonographic skill, study political economy and social science so that he could succeed her as ‘to reign virtually the protector and president of the British Commonwealth’.25 The close-type number included a paragraph praising the diminutive ‘divine of progress’ (and former bank clerk), William Johnson Fox of Finsbury Chapel, South Place. A ‘short mountain of a man, with large, thoughtful head, long, grey hair, and curious Quaker hat’, Fox became an MP, representing Oldham from 1847.26 Reynolds’s Political Instructor described him, in its front page biography in the same month, in December 1849, thus, ‘In political opinions Mr Fox is a Chartist – and something more; in religion, he is a firm believer in the power and glory of a Divinity; but entertains a profound and honest antipathy to the absurdities, hypocrisies and intolerance which disgrace the Established Church of England.’27 For Duncan, his mellow and deep voice, ‘lutenoted’, conveyed a theology which was Christocentric and not forensic – ‘No jealous God petitioned ’bout heaven and hell, a father is addressed – a loveful sire!’28 Perhaps the emphasis on a loving father was significant?

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This admiration was ‘notwithstanding he declares that there is much in me with which he is not in sympathy’ – I have not located where Fox did this, if it was in his writing or in a sermon. An article was also included on the Reverend Newenham Travers, educated at Lincoln College, Oxford, who had converted from Anglicanism to Unitarianism and was lecturing before the congregation at the Finsbury Chapel – it seems likely the detailed account of his introductory, and agitated, remarks on article XVIII of the Church of England’s articles of faith, was based on Duncan’s shorthand notes.29 Travers’ ‘polished’ lectures led him to becoming assistant minister at the point when Fox wished to resign from ministerial work.30 Duncan left a copy of Flowers and Fruits – his calling card as man of letters and progressive, evidently, at the altar, during one of those typical episodes in his career when the delivery of a tract on vegetarianism led to threats of police assistance.

FIGURE 28. William Johnson Fox, an engraving, after a portrait by Eliza Flower, in Wolverhampton Art Gallery. © Wolverhampton City Council.

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Duncan’s fragment of a novel, we have seen, was intended to dramatise the conflict between atheism and Anglicanism – and yet the section that was published showed him, through the character of the heroine, discussing the nature of Christian truth sympathetically. Thus, while he expressed typical Chartist / Owenite anti-clericalism, he could imagine – employing well-known metaphors from scripture – the argument that a ‘religion so beautiful, so consistent, so widely, and long and firmly believed, a religion so pure, could have been invented … could such purity flow from a corrupt fountain? Could such elevated morality originate with men – with man, fallen man?’ Would God, the all good, a God of truth, permit his own creatures to be thus widely deluded, were it a delusion? And could a mere human invention delude thus widely? No, neither could a morality so beautiful have originated with corrupt man; nor could it spread among man’s corrupt race – not by the sword, but by calm reason and persuasion – unless by the aid of the most high – unless it were something more than a mere human invention [,] an invention, of corrupt Priests, as some call it: pure water from corruption – birds of Paradise from pestiferous tombs – grapes of thorns, figs of thistles! A critic of the Anglican establishment, Duncan yet saw the masterpiece by Wren in St Paul’s Cathedral as ‘sufficient to counterbalance all her faults’ – a rare instance of his aesthetic sensibility regarding the built environment.31 Duncan called the classically-styled Unitarian chapel a ‘Divinearian Chapel’ (the chapel, designed by William Brooks, with a fourcolumned Ionic portico, was closed in 1927). Duncan’s attraction to this place is not surprising: the sermons which Fox delivered were, for years, political in nature rather than religious, as James Grant observed in Sketches of London in 1839: ‘His favourite topics for pulpit discussion are now “The Liberty of the Press,” “Duelling,” “Church Rates,” “Coronations,” “The Aristocracy,” and those other topics which constitute the staple materials for newspaper writing.’ 32 The theological aspect of Duncan’s mission was the promotion of a religion – ‘divinianity’ – superior to Christianity. This was also a distinction Duncan was keen to make, between himself and the atheism of someone like Holyoake, although he argued that even this was entitled, with ‘all religions’, to state patronage.33 In Flowers and Fruits he had commented on prayer, not as delusion and superstition, but an acknowledgement ‘to the mightiness and magnificence, and apparent order of the Universe’. And,

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in this light, methinks, even the Atheist, be there but a spark of poetry in his soul, may regard religion as beautiful, and even the superstition that bows to stocks and stones. In the same light might he also regard the temples of religion, even the humblest, with interest, and respect, and those more nobly and magnificent with additional awe, that is as a practical acknowledgment to the majesty of the Universe.34 Perhaps we can discern the impact of Thomas Cooper, on his journey from Chartism towards Christian apologist, when he was listened to by crowded audiences in the Scientific and Literary Institution at John Street in London in 1847, delivering a series of lectures which propounded, according to Holyoake, ‘Christian-Pantheism, or Pantheistic-Christianity, readers may term it which they will.’35 Possibly too, given the religious overtones to John Goodwyn Barmby’s brand of socialism, we can detect the influence of his communism. When Barmby was the subject of scandal with the allegation of sexual impropriety levelled against him by a maid in 1844, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper had published the following note to correspondents, from a review (actually appearing in The Penny Satirist, 31 August 184436) sent in, to show Barmby was a ‘strange and infatuated being’: ‘Barmby has long been asserting his claims to the Messiahship. He is now only twenty-four or twenty-five years of age; but when he was twenty, he boldly declared his mission, as being to the Christian dispensation what that of Christ was to the Jewish. He now makes no secret of his Messiahship; it is a prominent feature of his publications. He does not even hesitate to declare himself Johanna [sic] Southcott’s Shiloh come at last’ (Barmby called for the opening of Southcott’s prophetic writings, in the Communist Chronicle).37 Barmby’s defence of communism from the criticisms of Giuseppe Mazzini appeared in The People’s Journal in 1847 (Mazzini had stated: ‘There is not the merest poet whose imagination cannot in certain moments build ten Utopias similar to yours but they will always remain impracticable unless man is first of all raised to their level.’)38 Duncan, at least, did not actually declare himself the Messiah, or the Pontiffarch, as Barmby had done (Barmby was now a Unitarian minister, established at Southampton in 1849; the year of Duncan’s new periodical saw the Agapemone sect obtain great notoriety in the press, a trial for false imprisonment of one of the female Agapemonites in a lunatic asylum, heard in Westminster Hall, witnessed Agapemonites declaring that their leader Henry James Prince was not the Messiah). ‘In fine,’ Duncan declared, ‘we shall enunciate the Gospel of DIVINIANITY – we shall Preach the Divine Truth and Proclaim the Divine Dispensation, and Herald the coming of the True Saviour – the Messiah, by the Most High, ordained to

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direct the transition of Christianity into Divinianity!’ Like some Miltonic invocation, but employing conventional scriptural imagery, Duncan wrote: O, Sire Divine! – Illume my soul with light, So I thy truth – thy holy truth may write. O, bid thy spirit down from Heaven descend, With my young mind inspiringly to blend. Give – give me power to pen man’s future weal – To teach the truths which sages aged reveal, And aid the coming of that glorious time Foretold for earth in thine own words sublime, When every man ’neath his own vine shall rest, And none shall live to stir with fear his breast; The warrior’s bow shall string the minstrel’s harp, His hero glave be bent for sickle sharp, The dagger beat to serve as pruning hook, The spear’s long staff be made an orchard crook, The red pike forged the sod’s bright ploughshare – saith the book – Thine edge ‘Sword of the Lord,’ intense and keen, Dented with blows, warning of what hath been; Thy bolts of wrath hurled in the rebellious past, In heaven-ruled heat of hell recast – recast! Then human hearts no more shall vengeful burn, But through the world with love fraternal yearn, Moved of thy holy grace – all God-ward turn! He was a divinarian because ‘mercy is a Divine attribute, an erring brother ought to be reformed, not punished, and … on account of believing in like truths, and a Divine Power over governing Nature,’ he told readers of the paean, Tocsin ’gainst Tyranny in 1848. Flowers and Fruits had expounded his optimistic interpretation of man’s fate: made to rejoice, and not, as some priests believed, the blasphemies of gloomy brow and grief so that when man died there would be ‘Mercy from Nature’s deity’.39 Duncan wrote of the advantage that believers would have over their atheist brethren when meeting them in the afterlife.40 One should not see Duncan in isolation from the various other attempts to construct new theisms, whether Barmby’s communist church, Greaves’s sacred socialism, or Francis Foster Barham’s ‘Alistic Association for the Advancement of Divinity’. 41 The manifesto of the German Democrats, issued in the same year as Duncan’s journal, had extolled art and poetry in place of religion. 42

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In Duncan’s mind, it seems that poetry would function as the means to convey his religious truths rather than as a surrogate. The role of the harmonic in the schemes of the utopian social reformers of the era might be a fruitful subject for further research – after all, such reformers were described as crotcheteers. Duncan had studied Charles Fourier’s ideas on music, as editor of the Morning Star, footnoting an abridged essay on Fourier, with a comment on Fourier’s notion of the ‘musical’, ‘not the mere performance on an instrument, but the science of harmony and composition. Fourier maintains that there is the same harmony throughout the different orders of the creation as there is between different sounds in music. His views on the point are very striking, and we shall not fail shortly to lay them before our readers.’43 One did not have to be a follower of the Frenchman to believe in the elevating and democratising role of music – this was an era in which the counter-attractions of music making, and organised music making for the millions, could be seen by the conservative-minded and the reformist as a way of addressing the challenges of intemperance and political radicalism. Hymns were an important aspect of early Victorian culture and it was therefore not surprising that social and political reform movements created their own hymns and hymn collections – including Owenites, Chartists, communists (courtesy of Barmby), antislavery abolitionists and temperance activists. Music, as well as dancing at social halls, made Owen’s interminable lectures bearable, one writer observed; Owenites had been urged to use the Social Hymns at all branch congregational meetings, and to adapt ‘popular melodies’ to the hymns.44 Musical reformers such as the German émigré Joseph Mainzer advocated musical teaching and making (‘singing for the million’ – his work of that title published in 1842 even included maxims at the back, and songs about humility, self-respect and prudence), as a way of elevating society and ‘allaying bad passions’.45 The New Moral World, reviewing Mainzer’s Association for Popular and Gratuitous Instruction in Singing, had identified the ‘mission of the musician from Orpheus and Musæus downward, has been grand and harmonizing’.46 Mainzer, it was said, promised to assist in adapting the Owenite hymns; another musical populariser, John Hullah, was also enthusiastically reviewed in the New Moral World.47 William Lovett and John Collins’ Chartism. A New Organization of the People (1840) defended musical instruction via songs ‘conveying sentiments of the most exalted description, inculcating the love of freedom, social and domestic happiness, giving praise to good deeds, exalting virtue and condemning vice’, and on the basis of the ‘irresistible influence’ of song on individual and national character. 48 Others saw music as a prophylactic against Chartism – ‘We greatly prefer musical

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staves to specials’ staffs,’ commented the Mirror Monthly Magazine in 1848.49 The Literary and Scientific Institution at John Street, which had its own choir, was the venue for an Apollonic Society – singing the Marseilles Hymn on one occasion, for the celebrations of Tom Paine’s birthday, and at other times, Handel’s oratorios (the Society was advertised by the freethought journal The Reasoner).50 Yet William Hazlitt, in his lectures on the English poets, had associated music with deep-rooted passion, ‘mad people sing’.51 Duncan’s gatherumomnium of reforms included the ‘Sequential System of Musical Notation’ – perhaps the system which had appeared under that title in a pamphlet by ‘Arthur Wallbridge’ published by William Strange, reviewed in the New Moral World in 1843: proposed as a method ‘of writing music in perfect accordance with nature, and combining simplicity of construction with capability of expressing any degree of complexity’. One suspects Duncan’s attention was drawn to it by the fact it appeared after the review of his Flower and Fruits.52 The Sequential System’s pseudonymous author was William Arthur Brown Lunn, who was, inter alia, much interested by the changing conceptions of crime and madness, and author of an account of two days ‘passed at that magnificent and Philosophically Conducted Establishment for the Insane Torrington Hall outside Bath in 1844’.53 Another part of the ‘Divinearian’ programme was to be the metrical or lyrical presentation of ‘all liberal, enlightened and progressive ideas’ to the public, and thus indoctrinate (his word) ‘the national mind’ through a Society, the Divinearian Apollonica – ‘The sentiments and ideas it is intended shall be versified in these harmonics, are, for example, Man made to Rejoice – in the President only will God save the King – a Good Deed better than Good Creed – Live the Right Life mid Yeas and Nays – The Good Time – when? The Good Will – then! – Fair Queen, spare us that Tree: O spurn it now! – Boast not thou knowest God, while there’s mystery in the Daisy54: humbly walk his Sod, so his Spirit may upraise ye!’ Poetry was to have a public and communal role. 55 The ‘perfected specimen’ he offered, to the tune of Robert Burns’ ‘Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled’56, entitled ‘The Heart of Man is burning’ was simply some rehashed doggerel previously appearing as the ‘Hymn of Liberty’ in the Northern Star in 1845, and in which the bard was now envisioning: ‘An angel earthward winging,|A pen of Eden bringing, to fair Victoria singing | The People’s Charter sign!’ In his egotism, he saw himself, clearly, in the role of an apostle of the messiahdom, as the journal’s title implied. The gospel brought by angelic messenger was to be

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political liberty, as well as ‘those plain spoken terms of Common Sense and Sterling Conscience’ Duncan had introduced the journal with. In October 1849 Duncan had, according to his own testimony, intervened in the crowded squalor of Houndsditch when an old lady, a Jew, was being harassed by a mob of boys and adults (of Jews and Christians, he claimed – Houndsditch being associated with the Jewish secondhand clothes trade), and he forced his way through the crowd, rebuked them and rescued her. It was an act of bravery reminiscent of that episode in 1848 in Clerkenwell Green. He accompanied her back to her home near the entrance of the Eastern Counties Railway (Shoreditch), and inevitably left a copy of Flowers and Fruits by way of taking his farewell, thinking money would be indelicate: ‘I have since learnt from the daughters that their mother has been admitted into the poor-house, whither she took my book to cheer her heart, and in memory of me as a keepsake.’ He followed the record with some verse on the ‘Female Elisha’, in which he figured as one who was ‘taught in the Social Halls’, unlike her Christian and Jewish tormentors, ‘(He who himself a Divinarian calleth, |And branded Infidel the world appalleth:)’.57 That Duncan went around the City with a copy of his book (which was very slim, admittedly), that he felt the only incident to include in the ‘Divinarian Record’ in The Divinearian (and note that he could not himself agree on the spelling of his own religion) was his own good deed, is another indication of his egotism. Or perhaps it was an indication of his isolation. Yet the Record was intended to include brief statements of similar practice from his readers. He himself saw vegetable diet, water drinking, ‘daily ablution’ and ‘attending at all possible public meetings of a progressive character to gain instruction’, as part of being a Divinarian. There was no mention of getting a living, of family duties, of anything in the realm of the practical. There is no indication of romantic attachment in Duncan’s real life as opposed to his poetic life – although the biographical material is admittedly so sparse. We have seen that Duncan’s Divinearian programme encompassed reform of the divorce laws, and equality for women, something which would have been viewed as laughable (as shown, for instance, by the numerous cartoons on female emancipation, female law courts, female parliaments, in the Comic Almanac in 184958) to the majority who did not accept this tenet of socialism. He also advocated a more benign approach to prostitution – ‘puritals’ or homes for women. In 1845 his Morning Star had reported the proposal expressed during the party to send off Etzler to Venezuela, held at the Parthenium Coffee House Club Room, St Martin’s Lane:

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Woman, may she in the land of our adoption be made free. May she obtain equal rights and privileges with the other sex, who have for ages been her masters. Proposed by Messrs Hearne and Russell, and responded to by Mrs Bissell, who made a very clever and sensible speech, in which she read a very good lesson to the other sex for their neglect of home, and especially of the mental cultivation of woman, so as to make her a natural and happy companion. 59 Duncan later described Eliza Cook’s Journal (which was first issued in May 1849) as the female counterpart to Chambers’s Journal, ‘the genial tenderness of affection’. In Flowers and Fruits the first poem, ‘The Beauties of Nature, or Man Made to Rejoice’ imagined the poet seeing a queen of flowers, ‘All moist, and sparkling with bright dews; | And wet and blushing seemed a maid | Just bathed; and thus, while disarrayed,| Surprised, confused by wanderer’s glance,’ an accidental disrobing that (perhaps apocryphally), featured elsewhere in Duncan’s poetic fancy. 60 He also imagined a naiad, ‘Laving her graceful, fay like form, |So fair, so pure, so beautiful, Like to yon marble statue … Her dark and glossy hair, | With water lilies wreathed’. One suspects that a conflation of these two poems and a humorous aside in Flowers and Fruits brought about by surprising ‘O ye Gods! – a “fair ladye” EN CHEMISE’, brought about Holyoake’s mischievous recollection of Duncan’s dire poetic fancy. 61 In ‘Friendship’s Offering’, a short poem annotated ‘The author’s first,’ (whatever that meant), he praised sweetness and intellect combined in the form of a woman, who was her own true emblem, and not the unsatisfactory combination of poetic emblems which were the ‘sweet empty words the poet sings’.62 In the partner to that poem, ‘Love’s Offering’, writing as one ‘in young love’s chains’, and eschewing ‘another’s strains | T’express my love for thee –’ he imagined himself a bee, ‘That honey drop to sip’.63 Dark eyed and raven haired widows fair appeared too in his poetry.64 Had he ever been made wary by a wayward Mary like the faery of the mossy stile? In Edward Noble, apropos of the dark eyed and religious young widow in the company of his hero and heroine, he comments: ‘let it be remembered, that ladies, whether religious or not, are but women after all, and what makes women such dear creatures? Is it prudery? Malthus how unfortunate for you – at least for your theory.’65 It is possible, as I have suggested earlier, that Duncan’s memorial sonnet to Mrs Honey referred to a celebrated young actress, and one may assume that Duncan had seen plays and singers on the London stage. He certainly thought that Chambers’s Journal lacked gallantry when they were critical of their brethren of the metropolis for ‘their loyal admiration of the fair queen of song Jenny Lind’ – the Swedish Nightingale – who was trying to

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abandon the operatic stage from religious scruples, in her return to performances in London in 1849.66 There was also what had the appearance of being a serial, at least it was styled, ‘The Sportsman of Principle. Part I,’ and figured a teetotal hatter, Edwin Scrace Wilkinson of Reading, as the hero, who ‘had a plain but good education, such as should constitute the substance of every youth’s instruction at school’. He was not merely interested in trade, but interested in reformation too and his soul ‘soars above gain or emolument’. Maybe this was an echo of Duncan’s own self-image, but it is not clear that this was Duncan’s own prose.67 For in fact, the Northern Star, in its ‘New Year’s Wreath’ on 1 January 1848, printed a paragraph on Wilkinson, ‘We lately received a packet of hand-bills published and circulated by E.S. Wilkinson, “Hatter and Sportsman,” of 99 Broad street, Reading. These bills are, in their way, “curiosities” of shop-keeping “literature”. The author announces that he deals in “Hunting. Shooting, Fishing, and Peaching Hats;” but the said announcement is made subsidiary to the more important contents of the bills—denunciation of the Game Laws. These denunciations are both in prose and poetry. We subjoin a specimen.’ It printed ‘The Prince and the Peasant’, a game law ditty which Mike Sanders has described as ‘unremarkable’, and advised middle-class friends to follow the Reading hatter and write verse on the: abominations of class-legislation and the necessity for the Charter; on the evils of land-monopoly and the advantages of the Chartist Land Plan; on the folly of war and ‘national glory:’ and the true glory of international fraternity. By taking this course they might accelerate the progress of justice, freedom, fraternity, truth, and public happiness.68 It seems inevitable that Wilkinson’s trade was that of hatter, although, despite the proverbial wisdom, there is no suggestion that he was mad, in the newspaper reports.69 Edwin Wilkinson, born at Bristol in 1809, was the elder brother of George Paul Wilkinson of the London Hat Warehouse at 99 Broad Street, Reading (George Wilkinson would relocate to Finsbury Pavement, and become bankrupt by the 1880s). Edwin Wilkinson was violently assaulted by a man employed to look after game on an estate at Sonning in September 1846, and the gamekeeper was tried at the summer assizes before Justice Erle in July 1847: the gamekeeper evidently thought there was a dodge going on for it was alleged in court that Wilkinson carried a stuffed jay, which allowed him to maintain he had shot at a jay in flight and was unaware of the presence of cover or game preserve. He said facetiously in reply to a question in court, that he ‘did not give lectures on

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the game laws, although it was a very fine field for it, and should have no objection to so’. Yet, as the Reading Mercury’s account of the trial alleged, Wilkinson’s anti-game laws text had been widely disseminated (one paper describes him having a ‘contract for pasting bills around Reading’). 70 He had appeared before the courts for trespass before, in fact he was convicted ten times for offences against the game laws by July 1847, losing one appeal at the Quarter Sessions, and being imprisoned in Oxford Castle for default of payment of a fine for trespass in 1850.71 Chartists had seen the games laws as a ‘nefarious measure for keeping the people in subjection’.72 According to official statistics, they resulted in an increasing number of convictions from 3,004 in 1848 to 4,079 in 1849 (a 34 per cent increase).73 Wilkinson displayed his attitude to the laws by showing ‘upwards of 1,000 partridges and pheasant eggs in his shop window’. He was ‘bearded like a pard’.74 Why Duncan should have been interested in the man in his journal is to be explained by a curious incident in early 1849, when he actually travelled to Reading to attend court when Wilkinson charged the former mayor of Reading, the maltster and corn dealer John Yard Willats, with his false imprisonment in Reading Gaol in December 1846 in a proceeding following the conviction in November for trespass, and was awarded by the Judge Baron Rolfe a farthing’s damages, as it was, in the words of the jury, ‘an aggravating thing got up by the plaintiff’. Duncan’s intervention at the end of this case was typical of the young man. We know it was Duncan here, although he was not identified by name by the reporters, and does not himself refer to it in the surviving number of The Divinearian, because of the detailed descriptions in the Reading Mercury and the Berkshire Chronicle. The former reported the incident of Duncan’s intervention at the end of the proceedings, when Richard Godson QC (a ‘conservative Liberal’ MP for Kidderminster who died later in that year) and J.J. Williams had lost the case for their client against Serjeant Talfourd, thus: A strange looking person, who paid great attention to the case as it proceeded, here suddenly jumped up from his seat and said, ‘As a protest against this decision I fling these bills among you,’ and then quickly made his exit, no doubt fearing the learned Judge would direct his immediate committal to gaol. The bills were on Chartism and similar subjects. To the reporter of the Berkshire Chronicle, the incident had created ‘some surprise and merriment’ due to the ‘very strange appearance of the party … having a very formidable beard and moustaches’. From his coat

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Duncan had taken a roll of papers and with great warmth and boldness he had, to show his contempt for the jury’s decision ‘scattered them in derision’. The pamphlets had been flung around Baron Rolfe and the gentlemen at the table, and appeared to ‘contain inflammatory matter and twaddle of the most worthless kind’. The reporter thought it a trick to give circulation to this material. Rolfe, ‘with the greatest good humour, merely made inquiries as to the singular individual who, also during the trial, took copious notes for the plaintiff’. Duncan’s intervention here remained anonymous, so far as we can tell: if the local press had been aware they had a metropolitan Chartist of some notoriety there would no doubt have been more to say. After assaults on the high bailiff of the county court in 1850, which required a special summoning of the Reading magistrates in December 1850, Wilkinson next surfaced in 1852 in advertisements geared towards Australian emigration, mobilising Shakespeare, ‘Gold! Yellow, glittering precious Gold’: ‘AUSTRALIAN ADVENTURERS! “UNION IS STRENGTH.”’: It is partially requested that none become Adventurers who have not the fullest faith and unbounded confidence.’75 This presented Wilkinson as ‘confidential agent’ for free passage, ‘Adventurers will be registered for inspection, unless they personally object. Intending Adventurers should become so immediately.’ Later references to Wilkinson involved travelling fraudulently to Reading from Paddington without a fare in 1866 and, similarly, when ‘an elderly man of respectable appearance’, in 1874. He claimed that he had ‘had a great deal of trouble, and his intellect was impaired’.76 Trade and reform combined elsewhere in the journal. For Duncan promoted oatmeal with a stanza alluding to William Wallace, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and John Knox all being raised on the food – genuine scotch oatmeal being sold by ‘James Duncan, sen’ who was described as an accountant. His son, as the author, listed his own address differently, as ‘Hermitage Bridge, 353, Commerce Strand, West of Wapping Old Stairs’, though it was the same place and no doubt reflected James Elmslie Duncan’s desire to disassociate himself from Wapping, as he had also done in the pe-ans77 (and mention of the stairs, between 288 and 304 Wapping, might well have evoked misplaced thoughts of Charles Dibdin’s popular ballad of Molly in the minds of any reader). The journal was printed by Archibald Syme of 47 Hatton Garden, Holborn, who was also the printer of James Bronterre O’Brien’s Social Reformer, which appeared in the same year. One wonders what the typesetters thought of a work which reads at times like a madman’s manuscript. Of its circulation and readership we know nothing – perhaps Duncan hawked copies in his travels around central London, but there

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were to be no reviews of the new journal in any newspapers or progressive papers. It is certain that we are paying more attention to his words here than were ever done in 1849.  In late April 1849 Duncan’s presence was reported in the Northern Star, at the Chartist journalist Edmund Stallwood’s lecture on the writings of Thomas Paine at the Assembly Rooms, 21 Golden-lane, Cripplegate, supporting a motion of thanks to the lecturer, and reciting an ode in memory of Paine, who had died in 1809.78 Paine, part of the inheritance of metropolitan radicalism, gave his name to one metropolitan Chartist ‘locality’, and was the subject of a lecture by Thomas Cooper in aid of the Chartist victim fund, in early 1849, an anonymous poem in the Northern Star, a biography published by William James Linton, and a birthday festival at John Street Institute.79 An anonymous poem, but written by William Edmonstone Aytoun, entitled ‘The Golden Age’, which was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1852, recalled: ‘With gibbering glee the ghost of Thomas Paine | Heard the old watchwords thrill the streets again, and eager Chartists murmured as they ran | “The Age of Reason and the Rights of Man!”’ (the poet also mentioned the London minstrels, ‘shrining’ the ‘foul Megaera’ in their lays).80 On 23 July 1849 Duncan attempted to address a meeting at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street in the City, a popular venue for public meetings, which was intending to consider the ‘present condition of Hungary’: Richard Cobden, Lord Nugent, Lord Dudley Stuart and other Liberal MPs, were on the platform, to respond to the ‘interference of a neighbouring power with an independent nation’. Unfortunately, Duncan, and the Chartist leader and writer G.W.M. Reynolds, decided to interrupt and interfere with this meeting – Reynolds to discuss the political divisions in Britain, Duncan to mount the platform – and the chairman, Reynolds, and Duncan in vain endeavoured to obtain a hearing together. The Era declared it ‘the most turbulent meeting’ ever held in the City of London. It was, in fact, ‘a complete bear garden from beginning to end,’ with Cobden, the Liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne and others, leaving the meeting at the height of the disturbance.81 Duncan was absent from the newspapers for several months after that – perhaps involved in the production of his journal The Divinearian. Then, in 14 January 1850 he was again causing disarray at an evening meeting, this time the first metropolitan gathering of the National Charter Association at the London Tavern: the venue filled with working men and their wives (‘carrying in their arms infants of tender years’) and, ‘to judge by their

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bearded visages, … a few foreign sympathizers,’ with Feargus O’Connor taking the chair.82 After various addresses were given, by Reynolds, Philip M’Grath, William John Vernon (the forty-year-old lecturer in mesmerism and phrenology imprisoned in 1848, who had just been released83), George Julian Harney and Samuel Kydd, Duncan had leapt up on his chair in front of the platform, perhaps stimulated by Harney’s sanguine comments on French red republicanism (Harney launched the journal Red Republican in that year), ‘and with his arms thrown out and his eyes staring wildly over an immense unkempt beard, exclaiming, “Am I to hold my tongue? Am I to hold my tongue, as this reporter says?” … Great confusion ensued, while the man staggered over the reporter’s table on to the platform, and Mr O’Connor chose that opportunity to leave the chair for the evening.’84 The Times, without giving Duncan’s name, offered more details: a man with red beard ‘danced in, among and on the reporters’ hats with great energy’, and rushed to the platform ‘with a round bit of coloured paper in his hand’ and with wild gesticulations shouted ‘Chartists, will you allow it? I’m insulted! Here is the flag of the Charter. Liberty or death!’85 Dickens’s Household Narrative similarly reported it, including the same detail from The Times that O’Connor had addressed ‘a few words to the angry gentleman beside him and having appealed to his good sense not to make a disturbance quickly announced that he must vacate the chair as he had eight miles to go.’86 One paper decided that he had possibly been inflamed at the prospect that O’Connor, who had broken into verse of his own (Unite! Unite! Ye Chartists brave,| Let the land your watchword be;| Scout, oh scout the servile slave | That croutches when he may be free.’ The Times asterisking every spelling error in O’Connor’s original), about despots, wanted to deprive him of his lays, as the Chartist lyrist.87 It is the only reported instance of Duncan speaking with the great Chartist leader, but hardly under impressive circumstances. It is also the only report (apart from Duncan’s own) to allude to his ruddy hair – an interesting aspect of his appearance if true, since red hair (as now) has certain associations. Punch, for instance, reporting a hostile account of one other young Chartist jumping up to the platform, in 1841 at a meeting of the St Pancras Young Men’s Anti-Monopoly Association, observed ‘Red hair was first made infamous by Judas ISCARlOT … Red hair is doubtless the brand of Providence; the mark set upon guilty man to give note and warning to his unsuspicious fellow-creatures. Like the scarlet light at the North Foreland, it speaks of shoals, and sands, and flats.’88 Ernest Jones and Feargus O’Connor also had red hair. 89

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‘Nothing could exceed the insane violence and rabid ferocity of most of the speakers,’ one reporter decided – a mere ‘huddling together of the scattered elements of the old physical-force Chartist Rump’, it was doomed to failure.90 A ‘fearful riot at a political meeting’ led to Duncan’s next appearance in the press, as a ‘Chartist poet, vegetarian, teetotaler, financial reformer, &c., &., in trouble’ (as The Era subtitled its article). Because the offence was committed within the police court division of Thames Police Court, he was charged at the court there, at East Arbour Street in Stepney (it had been relocated from Wapping in 1842), with wilful and malicious destruction of property, when he disturbed a reform meeting of the Tower Hamlets parliamentary and financial reformers in Sion Chapel, Union Street, Whitechapel road (a theatre which was converted by the Countess of Huntingdon into a large evangelical chapel in 1790), presided over by Messrs Fry and W.J. Hall of Custom-house Quay, Lower Thames Street. The meeting had gone well until Duncan’s appearance. As one paper reported, he ‘acted more like a madman than anything else’ – putting himself into extraordinary attitudes when he had jumped on to the platform (or the table), despite being called to leave.91 The meeting (28 January) was attended by Sir Joshua Walmsley, MP for Leicester, the slavery abolitionist George Thompson, MP for Tower Hamlets, William Williams, the former MP for Coventry, G.W.M. Reynolds, and Tower Hamlets reformers, and attended by over 6,000. A National Parliamentary and Financial and Association had been formed in May 1849 by Walmsley, Thompson and others. Duncan had been dealt with courteously by the chairman, Hall, and persuaded to leave the platform at the start of the meeting, but attempted to address the audience at the end after Thompson and other speakers had spoken, his posture and outré appearance leading to groans and cries to get him out (with some vociferous cheers from a few). He sought to tell the audience that not only was he a Chartist, ‘but a firm supporter of communism, socialism, and other similar doctrines, and that he had written to the queen in furtherance of those (to him) important subjects’ (surely an allusion to the letter he had included in The Divinearian, about reconstructing the government to be a ministry of democratic talents). As reported, this brought disapproval from the audience. The most detailed account of the extraordinary scene that followed, appeared in the Daily News: After the lapse of about ten minutes, and the hour being 11 o’clock, Mr Thompson, seeing the disposition of the meeting to break up, proposed a vote of thanks to Mr Hall, the chairman, and as the assemblage was about giving three cheers to that gentleman, the

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prisoner, in the most frantic style, made an attempt to jump on the table, at the same moment crying out ‘Three cheers for a new Democratic Cabinet.’ He was immediately caught hold of by Mr Thompson, Mr Hall, and other gentlemen, and brought down. The fellow, however, kicked and struggled violently, and after several ups and downs, during which water bottles, candles, and other articles, were scattered on the floor, he took up a position on the table with a candlestick in each hand, apparently in great triumph, and looked down on the wreck he had made with satisfaction and disdain. 92 Despite the entreaties, and calls from the audience to get the police and drag him out, he stood there for ten minutes, then, as the chapel was due to be closed, he leaped at the pulpit, damaging the gasburners and the Bible board of the pulpit, when he sought to move an address to the Queen, as the ‘chief magistrate of free people’, for ‘I have a veneration for her Majesty, and it is but right the prayers of the people should reach the Throne.’ Several thousand of the audience clambered over the pews of the chapel towards the pulpit. The London Standard report has the most detailed account of the court exchange between Duncan and the magistrate. ‘I was resolved to do what my conscience told me was right,’ he told the magistrate, Edward Yardley. ‘You had better not let your conscience bring you under the cognizance of the law,’ was the reply. ‘I hold that, whatever the law may be, I must obey the dictates of my conscience. Let me state my motives –.’93 His conscience acquitted himself of all blame, he told Yardley – a very perverted conscience, the magistrate replied. The court messenger, John Cass Waller, who had been a police inspector in K division in June 1848, pointed out that Duncan had been wounded at Bonner’s Field on 12 June 1848 and charged by Ballantine with carrying firearms and using threats, and was ‘very riotous’.94 Yardley suggested Duncan’s friends should pay some attention to him, picking up the comment of the chapel’s keeper, William Lowe, that he had behaved like a madman; Yardley thought he did not look ‘very unlike’ a madman now.95 He was still haranguing the court as he left, annoyed at not being able to state his motives publicly to the magistrate – having been dealt with by Yardley in a lenient manner, as not guilty of wilful destruction – passionately talking of the Charter, reform, equal rights, equal laws, and universal freedom as he left, followed by a large number of people. The court then turned to the matter of three notorious and well-dressed thieves (members of the ‘swell mob’) who had also been present at the chapel, for the purpose of committing a felony.96 Other papers provide further details. The court – indicative of the level of Duncan’s notoriety now – was filled with a ‘great number of persons

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anxious to see the poet and to hear the investigation’. He wore a heavy greatcoat, torn in several places. In the felons’ dock, his arms folded, he took a defiant pose. He was advised by Yardley to ‘reform his own habits before he attempted to reform the finances and the Legislature of the nation’.97 He had that within him that passeth all show, he replied to Yardley (quoting Hamlet) when Yardley again alluded to his appearance. Yardley thought this (Duncan pulled away the coat to reveal his disordered underclothes and linen, he said his waistcoat and shirt had been torn by the financial and political reformers, after having declared his status as vegetarian, teetotaler and a lover of peace) was not such as to carry weight in any assembly. A day after this appearance there was another violent scene (The Era, indeed, brought the two incidents together in its news 98): in late January 1850 he appeared before the court as a result of causing extensive damage at J.J. Grant’s (or Browne’s) coffee-shop in Cable Street, off Wellclose Square (where the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg had settled when he came to London). His court appearance, with his enormous beard, moustache and bushy head of hair, was extraordinary, according to one press reporter – the good-humoured advice from Yardley, the magistrate at his previous court appearance, to reform himself had not begun yet. Yardley would not have been surprised, probably, as he had said his advice to Duncan would be thrown away.99 Coffee houses were, alongside pubs, the venues for Chartist discussion in this period – indeed the 1848 conspirators in London met at a number of coffee houses in Seven Dials, Cripplegate, Fleet Street, Shoreditch and elsewhere through the summer. But this did not mean that politics were welcome in other places, and evidently Grant did not want his place to be the site for political debate, which Duncan attempted to begin among customers after ordering coffee and toast – smashing a dresser, window pane and blind, and two dozen and a half cups and saucers when this was forbidden. Duncan refused to leave, complaining later that he had not been asked to go in ‘a proper manner’, and calling Grant a ‘––– miscreant’. He violently resisted the policeman who had been called by the proprietor. The court heard him expound in a ‘long and violent harangue’, about politics, the Charter and his rights as a Briton, and ‘that he was hunted and annoyed because the reporters and newspapers had aspersed his character’. Violent gesticulations were directed at the people in the court by Duncan, and after being told to address the magistrate, he again spoke on a ‘variety of topics quite irrelevant to the question at issue, and said he was an oppressed and much injured man’. He was imprisoned by James Taylor Ingham, the magistrate, for fourteen days, as he could not (or would not – as one report said) afford the damages.100

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On Friday 17 May he surfaced again in the press, for two days before he disturbed an evening meeting at the Finsbury Chapel on the Marriages Affinity Bill (not a question which one would have thought he had strong views on, although divorce law reform did get his support 101) and assaulted a policeman. Although asked to leave by the secretary he rushed through another door, and leaped on the platform to address the meeting. The policeman was struck as Duncan struggled to escape. At the police station a Mr Thompson of the Minories had volunteered to speak in Duncan’s favour, but then withdrawn this after having ‘ascertained the prisoner’s character’. Duncan claimed in court that he had wished to address the audience with a poem in support of the meeting’s object, but refused a hearing he instead decided to throw the manuscript at the reporters, ‘because he had faith in them’. ‘He was a man of peace, and as long as he was treated like a fellow being he would consider every man his friend; but while he was treated as a savage and a monster, he would resist to the utmost in his power.’102 Having embraced an outré appearance, he was now experiencing the prejudice that this stimulated – Duncan could only declare ‘his general character had been greatly mistaken’. Moreover, he asserted at the police station when arrested, that he intended ‘to attend any meeting he liked and speak his mind’.103 When he appeared at the Guildhall (where cases were heard in the city of London when west of King Street), he was described by a reporter as ‘shabby-genteel’. He was sentenced by Alderman Robert Carden to prison for a week, or a 5s fine.104 Carden observed, ‘had it not been for his character being such that none could place any confidence in him, he would have had some respectable parties to speak for him; but as the case stood, they were afraid to appear.’ Interestingly, asked by Carden if he was not the Chartist Poet, he ‘replied that he was generally known by that cognomen, but that he did not acknowledge the title himself’. 105 In the same month he appeared in court again, tellingly reported in one paper under the headline of a ‘Specimen of Chartism’, charged with riotous conduct in his father’s house – destroying a great quantity of his father’s property, and then causing damage at the police station-house. This was not the heroic defence of liberty, nor the courageous promotion of progressive causes, but violence towards a parent, and immature petulance. In court, his long beard reached to his waist now. Insisting on speaking, only the threat of being sent back to his cell (which, given the general standard of police cells in the capital, cannot have been salubrious106) quietened him, and he ‘put himself into one of his most extraordinary attitudes’. It appeared, so the Lady’s Newspaper reported, on 11 May 1850, that ‘though preaching liberty, equality, and fraternity abroad, [he] does not

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practice it at home’. He seemed to exemplify the trope of the libertarian and layabout youth which critics associated with Chartism.107 His odd hours were described to the court: breakfasting at four pm, dining at about midnight, supping at three or four in the morning. On Sunday afternoon he ‘rose at four o’clock, and entered the drawing room to partake of his breakfast, just as his father and the rest of the family were about making preparations for tea’. He wasted sugar and treacle on his own coffee making and James Duncan senior warned him he would eat them out of house and home after he spread a quarter of a pound of fresh butter over a slice of bread. The Chartist poet kicked the breakfast table away, saying it was an interference with his personal comforts, breaking everything on the table. After his father threw away the coffee down the sink, his son smashed the pembroke table to pieces. His brother and father managed to eject him into the shop below, where he proceeded to wreak destruction until police from the H and N divisions (Whitechapel and Islington) came. Only by striking his arms and legs could his hold on the shop counter be broken. He then pulled down shelves until he was exhausted. A stretcher was needed to take him to the Leman Street police station in Whitechapel, his father refusing to walk with him there – an act which enraged Duncan to the point that he had to be lashed to the stretcher by nine or ten constables. The damage was not over, as a constable’s hand on him as he was led to the cell, made him hit out and destroy writing desk, lamp and the balustrades to the stairs – truncheons being required to bring him under control after he clung to the arms of the policemen or slipped about like an eel.108 In court, Duncan admitted that, though unjustly accused in the past, he was in the wrong on this occasion, and that if his father would overlook his misconduct, he would not give him cause to complain again. Duncan senior, ‘with great reluctance … appeared against his son’. Knowing his failings as well as his good qualities, he believed his son would keep his word not to act so ‘extravagantly’.109 But it was not over: evidently, Duncan could not control himself now. (Given the diagnosis that would later be applied to Duncan, one may wonder if his outbursts of temper and the oddity of his eating habits went along with his medical condition.110) He resurfaced again in the press, in July 1850, after further eccentric public behaviour. He was charged with starting a riot at a public meeting in the London Tavern organised to agitate for the repeal of the new postal system which Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury) had triggered, in moving for Sunday post to be stopped. Present (Douglas Jerrold had been announced as the chair but could not attend) were radical figures such as

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William Williams, the former MP, the Irish barrister and Anti-Corn Law League activist Robert R.R. Moore, and the Chartist bookseller and stationer Charles Henry Elt of Islington. The most complete if confusing account appeared in The Times, with evidence from those present such as the journalist James Irvine Scott (who was later proprietor of The Reporter or London Monetary Times).111 Duncan had been sat in the reporters’ table writing, when a person who appeared drunk made a disturbance, in an offensive manner, and people in the audience proceeded to deal with him roughly. Duncan rushed towards the man, out of good motives, one witness thought, but (and here is where The Times report gets a bit confusing) he dragged the man, after seizing him, up and down, several times – yet the report is not too clear if this was Duncan being dragged, or the interloper. After the cry for the police, Duncan jumped on to the table, spilling ink and remaining in front of the chairman, Scott, striking several people right and left, and seizing an inkstand with the intention of throwing it. The evidence of several policemen was given next – one to the effect that he had orders to keep Duncan out of the London Tavern meeting, but that Duncan told him he would resist any attempt to keep him out, knowing the law, and that the result was a fight between Duncan and two policemen in which Duncan assaulted constable W. English 39, was kicked in the front several times and knocked down. The other policeman present told the magistrate the chain of events from Duncan having been ejected from the Tavern on the first occasion. Given into custody, Duncan was discharged when the parties withdrew their charge on the promise he would not go to the London Tavern again, which he broke by rushing back, assaulting the two policemen and declaring he would either kill or be killed. Strangely, despite all this violence, Duncan was apparently bound over for three months to keep the peace and be of good behaviour, with two sureties of £10 each. The Morning Chronicle noted that ‘after jumping on the table in his usual style, and scattering dismay among the bystanders, [he] was borne off by the police.’112 The Morning Post had further details, after hitting a heckler ‘in the face and body’, a petition which was to be presented to parliament was covered by Duncan in ink, and decanters and glasses smashed. In the court room at Mansion House in the city of London (the police court for all cases east of King Street), he turned his back on the magistrate, alderman Gibbs, and addressed the public, justifying his actions on the basis of justice and freedom of speech – and this was a claim supported by press reports which suggested he had been actuated by the desire to allow all parties a fair hearing, at a meeting which had been disrupted already by Sabbatarian ‘saints’ and their opponents.113

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Duncan was undoubtedly an embarrassment to other radicals. In an age of leaguing, organising, agitating and lecturing, the public and ticketed meeting was an important institution. They were, as Samuel Neil of Moffat wrote, in his guide to Public Meetings and How to Conduct Them in 1868, ‘a practical education in the management of thought and men as well as agencies for initiating reforms and effecting changes’.114 The Chartists had adopted the strategy of disrupting the meetings of rival or opposing groups in the 1840s – Anti-Corn Law meetings most notoriously – and London Chartists continued to exert pressure on other reform movements through invading meetings into the mid-1850s, but Duncan was a one-man engine of commotion.115 He liked to attend ‘all possible meetings of a progressive character to gain instruction’ but by his own account, he irritated his progressive brethren, who took measures to exclude him.116 At the Unitarian chapel at South Place, Finsbury Square, he was threatened with the police for hawking his vegetarian tract Do you eat flesh? and for running up to the pulpit to give an impromptu sermon on his philosophy. It was not surprising that William Johnson Fox declared (according to Duncan) that there was ‘much in me with which he is not in sympathy’. Duncan thought George Jacob Holyoake treated him ‘with contempt and actual insult’, because of his beard and his theism. 117 We have seen what Holyoake thought of Duncan’s antics, in January 1849. Duncan was also referred to by the editor of the Reasoner in October 1849 in a note appended to a letter of complaint by the freethinker Charles Southwell (imprisoned at Bristol for blasphemy in 1842), under the heading ‘The Right to Address Public Meetings’, that appeared in the journal after Southwell was accused of interrupting Wesleyan meetings: ‘We recall to our correspondent’s recollection the names of Brindley, Duncan, Callow, Puddefoot, Sparkhall, Mrs. Vaughan, ‘Christian’ Smith – not to recite others – who, in the same manner and upon a similar principle, have for years broken up the order of our assemblies–ED.’118 In the mainstream press, Duncan’s reputation as ‘A Disturber of Public Meetings’ was clear.119 Although the public meetings which Duncan so prized as sources of progressive culture, and as platforms for his own verse, were key aspects of popular politics and reform movements, they had their critics. The Spectator referred, in a phrase that reminds us of radicalism’s alleged pantomimic associations, to the ‘harlequinade gesticulations of platform cosmopolitan philanthropy’ in 1851.120 Another critical response, published in November 1852 in the Chartist Star of Freedom, under the title ‘The Farce of Public Meetings!’ judged that: ‘People go to “lectures,” “political soirees,” and “public meetings,” to be entertained and to indulge

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in that kind of mental excitement in search of which the denizens of the New Cut [Lambeth Marsh] throng to the “Royal Victoria,” and the elect of holies fill Exeter Hall “to suffocation”. The writer was disturbed by audiences’ delight in the ‘coarsest charlatanism,’ the ‘antics of a mountebank, or the language of a buffoon’ at the most serious of meetings, ‘as ‘keenly relished as though the audience were in the presence of a pantomime!’ No wonder the ruling classes can afford such a people the cheap luxury of public meetings; the right to grumble; and the privilege of burlesque patriotism, and bring the very principle of Freedom into contempt.121 The Hall of Science – Duncan’s Temple of Free Enquiry – at 58 City Road, opposite Bunhill Fields cemetery, was about to be closed to him, but support by Thomas Cooper, whom he called a ‘Panthean Priest’, preserved his access to all the institutional privileges. It was still a place of resort for all manner of reformers, W.E. Adams later recalling the venue in the early 1850s as a place where he had heard exposition of Bloomerism (the reform of female attire which was also promoted through the agency of Mrs C.H. Dexter, at John Street Institution), and later, Robert Owen. ‘A more useful centre of social and political activity did not exist in all London,’ Adams remembered – it was not surprising that Duncan should be keen to keep his access to the place.122 Ordinary working-class Chartists were, by Duncan’s own record, not at all eager to listen to his poems, ‘discourtesy’ which provided the Morning Chronicle with an opportunity to criticise them for impoliteness after a chairman refused to allow him to speak ‘as a poet’ at Clerkenwell Green.123 His paean in honour of Feargus O’Connor was rejected by the working man who acted as chairman at the Royal British Institution, in Cowper Street, off the City Road, ‘I then rushed to the contribution plate, and emptying my pockets, said, “Well, if you won’t have my poetry will you accept my money?”’124 At the funeral of the Chartist convict Joseph Williams (in September 1849, ‘martyred’ by the harsh conditions he had endured in Tothill Fields Prison, in the view of the Chartist movement) in the Victoria Cemetery in Bethnal Green, when there were said to be about ten or twenty thousand present, Duncan was deprived of an audience by the working-men conducting the ceremony, who threatened to leave.125 He felt it appropriate then to drop the rejected epitaph-dirge to Henry Hanshard (or Hanshaw, the young Chartist silk weaver killed at Bishop Bonner’s Field in

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Bethnal Green on 4 June 1848, in whose grave Williams was being placed) upon the coffins, And declared I would rather jump into that grave than succumb to such a denial of most sacred rights, especially by professed Chartists; and cried ‘Death or freedom – freedom or death!’ I any thing but impute this bad taste to the Chartist principle; no, to the vulgarity of the working man traceable to his rude circumstances… Thankfully for Duncan’s reputation at the time, the Northern Star and other papers did not print details of this outrageously egotistical display – the Examiner simply reported that ‘Clarke, Stallwood, Julian Harney, Duncan the Chartist poet, and other members of the Chartist Convention, then addressed the multitude.’126 His presence was not reported a week later, when the verse recited in honour of the new martyr, Alexander Sharpe, had been penned by John Arnott of Somers Town, secretary to the National Charter Association.127 Duncan was not a member of the Convention – it might be conceivable that he was the ‘Mr Duncan’ who stood to be elected as a member of the Convention in Tower Hamlets, at a meeting in Bishop’s Bonner’s Field, 21 April 1848 – but if so, he was not elected (and in any case, one feels had he made this gesture, he would have referred to it somewhere); but the press, by eliding him with ‘other members of the Chartist Convention’ was implying his prominence.128 He presented himself as a conduit for funds to the Cripplegate Chartists, collecting money for the politically highly charged monument to Hanshard, the baker Williams, and the copper-plate printer Alexander Sharpe, in his journal The Divinearian, in December 1849.129 Physical violence was sometimes directed at him from opponents Duncan identified as ‘moral force’ Chartists. Thus at a crowded meeting of these moral forcers at the London Tavern, ‘one of the most aristocratic halls in the world’, on Wednesday 24 May 1848, he was apparently struck by William Lovett when he attempted to mount the platform. 130 The meeting of supporters of the People’s League for universal suffrage was attended by such middle-class luminaries of radical reform as the Quaker Joseph Sturge (‘with his soft hair and mild blue eyes’, according to one eyewitness) and his nephew Charles Gilpin (of ‘tall, spectre-like form’), Colonel Thomas Perronet Thompson (MP for Bradford, with a ‘head as white as the driven snow’, according to the same witness), Luke James Hansard, the Irish radical William Sharman Crawfurd, and the Whig and former MP, Charles Lushington. Also present to witness the fracas was the American blacksmith-cum-pacifist leader Elihu Burritt (no brawny

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figure according to Barmby, but a gentleman in black satin neck tie), and Edward Miall of the Nonconformist, ‘with his pale face and nervous hands’. No wonder Miall looked nervous, it had been the deliberate attempt by the organisers to exclude the ‘violent, foul-mouthed demagogues, who were exciting the people to deeds of murder’. Unfortunately the ‘fiery, fighting Chartists … would not be stilled’.131 The Northern Star, not surprisingly, put the blame for the disorder on the People’s League’s shoulders – noting the ‘most violent and disgraceful interruption was continued almost incessantly on the platform, amid crowding and confusion,’ only it did not suit the paper’s case to make anything of Duncan’s role.132 As reported in the anti-O’Connorite Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, and Morning Chronicle, and elsewhere, Duncan’s intervention followed Ernest Jones charging the People’s League at this inaugural meeting with not going far enough, initiating a clamour from the Chartists for the six points and no half-measures, and the chairman, Thompson, was about to take the sense of the meeting on a third resolution, when Duncan, the Chartist poet-laureate, ‘sprung upon the platform, and charged some of the League with having struck him, which was flatly denied. It sufficed, however, to create a riot so formidable that a body of the city police were called into the room.’133 According to an American eyewitness, the young American assistant of the peace activist Burritt, when the Chartists showed ‘mob-resistance’ to the resolutions against the violence of Chartist activity recently, ‘one ragamuffin [presumably Duncan], just in front of me, leaped from the crowd up on to the platform and commenced to speak.’ In David Vandewater Golden Bartlett’s account, it was a brawny Scotsman who dispatched this fellow into the sea of human beings below by swinging him out by the collar.134 The British Banner’s report, not mentioning Duncan by name, described him as calling for his brother Chartists to avenge him, following the chairman’s gentle reprimand. For this paper, the more riotously disposed of the Chartists threatened physical violence against any who ‘“dared” to disturb their “poet,” as they facetiously, we presume, styled the individual who had been the immediate cause or excuse’ of the riot that ensued. 135 Provincial papers reported him as ‘poet-laureate to the physical force Chartists’.136 The attempt to create a union had been frustrated by a Chartist majority.137 Duncan recalled the fracas with William Lovett thus: ‘The flood of fervent indignation swept him away and bore me throned on its crest, scattering my poems in hundreds like “bread upon the waters!”’ Duncan affected to be unwilling to believe Lovett had actually struck him,

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in his brief account of the event in December 1849, apparently telling this to the next public meeting which he attended, although people near by still maintained this.138 Lovett made no allusion to Duncan in his memoirs, just noting that the ‘O’Connorites – headed by Ernest Jones – having forged admission cards to a large extent, interrupted and broke up the meeting in disorder’.139 Duncan’s attitude to the use of violence was ambiguous – we have seen him defending the use of arms against police brutality, and arguing against pacifism. In his own action, of course, we have seen him willing to create mayhem (or unable to resist the temptation). If he identified with the O’Connorites, it was perhaps on the personal basis that Lovett and other moral forcers scorned him. ‘Of blood-shedding hirelings the deeds are abhorred, | The patriot smites with the Sword of the Lord’ he quoted from William Johnson Fox’s ‘Praise to the Heroes’, in December 1849, when he reflected on the ‘late popular turbulences’, with the resolve to use force as a ‘last reserve absolutely subservient to the active agencies, intellectual and moral which really effect the desirable reformations; but, nae puré, there is no force without the physical!’140 Though he hoped to be recognised as the Chartist poet, Duncan identified himself as a member of the middle classes and was consoled by the courtesy of some men ‘of my own class’. During a meeting organised to petition parliament against additional military or naval forces, the enrolment of militia, or the establishment of new fortresses, called in response to the publication in late 1847 of the Duke of Wellington’s lengthy ‘invasion letter’ concerning the threat of French invasion and the need to construct coastal fortifications (an instance of personal as well as national folly, in the view of Punch, stimulating an ‘invasion fever’141), at the lecture room of the Eastern Literary Institution in Commercial Road in January 1848, the chairman and anti-slavery abolitionist George Thompson MP permitted him to read an ode in honour of Elihu Burritt, who was in England at the time and present at the meeting. His intervention was not recorded in press accounts at the time, although the London Standard did note the ‘proceedings were occasionally interrupted by considerable uproar and confusion’ (a proposal in favour of the People’s Charter was also moved, and ‘unanimously adopted, with an addition merely declaring the right of every man unstained by crime to the elective franchise’).142 Duncan thought Burritt, and the anti-capital punishment leader Charles Gilpin, were wrong to oppose all use of force (citing the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini and General Józef Bem, the ‘Washington of Hungary’, in his journal The Divinearian).143 A ‘Canticle for Cobden’ – which has not survived – was handed to the chairman by Duncan to read at the end of a public meeting in the Hall of

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Science in the City Road on 20 September 1849, assembled to show sympathies with the relatives of Williams and Sharpe and to petition the Queen to release Chartist prisoners: the meeting learned that Cobden had secured a ticket of leave for William Cuffey and his family and that Cobden’s wife also exerted herself on behalf of the Cuffeys.144 He seems too, to have met the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison (this must have been some when between late July and midNovember 1846, during Garrison’s third visit to England), ‘I remember his hand laid upon my head, his voice speaking kindly in my ear, and his eye beaming gently in my soul,’ and knew the veteran radical publisher and martyr for the cause of freedom of the press, Henry Hetherington (Hetherington had been one of the early publishers of the Morning Star, letters to the editor reaching Duncan at Hetherington’s office at 40 Holywell Street, the Strand 145), who died of cholera on 24 August 1849, homeopathic and vegetarian treatment notwithstanding.146 Duncan had attended a conference at which the aged radical and freethought advocate spoke, and he hoped that in a future number of the Divinearian he would give a full report: ‘Near fifty years had he been toiling yet knew he not but the poor’s house might be his morrow’s fate. The world must be wrong which permitted this: but it would improve.’147 It is a pity that Duncan did not provide a full account – as this comment from Hetherington does not appear in any of the obituary accounts. 148 The good man never dies. He lives before me now. I see him distinct as yonder ‘brave old oak.’ His robust manly form tall and stalwart, his broad shoulders and deep chest and muscular limbs, his ruddy face, brown hair mellowed by age, his nobly featured countenance, his brow of intellect, eyes of light – they look upon me! A vision? No; a bright reality! Yes: there are the flattened shoulders, his bent neck. Ay, a deformity! Nay, sir; though neighest! Pardon me, brother ass, brayest I mean. He hath not the military bearing, ’tis true; but seest thou yon athletic Herculean, the globe upon his brawny back? Our Atlantis also hath had a world of cares to stand under.149 And yet one cannot help feeling that, not for the first time, Duncan was making much of a brief association: Hetherington’s funeral was followed by five hundred, with several thousand at his grave, and Duncan wished to link himself with the great man.150 Duncan’s enthusiasm did not seem to abate, as the age of mass Chartism elided into the era of the Great Exhibition ‘of the works of industry of all nations’, which had been announced to the nation in early January 1850.

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In October 1850 he again amused the metropolitan press by his strange behaviour at a crowded or moderately well-filled – reports varied – temperance meeting at Drury Lane Theatre, pit, galleries and stage full of a paying audience of enthusiasts for the cause, where George Cruikshank, a Native American Methodist, the Reverend George Copway (that is, Kahge-ga-gah-bowh, an Ojibway chief151), the publisher John Cassell, Lawrence Heyworth, the MP for Derby, were propagandising for their moral reform.

FIGURE 29. ‘Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, the Ojibbeway [sic] chief, sketched during the temperance meeting in Drury Lane Theatre’, Illustrated London News, 2 November 1850, p.344. Author’s collection.

His strange and violent gesticulations as he rushed to the chairman’s table were interpreted as hostility towards the Ojibway chieftain (who was dressed, at the request of the committee, in the ‘costume of his tribe,

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being a tunic of gaudy colours, ornamented with beads and gold embroidery, and a pair of red trousers’ – the wood engraving of a sketch of the chieftain by Henry Anelay was published in the Illustrated London News and is reproduced above, Figure 29) until it was discovered he was holding grapes and a small bouquet of flowers which he took from his button hole, and, declaring loudly, ‘I come forward to present to our brother from the Far West this bunch of grapes, and to request that he will take this flower from my breast instead of my scalp, which, perhaps he might prefer had he been drinking the fire water. I present them to him as a teetotal vegetarian divinarian’ – which was followed by laughter from the audience. Duncan ‘retired quickly into the body of the meeting’. 152 ‘This little interlude met with the greatest success, being received throughout with roars of laughter and cheers.’ His reputation as ‘a poor half-witted Chartist’ continued; although The Spectator chose to interpret the incident as the crowning eccentricity of an event organised by the eccentric temperance movement (‘as alien from the English nation as the inhabitants of the moon might be were they actually dwelling amongst us’): winding up the proceedings to the astonishment of the English part of the audience.153 The ‘forms of intemperance’ noted in the press, originally in a paragraph in Hogg’s Weekly Instructor in 1845, had included, incidentally, the intemperance of ambition, leading, by way of example, to ‘mad-cap poets’.154 On 29 January 1851 Duncan appeared again at the Thames Police Court155, still sporting his long beard, charged with being disorderly and interfering with the street keeper, Samuel Taylor (‘a very intelligent, wellinformed and humane man’), in the High Street in Whitechapel, who was going about his humble duty and stopping obstructions by the dock labourers selling wood and other goods – Duncan saying that Taylor had no right to interfere, catching him by the shoulder and calling him ‘an oppressor, a minion of tyranny, and a tyrant’. A wine porter, Richard Peck, also intervened against the street keeper. Duncan called out that the poor people had a right to live, ‘and by discussing politics, caused a mob of from 50 to 60 persons to assemble, who were highly entertained by the jesticulations [sic] and oratory of the man with the long beard, of whose insanity there was not much doubt, for he acted like a madman’. One might make more of this incident: as an example of the early Victorian battle over public space, and the policing of the street against the interests of the working classes or the urban poor.156 In fact the magistrate, Yardley once again, found himself sympathetic to the intervention in defence of a poor man’s wood being kicked into the street by a street-keeper or policeman, and did not think Peck or Duncan had behaved improperly by intervening, but should have made a proper

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presentation to the Commissioners of the High Street – the regulations about selling wares in the street seemed unclear. But he ‘knew Duncan was a busy, idle, troublesome man, in the practice of interfering in matters that did not concern him, and he had often been involved in trouble on that account’. The court appearance ended appropriately on the bizarre note of Duncan’s attempt to read a memorial praying the dismissal of Taylor being foiled by its seizure by a ‘shabbily dressed boy at the table, who retained possession of it’ – Yardley never receiving the document.157 Yardley’s comment that Duncan was a busybody and idle was, unfortunately, no doubt true. Yet idleness was part of the charge against the London Chartists and the movement in general – they had been drawn into the movement from boredom, idleness, and the search for excitement. Thus, in the essay ‘How I Became a Chartist,’ in Bentley’s Miscellany, published in July 1848, there appeared the confession, ostensibly from a young former Chartist now in Sydney: ‘I wanted excitement – a change – anything, in short, that held out the prospect of a new career; and my education, and the facility of expressing myself in public, which I then accidentally discovered, hurried me into Chartism, as it would have hurried me into any other ism, that held out the same apparent advantages.’ In this case ‘excessive vanity and love of ambition’ were identified too.158 The next month Duncan appeared again in court, with long beard, moustache, and Byronic short collar, and ‘a very dirty face’ (Divinarian attention to daily ablutions apparently abandoned), his behaviour revealed as more sinister in the domestic sphere, after failing to extinguish the flames that engulfed an infant girl, the mother and another woman having to put out the flames while he remained in his bedroom, where he claimed to be seizing a blanket to extinguish the fire. His father thought that this was a lie, indeed he even spoke of ‘murder’ (Duncan senior retracted this in court, saying he only spoke about this by implication), for the bed was undisturbed, ‘and upon making some further observations rather warmly, his son broke out into a violent passion and capsized a mahogany table covered with glasses and jugs, and not only broke the table but everything upon it’.159 The newspaper record – only the conservative Morning Post it seems, carried a report – gives no further indication about what happened to the poor infant after she had been saved, or indeed how her clothes had ‘ignited’ in the first place. Children were vulnerable to domestic accidents as the newspaper reports of penny-a-liners and coroners’ inquests make clear160, and the simple act of domestic lighting was fraught with hazards, of course (a spark from a candle was to blame for a fire in Hermitage Street in Wapping setting alight the bedclothes of an elderly woman,

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reported in the Northern Star in late August 1849).161 But the report included sufficient detail to suggest a mind dangerously self-absorbed and unhinged. His father answered magistrate Ingham’s question about his son’s sanity with understatement, ‘I don’t think he is in his perfect senses.’ It was indeed, rather bizarre, as he had just told Ingham that ‘his son had been a great annoyance to him for ten years, and had frequently threatened him and acted with terrible violence … He was actually in danger of his life from the violence and extraordinary conduct of his son, and hoped the magistrate would bind him over to keep the peace’ – as if that would make him behave – Ingham thought he should not be at large – should be in a lunatic asylum. There was no question of drunkenness, his father saying ‘he never drunk anything stronger than water.’ Not daunted by these revelations in court, James Elmslie Duncan, who had read a copious written defence to the court, agreed to pay a fine for the damage only on the extraordinary condition that ‘he had the management of his father’s house while he was there’: ‘Then you had better reform yourself and your own personal appearance.’ (Laughter) ‘I want reform of the household. There are the lodgers in my father’s house, and I want to make a model of a lodging-house of it, not a model lodging-house. If my father will agree to that I will pay the fine, not otherwise.’ It is not clear if this was a garbled report in the newspaper, or reflected Duncan’s own mental confusion. What did making a model of a lodging house mean (the model lodging home was in vogue as a social reform for ‘practical philanthropists’, and Lord Shaftesbury was involved in legislation to inspect and control lodging houses 162). Did Duncan mean that he wished the place to be run as an efficient place of lodging rather than as an exercise in philanthropy? Having paid the fine, and paced up and down with arms folded for two hours at the back of the court, he took to the witness box, contrary to the usual procedure, and said the magistrate could keep the fine or pay it to his father, at his discretion. What may have been an attempt by his father, through the medium of the police court, to try and resolve the domestic situation by the threat of intervention by a magistrate, had not dealt with the problem of Duncan’s erratic behaviour.163 Within a day there appeared, with ironic timing, a new advertisement for Duncan’s journalism. Duncan seemed to return to his progressive obsessions, although one must not read too much into this obscurely

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placed single advertisement. The Sunday radical Weekly Dispatch (which published William Johnson Fox’s letters as ‘Publicola’) printed an advertisement on 16 February 1851, for the ‘new series’ of Duncan’s journal. (The paper managed to report his name incorrectly when he next appeared in the police courts, as ‘James Christie Duncan’.)164 One assumes that the ‘adventures of the man with a red beard’ was intended to deal with Duncan’s own exploits. Such was the advertisement, appearing in an obscure page of a relatively obscure newspaper. No copy of this phonetic oddity exists. Whether it was actually produced or not is therefore unknown.165 The address was where James Watson the radical publisher and printer was based, at 5, Paul’s Alley, Paternoster Row. By 31 May 1851, when the Northern Star noted a copy of The Divinearian as received (listed after Ernest Jones’ Poems and Notes to the People, parts 3 and 4), it was listed as published by Dillon, of Hatton Gardens. Again, no copy exists.166 Duncan’s title presented itself, it seems, as the oracle of the Hall of Science on the City Road.

FIGURE 30. Facsimile of advertisement in Weekly Dispatch, 16 February 1851, p.109.

One wonders what his view of the Crystal Palace was, or indeed, if he ever visited the Great Exhibition at Hyde Park, after it was formally opened by the Queen at the beginning of May, perhaps he recognised it as an expression of some of the hopes of Etzlerian technological paradise (one review of the London edition of Etzler’s Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labour, in 1843 had mentioned the ‘crystal palaces’ of his sunvitrified scientific imagination).167 Etzler’s agricultural machine seems to have featured, as the Westminster Review noted in 1851 that at one end of the agricultural gallery there was ‘a model and diagram of a plan for cultivating land in circles’ (the catalogue by Spicers, detailing exhibits in class 9, does not allow identification). A machine was ‘tethered by one end to a centre pin which we may imagine to be larger than the mast of a first rate and by some arrangement which we do not see it is made to revolve round that great pin in a circle while from the sides are protruded all

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manner of ploughs and hoes and harrows and rakes with men near them looking like an ancient hundred oared galley.’168 Wapping was represented among the exhibits, in contributions to naval architecture, with life belts, buoys and safety boat models from E. Light of the High Street, specimens of wire ropes from Wilkins and Weatherley, Soulby’s safety windlass, and corn and sugar mills. Roberts’ Royal Primrose soap, manufactured at the High Street at Wapping, won an award.169 Duncan’s views on the Church of England remained clearly antiestablishment – indeed, with the ‘deth blo’, violently so. Probably, though with Duncan one is necessarily arguing from absences, his comments on the Papacy were in response to the recent Papal Aggression scare of late 1850, after Pio Nono re-established a Catholic hierarchy in England. His old fellow utopian, John Goodwyn Barmby, published The Diana of the Day: Or, Popery and the Church of England: a Discourse of Caution to Churchmen and of Duty to Dissenters, from lectures he delivered at Topsham which were well attended for such a small Devonshire town, according to a report in The Examiner.170 In March 1851, as the Chartists convened a new Convention at the Parthenium in St Martin’s Lane, Duncan was still living with his father in Wapping, and describing himself as ‘author’ for the census – his father as head of the household, listed as ‘accountant and agent’. James Elmslie Duncan had been described as ‘shabby genteel’ in one newspaper, a term – for those with a tenuous grasp on economic gentility and thus the physical appearance of poverty – that became current in the mideighteenth century. Associated with the bankrupt, the burnt-out, those in reduced circumstances, it at least indicated Duncan’s genteel address or manner.171 But Duncan’s father seems to have had some status in the Wapping locality, which may at least have reflected temporary business success.172 His son had been indulged – enjoying a good education and not, seemingly, having to work hard for a living. There were thirteen other people living at their address apart from the Duncan household, which comprised the two Duncans and a twelve-year old shop servant who had been born at All Hallows – an engineer called David Reading with his Scottish-born wife, employed as hat trimmer, and young son and daughter; a porter, George Harper, with wife and infant son; and an errand boy and his mother who was a charwoman. 173 In late May 1851 Duncan was before Bow Street magistrate’s court for disorderly (indeed ‘riotous’) behaviour at Covent Garden, apparently, though there were no details in the newspapers at the time. His behaviour being so bizarre, in the view of the presiding magistrate, Duncan was

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considered insane, sent to St Martin’s Workhouse (at St Martin’s in the Field), but he was released when the medical officer declared him sane. 174 Very shortly afterwards there appeared yet another item about Duncan coming before a magistrate in a police court – ‘the Chartist poet again’, according to the article title in the Morning Post, although mangling his name as ‘James Embley Duncan’.175 The ‘well known Chartist poet’ was charged with wilfully destroying four brass taps, three glasses, and a pint of spirits, the property of Mr H. Mitchell, the landlord of the Gun publichouse, at 103 High Street, Wapping. The incident began, as recounted in the police court, with Duncan apparently minding his own business: Mary Courtney, a servant of the landlord, testified that the poet had been sitting at the front door of the pub reading a newspaper on Thursday afternoon about 4. Some men spoke to him and ‘they all rushed inside, and the prisoner began divesting himself of his clothes, and conducted himself in a very improper manner.’ One assumes that this fracas was some sort of frenzied response to insults about his appearance (Horace writes of the mad poet, ‘the boys jostle him and the incautious pursue him’176), but we will never know as the magistrate’s interrogation, if there ever was an attempt in court to fathom what had gone on in what seemed to be just another instance of Duncan’s aberrations, was not reported. Duncan had been asked to leave the premises but refused, and threw himself around the bar, causing the destruction of property which was valued at 20s. ‘The prisoner,’ the newspaper report continued, ‘who had some periodical in his hand, said all his clothes were torn from his back, and that it was while he was attempting to escape that the things were destroyed.’ Is it not likely that Duncan had in his hand the latest number of the Divinearian and was, in his mind, taking the part of the man with the red beard, standing up for his principles? Not for the first time, Duncan was able to evade immediate punishment because of a technical flaw. The magistrate could not convict in this case as the charge had not made out that Duncan wilfully and maliciously destroyed the property: Duncan would have to be sued in the County Court for any damages, but Ingham noted that Duncan ‘was a very extraordinary person, and things might have been broken accidentally’. But though Duncan was discharged, his father remained in court to ask Ingham’s advice about retrieving the 5s he had given his son to procure some refreshments, after Duncan’s last appearance in court when he was fined that sum for misconduct, the sum advanced by his father being used instead to pay the fine, and he wanted to know whether his son could be compelled to return it. Ingham’s advice was again to apply through the

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County Court. James Elmslie Duncan’s finances were evidently a sore point in the paternal home. The newspapers carried in June 1851 the following news, a ‘scene extraordinary in the Court’, with the noted Chartist laureate, having been frequently brought up before various police courts for ‘riotous conduct’, now being charged at Thames Police Court with stealing 1s 6d from his own father’s till. He looked ‘a most singular looking person’ in his long beard, wild and haggard, ‘directly he was arraigned in the dock a scene was expected,’ the Morning Post reporter not unreasonably claimed. He was a ‘very singular and dangerous character’.177 James Duncan told the court that his son on the previous night, ‘although he had been frequently cautioned not to go behind the counter … opened the till’ and stole the money – he had ‘frequently taken other things from the house, but had never attempted money before’. Presumably this was to pawn, in order to raise funds for his printing. Duncan’s shopman told him what had happened. Over ten years had passed since James Duncan ‘cautioned him that his habit of abstracting things would bring him disgrace’ – if this is a correct report, then we must date Duncan’s aberrant behaviour back to 1841. His father told the police court in June 1851 that his son ‘put him to considerable inconvenience, and nearly ruined him by his misconduct and extravagant behaviour’. He was ‘leading an idle life, and had repeatedly plundered him’, and was a ‘continual source of trouble to me, and has almost made a poor man of me’. And yet, a year before, at Thames Police Court, where his son was being charged with destruction of his property, he had described his son with exaggerated pride, as a ‘poet of considerable talent’.178 James Elmslie Duncan stated, according to the report in The Standard, ‘I am an injured man. I am the victim of misrepresentation. It was a paragraph in the Times that caused all this. I want only justice.’179 The allusion to The Times was because the young man claimed he needed the money as he had ‘an engagement to attend the Times office, and must go there’ – whether he was intending to go to the office to berate the editor for some imagined slight (one can find no trace of any offensive treatment of him at this point, in the paper, which did not report the incident either) or whether this was in search of work, is unclear.180 His father knew this pretext to be a lie, and had called a police constable to arrest his son when he refused to return the money to the till. James Duncan had evidently reached breaking point when it came to tolerating his son’s antics. But here the prisoner, notwithstanding the vigilance of Mr Roche the gaoler, suddenly bounded out of the dock, shouting in a loud voice, ‘I’ll have justice, if justice is to be had,’ and sprang upon the table at which the solicitor and reporters usually sat, and it was apprehended that he was

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about to attack the magistrate; but the ushers, gaoler and Serjeant Ball, and Walsh, 28H (Whitechapel division), suddenly rushed upon him, on which he threw himself on his back, and began to kick so furiously with his heavy boots as to split the table from one end to the other, dashing the ink into the lap of the reporter, and besmearing the whole place with the contents of the ink stands. The Morning Post report refers to a boy seated at one end of the table scampering away in fright, and to Duncan’s own incoherent ravings.181 He was taken out of the court, still kicking the police officers as he was carried into the jailor’s room, before being subdued, his father telling the court that several days before ‘apprehending the young man’s intellect was in abeyance, he had applied for a certificate to that effect, but had not succeeded in securing one.’ The magistrate, again Ingham, thought there was little doubt his intellect was astray and advised James Duncan to apply to the parish officers.182 The details are too sketchy to allow an answer to the question: why had Duncan delayed having his son certified as insane? One may find evidence here of parental reluctance because of the stigma, or concern about the treatment his son might receive when confined within the county asylum, which would have been the result of a certificate of lunacy. James Duncan’s willingness to tolerate his son’s oddities for many years is a demonstration of the Victorian family’s significant role in dealing with ‘madness at home’ – with all the tensions and traumas that this might entail. 183 But now Duncan’s condition would lead to institutionalisation. James Sergeant, the relieving officer of Shadwell (or Stepney Union, according to the Morning Post) appeared in court and said the young man would be removed to the Mile End Workhouse (in Alderney Place in Mile End Old Town) at once, Ingham advising that he should be restrained, ‘You must watch him closely at the workhouse, and you had better send a light pair of boots, as with those he has on he might in a fit of frenzy kill some person.’ Duncan was reported as lying on a bench in the gaoler’s room, casting savage glances at nearby onlookers, his shoes removed. Serjeant Ball and Walsh brought him to the workhouse, ‘in sight of our reporter’, he left ‘unresistingly’, with the light boots sent from the workhouse. When he got there he was ‘very quiet’. And so Duncan leaves the public historical record as an actor in police court proceedings. No longer of interest to the press, his fate was now to be that of an inmate in a public lunatic asylum. The next chapter studies the associations made by contemporaries between political revolution and madness.

6 ON REVOLUTIONS AND INSANITY The world’s bewitch’d with politics And mad for Revolution; But we’ll have no such ‘knavish tricks’ With England’s constitution. It’s very well for foreigners, Who freedom ne’er have known, boys; But England’s prov’d the worth of hers, So, we’ll ‘let well alone,’ boys.1 REVOLUTIONS AND INSANITY.—The agitations of the last two years have, according to the reports of medical officers, increased the number of cases of mental disease to an extent far beyond the average of former years; the fact is proved by the returns from all the lunatic asylums of Germany. The same result was observed in France in 1818. Such is the statement of the Times’ Correspondent. It has long been known however that in seasons of great political excitement cases of insanity more frequently occur. This was noticed in the French Revolutions of 1792 and 1830, as well as in 1848.2 In the London Standard, Morning Post and Reynolds’s Newspaper in January 1853 there appear final, sad, references to James Elmslie Duncan in the public prints, as ‘a poor person not able to work’. His father, a ‘respectable portly looking man’ (the description reminds one of the ‘stomachic bulge’ of Balzac’s picture of the Parisian grocer3) was summonsed at the instance of the Board of Guardians of the Stepney Poor Law Union which covered the parish of Wapping, having neglected to maintain him, though being of a sufficient ability to do so.4 Although the asylum was designed for pauper lunatics, the Union was attempting to secure fees. James Duncan claimed he was unable to pay for the maintenance of his son, who had been at Colney Hatch, the newly-built county asylum, for eighteen months, at a

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cost to the Union of 8s 6d per week (the standard weekly rate, covering Duncan’s board, clothing, bedding, fuel, medicine and sundries). The London Standard’s report was entitled ‘The Fate of an Enthusiast’: The young man has occupied some position in the public eye as the laureate of Chartism, and one of the most strenuous supporters of all the points. He appeared to have vowed his beard to the point, for no razor has touched it since he devoted himself to the crusade. He has frequently been to the court on charges springing one way or other out of what he deemed to be a pursuit of the principles of civil liberty.5 Other newspapers, in Manchester, Bradford and Leeds, for example, picked up the story – inserting in their paragraphs of miscellaneous news, a paragraph on the latest embarrassment to the ‘Chartist poet, who made himself so conspicuous in the Trafalgar-square revolution’.6 The allusion to the beard unknowingly echoes the comment made by one correspondent with the Home Office in this year, who asserted that the Bradford Chartist Isaac Jefferson, ‘Wat Tyler’, had decided not to shave his beard ‘until the Charter becomes the law of the land’.7 James Duncan rented a house of 30l a year, the court heard, and could afford to live ‘in the sphere of a respectable man, paid 5l in poor rate a year, and was also a county court agent, according to James Sergeant, one of the Union’s relieving officers (a side occupation not otherwise recorded in reports of James Duncan, this would involve doing business for suitors at county courts, taking out summonses for them, for instance, but the magistrate Yardley disregarded Sergeant’s comment about this).8 James Duncan was actually taking in lodgers to make up the rent, letting the principal apartments, he told the court, and having an income of not £1 per week.9 The month in which James Duncan appeared in the police court, saw the publication by the Illustrated London News of an engraving of an ‘entertainment to the patients at the Middlesex County Lunatic Ayslum, Colney Hatch’ – men and women dancing in a huge hall decorated with flags, several of the men captured in strange poses of dance or gesticulation (see Figure 31, below). How horrible to find that, rather than appearing in the magazine to be fêted for his success as a man of letters, or inspirational poet, scaling Parnassus, he was now part of a scene from a reformed Bedlam. After that ‘virtual’ court appearance in January 1853, James Elmslie Duncan disappeared from the public record. Being sent to Colney Hatch meant being certified as incapable of looking after himself. To be

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compulsorily admitted to a public lunatic asylum was shameful, although we do not have any evidence as to why – if his condition was actually chronic – his father had avoided having him being placed in an asylum before (was it the expense of being a private patient, the stigma of being a pauper lunatic certified, or concern for a beloved child?), but James Elmslie Duncan’s Chartist notoriety probably brought quite as much shame to the family as the status of publicly institutionalised madman. Yet it was only at the point when his plunderings from the family business became intolerable that he was sent to the asylum – his behaviour in May 1850 when he was extravagantly violent within the home and local police station, as reported by the newspapers, had not led to his incarceration, and it is interesting to reflect that this allowed him to be at large as a source of embarrassment to metropolitan radicalism for over a year.10

FIGURE 31. ‘Entertainment to the patients at the Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum, Colney Hatch’, Illustrated London News, 15 January 1853, p.44. Author’s collection.

The vast asylum (1,881 feet long, or a third of a mile long, with 987 rooms11), founded in 1849 (the foundation stone was laid by Prince Albert), was one of Middlesex county’s two asylums, and situated ten miles north of London in the parish of Friern Barnet. The Lunacy Act of 1845 required counties to build asylums and a rapid building programme ensued.12 Built to deal with the overcrowding at Hanwell Asylum and the volume of insane pauper patients in the metropolis, the location was ‘airy

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and healthful, the surrounding scenery cheerful, and perhaps, as beautiful as may be found in any part of the county.’ 13 The asylum was situated in over a hundred acres of grounds. The Italianate structure of London stock brick – creating a ‘cheerful elegance’ rather than depressive monkish gloom from a Gothic structure, to play on the religious prejudices of inmates – was opened in July 1851, with accommodation for 1250 patients.14 Although, as its modern historians note, it came to symbolise madness in Victorian literature, as New Bedlam had done in the eighteenth-century, Colney Hatch was thought to be the most advanced asylum when it opened. ‘Neither inside nor outside,’ one report on the new asylum declared, ‘is there the gloom usually supposed inseparable from an asylum. The modern system insists on maintaining cheerfulness among the patients.’15 A quite different impression was conveyed by an early visitor, whose account appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1857: the asylum was like a prison, ‘the little light admitted by the loop holed windows is absorbed by the inky asphalte paving and coupled with the low vaulting of the ceiling gives a stifling feeling and a sense of detention.’ The walls were unplastered, the rough brickwork visible beneath whitewash and the wards lacked even the adornment one would find in the commonest cottage decoration.16 The wards were cold and dark, and the hard flooring became impregnated with the smell of urine before they were covered over with floorboards.17 Here in intention at least, albeit expressed on a palatial scale, was the ‘domestication of insanity’ observed by Elaine Showalter: making the treatment homely, paternal, ‘purged of its fantastical properties in a decided retreat from Romantic associations of inspiration and madness’.18 Showalter also notes the opening of the institution followed on shortly from that of the Crystal Palace: ‘a Great Exhibition of insanity’ and indeed there was a guidebook issued for the expected influx of visitors, ‘English and Foreign,’ to the building which was compared in length to the slightly shorter palace of all nations (by the by, in the causes of disease ascertained in 249 of 411 men admitted to Colney Hatch from July to December 1851, there was one case of ‘over-excitement at the Great Exhibition’; and yet an excursion took inmates to the Crystal Palace in 1854. One wealthy inmate believed himself to be the Crystal Palace).19 The interest in such an architectural wonder, with its avowedly enlightened regime, was not surprising: the subject of insanity and asylums ‘has of late years,’ one popular encyclopedia commented in 1846, ‘occupied a very large share of public attention; particularly as an opinion has prevailed that insanity is on the increase in this kingdom beyond the ratio of population.’ 20

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FIGURE 32. Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, Frien Barnet, 1851. From Tallis’s Illustrated London. Author’s collection.

In the year 1852 there was a daily average resident of 465 males (and 712 females), although the total number of males under treatment during the year was 732 with 119 deaths and just over 60 recoveries.21  We have no way of knowing what Duncan felt of the regime in the asylum – as we have no way of knowing how he had felt about being imprisoned in 1849. He had not been interested, in his writings, in lunacy reforms – although had he been an attentive reader of socialist periodicals such as the New Moral World he would have encountered some discussion, for Owenites, members, after all, of a ‘Rational Society,’ had published statistics on insanity from Hanwell Asylum, and Owen saw insanity as the consequence of the ‘irrational circumstances and treatment of this old world’.22 Like the work house, the prison or the penitentiary, the asylum was proof of ‘deep and complicated moral and physical disease in the very core of society’s heart’.23 Metaphorically, then, Owenism was engaged with curing a ‘long established mental disease’: one presidential address from Owen at Harmony Hall in March 1844 identifying, for example, the ‘increasing absurdity, insanity, and madness of the British and North American governments and people’ – the cure to be effected calmly, patiently and tenderly.24 But the Chartists had not been critical of the reform of lunacy laws in the 1840s, indeed Joseph Melling has described

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the ‘accommodation between radical politics and moralised economics was a golden age of asylum building sustained by the promise of moral treatment’.25 One early press account of Colney Hatch spoke of ‘a glittering cleanliness apparent, which in itself would be medicinal’.26 The report of the Christmas entertainment in 1856 in the large concert room, written by William Kidd, depicted a place of ‘clouds and sunshine’ – of ‘kind (but needful) restraint,’ of ‘gentle and soothing words,’ the ‘irresistible power of kindness’ rather than the lash.27 Yet there was the vignette of a disturbed participant, glancing constantly at a portrait of Louis Napoleon, and obsessed with plans to assassinate the emperor. The asylum was a place for the political maniac. Duncan’s fellow male inmates came from the lower classes, ‘artizans and persons in humbler life,’ according to a visitor in 1854, ‘and I must say they seemed to be rather an inert and lumpish set.’28 Some medical experts believed insanity was a stimulus to dormant poetical powers and faculties, ‘No other power is more frequently thus rendered prominent than that of poetical composition … The cacoethes scribendi of poetry rages if possible to a greater extent within the walls of an asylum for the insane than in the community at large,’ opined Dr Pliny Earle of New York in the American Journal of Insanity in January 1845.29 The Leisure Hour’s essay on lunatic life and literature, in 1856, mentioned the whims of inmates, including the literary, ‘One is a rhyming madman talking perpetually in pitiful doggerel and half choking himself because he won’t take breath till he has a rhyme,’ but also excerpted from the literary monthly Morningside Mirror produced by inmates at the Royal Edinburgh Asylum and with contributions from inmates of asylums across Britain. Colney Hatch’s sister institution, Hanwell, printed inmates’ poetry. 30 Indeed, quite a number of asylums produced literary journals: the cultural life (‘sanative culture’) and productions of the American lunatic asylums have been studied,31 from Utica in New York came The Opal. A Monthly Periodical of the State Lunatic Asylum edited by the patients, and printing a brief essay by one Etta Floyd in 1854, on the common assertion made that poetry and poetic feeling was the result of craziness or lovesickness.32 But the British asylums need further study in this area.33 The report of one Scottish asylum in the same period, revealed that ‘while the New Moon [its literary journal] preserves the most interesting fugitive productions of the inmates a volume of poems has recently issued from our own press, composed by one who is in every sense insane, who has been in seclusion for ten years composes only during the night and when disturbed and wretched, and who may display the most exquisite delicacy of sentiment in the same moment that she strikes those whom she loves, or wreaks her intemperate jealousy on the window glass.’ 34

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Duncan’s intellectual associations, and radical affiliations, would have been viewed by many contemporaries as foolish – certainly Owen, Fourier, Greaves, Barmby and Etzler could be treated as uttering insane phrases and advocating bizarre reformations. 35 People did doubt the sanity of these visionaries. There are other ways in which to contextualise Duncan’s individual derangement (for contemporaries). It is tempting, for example, to find some meaning in Duncan’s fate as a casualty of social dislocation or the derangement of the social system (as Carlyle had argued, in his pamphlet Chartism, published at the end of 1839, ‘bitter discontent grown fierce and mad’36). One might make the case for crushed millennial hopes, except that the new moral world that Duncan hoped for – ‘a more just, wise, and felicitous order of affairs’ – was to be effected by the People’s Charter, rather than the second Coming of the Lord: For this our souls were yearning, With ardent fervour burning, and prayerful ever turning Toward the eastern glow; How genial it gleameth, How fruitful it teemeth, and millennium like it beameth, The hallowed love-dawn now!37 The Reverend John Cumming, in writing on ‘God in History’, had referred in retrospect, in 1849, to ‘some few thousand of those eccentric phenomena called Chartists, a few specimens of whose crotchets should be embalmed in the British Museum’.38 Critics, of course, treated the attraction of Socialism or Chartism as something pathological – ‘epidemics’, the people having the appearance of being ‘half-crazed’, according to one commentator, in the Anglican clergyman William Gresley’s novel Clement Walton: or, The English Citizen in 1840.39 Punch, commenting on the trials of John Mitchel, Thomas Meagher and William Smith O’Brien for treason felony, in April 1848, headed its article as ‘Commission of Lunacy Extraordinary’, the fact of oppression by Saxons being asserted by the men, and claims to be united Irishmen, being treated as delusions.40 ‘After every revolution,’ a reviewer decided, in the National Magazine in 1858, ‘a hundred schemes, a hundred paradoxes, start into life: the lunatics at large are in their glory; every crazy philanthropist claims and obtains a hearing.’ If, as one authority claimed was the popular belief, insanity was on the increase, and most prevalent in Europe, in England, might not a period of political excitement increase this trend further? 41 One can uncover reported cases of mania caused by the excitement of political radicalism, thus The Lancet noted in 1839 ‘a patient confined in an asylum in the vicinity of London whose insanity was caused by the

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political excitement which took place after the rejection of the Reform Bill by the House of Lords. This man was actively engaged in promoting the establishment of the great political union in London and it was during this period that he evinced decided symptoms of mental aberration.’ He believed he was a candidate for a seat in Parliament. 42 Other instances suggest that, as a contemporary turbulence, democratic politics figured in the anxieties of the mentally ill: the journalist and phrenologist Marmaduke B. Sampson, as a correspondent with The Spectator, informed the editor of one mad visitor to the Queen, from Scarborough, who was said to have seen the Queen in order to inform her that he was not a leader of the Chartists.43 Dr Richard Poole’s Memoranda regarding the Royal Lunatic Asylum in Montrose of 1841 included a case of a young man admitted to the asylum of which he was medical superintendent, ‘of slender but not feeble make … remarkably gentle disposition’ whose lunacy included, ‘although unacquainted with their tenets, exhibit[ing] great alarm about the Chartists’.44 In 1849 there was the case of a forty-year-old clerk called Cornelius, with a family history of mental illness, and alarmed now by the Chartist rioters.45 G.E. Day, in a treatise on the domestic management of lunacy, reported the case of a gentleman of ‘sanguineous temperament and strong frame who made a large fortune by his own exertions and for the last six or seven years has retired from business’, whose idée fixe in his retirement was the horror of a speedy Chartist rule in England mixed up with a ‘feeling of the extreme necessity for economy’. The most infamous example of mania linked to political delusion was the Scottish woodturner Daniel M’Naghten, who attempted to kill Sir Robert Peel in January 1843 under the impression that the government was persecuting him, but who killed his private secretary instead; he was associated with Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League.46 But cases of political excitement stimulating madness were probably very rare: the Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge claimed that political excitement was a ‘productive source’ of mental alienation during the French Revolution, but that even there it was now rare ‘and of upwards of 1200 cases admitted during 6 years into an English asylum 2 only were traced to political cause’.47 The propensity of men to insanity induced by political commotion (and for women to succumb to religious mania as in followers of Joanna Southcott) was noted. 48 And a visitor to asylums in Berlin in 1851, a former doctor from Bengal was also struck by how few there were in asylums, who could be linked to political disturbances although he noted that in France ‘every revolution sends its victims to the wards of Saltpêtrière and Bicêtre’.49 An Austrian newspaper correspondent proclaimed the same of Vienna, in 1850.50 Another, American, writer, puzzling over the connection between freedom within

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societies and the prevalence of insanity, thought that there was a descending scale of ‘mental commotion’ from the peak of party politics, party-religion and pursuit of wealth of the United States, with its height of distracting mental emotion, through Britain and France, to Spain, Russia and China.51 Political excitement was recognised as a minor cause of insanity, when cases of insanity were analysed statistically by John Bucknill and Daniel Hack Tuke in 1858, studying 29,769 cases in England, France and America. They classified ‘political and other excitement’ as the fourth of six categories, in a descending scale. The Irish Census of 1851 gave political excitement as a cause in six cases, with a third of the whole being grief, followed by reverse of fortune, out of the moral causes (congenital disease and intemperance being the most significant, of the physical causes).52 The report of the visiting justices of Hanwell Lunatic Asylum, the older sister of Colney Hatch, in 1851–1852, noted that of the moral causes of insanity in male patients, ‘political excitement’ had been identified for only one of the inmates, the same number was identified in Bethlem Hospital, of those admitted in 1850. 53 On the other hand, support for threatening political movements might be viewed by critics as a form of madness. Macalpine and Hunter have noted that ‘addiction to socialism’ was an accepted cause of insanity in this period, ‘attendance at political meetings was thought of as dangerous for those of delicately balanced mind as presence at Methodist gatherings was the century before. Demagoguery induced enthusiasms and crowd delusions.’54 Was there a ‘revolutionary mania’ to which Duncan and others succumbed? Certainly counter-revolutionary critics of reform, whether those defending the institution of slavery in the 1790s, for example, or contemporary reflections on the first French Revolution, identified this mania, seen as infecting individuals or a whole population.55 Jean Étienne Esquirol, in a work translated as Mental Maladies: a Treatise on Insanity, concluded ‘that if the number of the insane has increased since the revolution this augmentation is more apparent than real; that it is far less considerable than we are accustomed to suppose; that this increase is less due to the storms of the revolution, which were transient, than to the profound change which it has effected in our morals’. 56 The question, ‘is there now more insanity than existed previous to the revolution,’ was, he stated, one much asked over the forty years since the first revolution in France, but he argued, ‘political commotions like prevailing ideas are not the predisposing but the exciting causes of insanity.’ 57 For the author of Familiar Views of Lunacy and Lunatic Life published in 1850, the French Revolution exemplified the fact that ‘the hallucinations of the insane are apt to take shape and colouring from the principal and most exciting topic

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of the day’ such that an inmate would naturally believe that he too, during the Reign of Terror, had literally rather than figuratively lost his head.58 The ‘madness in the multitude’ of Hobbes’ Leviathan might also be recognised in the Chartist crowd: with anti-Chartists asserting the need for religious instruction to cure the madness of the benighted working-class mind.59 Thomas Carlyle famously argued, in his essay Chartism in 1839, that ‘When the thought of a people, in the great mass of it, have grown mad, the combined issue of that people’s workings will be a madness, an incoherency and ruin!’ Charles Dickens had depicted the insurrectionary mob, in Barnaby Rudge (set during the Gordon riots, and published in 1841) as mad, and the theme of the madness of crowds figured in other early nineteenth-century literature.60 In glancing back from the perspective of ‘The Year of Reaction,’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine could safely look to the force of property to defeat the passions and madness of the people, prone as the majority were to delusion.61 In the novel Mary Barton, published in 1848, Elizabeth Gaskell relates ‘the state of distress which prevailed’ in Manchester, to the development of ‘rabid politics’. Of course, the idea of rabid demagoguery implied uncontrollable and animalistic violence.62 John Bull, reporting ‘Disturbances in the Metropolis’ in 13 March 1848, referred to a ‘rabid audience’ at a Chartist meeting at Stepney. The Chartist leader Ernest Jones’s poetry was discussed in terms of ‘rabid strains’ and ‘wild imagination’ by the English Review in 1848.63 The animal madness of the rabid dog provided a metaphor in the discourse of political madness: They think to stop the progress of free opinions and free inquiry by crying mad dog, when the whole effect is to send everybody to the windows and doors, to see which way the mad dog went; and to inquire whose dog he is, and what made him mad, and, above all, whether he was really mad, or whether people only said so. 64 Chartist discourse, and the perspective of observers, included the sense of a people driven mad. Madness in the columns of the leading Chartist journal, the Northern Star, presented the idea of a people ‘goaded to madness’.65 The journal promoted the view, in explaining popular or Chartist violence, that the people were excited or driven to madness by their rulers – when scheming for power the Whigs ‘have invariably excited the people to madness … when deceived by leaders in whom they have reposed implicit confidence – are sure to be driven to madness and fury’. 66 The Republican wrote in 1848 that ‘crimes and mistakes of misguided men, goaded on almost to madness by oppression, has [sic] been all charged upon Chartism.’67 Elsewhere – among critics of Chartism – one also finds

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references to the poor and ignorant ‘driven mad’ by demagogues – madcap inmates of the Kennington Common wagon goading half-deluded innocents, in one poem lampooning William Cuffey.68 Simply to be a Chartist might invite the suspicion of madness, according to Kingsley’s Alton Locke where a dragoon encountered at Horse Guards describes Crossthwaite as ‘gane mad, and toorned Chartist’. 69 English readers learned that the initial letters of the names of the French Provisional Government in April 1848 made up the word ‘all mad’.70 The new French revolution of this year did stimulate analysis in France, thus, as readers of the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology learned in January 1850, in an article reporting the research of Dr Jacques Étienne Belhomme, director of a private lunatic asylum in Paris, presented to the Académie de Médicine in May 1848, who studied eleven cases placed under his care immediately after the revolution of 1848, ‘popular commotions give rise to numerous cases of insanity that revolutionary excitement may rightly be reckoned among the moral causes of the disease.’ In his response to the normal practice of asking for a report of experts in response to his paper, Belhomme argued: … I believe that there are more causes of cerebral excitement during revolutions, than during the happy times of the wise government. The establishment of a republic gives birth to new passions; men’s minds are strongly moved by a multitude of ideas and propositions more or less exciting. Another cause, not less dangerous for the ideas and the passions, are the clubs and political meetings, and the journals which breathe discord and civil war. In these critical circumstances, are there not, I ask, incessant causes of mental exaltation, and from the exaltation of the mind to its alienation there is but a step! Let us then say it, and repeat it – political commotions and events are a powerful determining cause of madness.71 Belhomme’s study is important not so much for what it says about divided French medical opinion, as its reception in a British journal at the time of Duncan’s public prominence. The author of the article agreed with Belhomme in his conclusion. There were ‘changeful, fitful, unsettled minds which lead the unhappy possessors to afflict their friends, and astonish or amuse their acquaintance, by the strangeness of their conduct’. Such people, with an exalted sense of their talents, ignored conventions and considered themselves ‘privileged to commit any eccentricity or absurdity’. From childhood precocity they reached manhood unable, generally, to master ‘the exact sciences, or matters which require a continuous effort of thought’. They turned scribblers, amateur artists,

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schemers, political adventurers, pursuing every novelty. They became the ‘high priests of quackery, of quackery political, commercial, literary, or scientific – moral or physical quacks, they become self-styled curers of men, or would-be curers of humanity.’72 Earnestness, partisanship, or obsessiveness in the Chartist cause, could be described in terms of madness. Thomas Cooper, correcting the early Chartist historian Robert Gammage’s account of his role in Leicester in the early 1840s, admitted, apropos of being described as ‘O’Connor-mad’, that ‘we were all mad, more or less, at that time.’73 A chaplain’s comment reproduced in a report of the inspectors of prisons, referring to one Chartist prisoner in Preston in 1840, was: ‘this man’s earnestness in his desperate cause appeared to me to amount almost to monomania.’ 74 If Duncan was a crazy fanatic (rather than simply idle, as his despairing father said – and we shall see shortly that there was another diagnosis, too), it is true that there were a few other ‘mad Chartists’ reported in the press. James Dawson Burn, who knew the Ayrshire Chartist leader Dr John Taylor, thought that if they were honest, the Chartist leaders had to be infatuated or mad.75 There was the ‘singular-looking’ Henry Ensell Weston, a tailor and ‘Chartist enthusiast’ who was detained as a criminal lunatic at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum – after threatening the lives of Sir Robert Peel, Lord George Bentinck, and Lord John Russell. 76 A participant in a Chartist riot in Bradford was incarcerated in an asylum after killing another man, in December 1848.77 There was another ‘mad Chartist’ – respectably dressed but nameless (he refused to give his name in court) apprehended for using seditious language, and found with a plan to set fire to the aristocratic ladies’ dresses at Kensington-gardens (his case reported immediately below that of Duncan’s at the Mansion House, in relation to his assaults at the London Tavern, in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 14 July 1850), who appeared before Alderman David Salomons in the Guildhall, and ‘entered into a rambling statement, saying that he was anxious to serve out the aristocracy, that he would think no more of killing 500 persons than he would of killing a fly’. Salomons said in this case, he was either insane, mischievous, or a person seeking notoriety, and thought he was the latter, ‘arising out of a morbid state of mind’ – he was imprisoned for lack of funds for the sureties to keep the peace.78 Other Chartists active in 1848 whose sanity may be queried include the unnamed orator during the Trafalgar Square riots (in March) who said that he ‘should like to see, provided they did not hurt the Queen, the throne burnt in the middle of Trafalgar Square’.79 Other Chartists who were reported as inmates of lunatic asylums included the shoemaker and preacher John Duncan, a Dundee Chartist (who died in an asylum in 1845); Thomas Briggs of Sheffield, a delegate at

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the National Convention who died in the Sheffield Lunatic Asylum, supposedly, according to press reports, due to ‘the dread of a Government prosecution for a seditious speech delivered by him at a Chartist meeting on Whit Monday’.80 The case of the ‘intelligent mechanic’ David Watson, who was reported as having been driven to insanity by his workmates chaffing at the Great Western Works in New Swindon, when he seemed to betray his previously free trade and Chartist sentiments, was also noted in the press in 1850.81

FIGURE 33. Mr Feargus O’Connor, M.P., engraved by Henry Vizetelly, Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, p.243. Author’s collection.

The key instance of Chartist derangement was, of course, that other redhead (a ‘red-haired meteor’ according to one contemporary 82), the ‘Lion of Freedom’ himself, Feargus O’Connor, who was to remain in Harrington Tuke’s private lunatic asylum at Chiswick from 1852 until shortly before

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his death in August 1855, although in his case the symptoms – ‘insane eccentricities’ – evident since February 1852, were of tertiary syphilis.83 Gammage attributed his plight to Land Plan complications and loss of popularity.84 A correspondent in one provincial newspaper in June 1852 described him ‘roaming about the lobby of the house in a seemingly unconscious state … The vacant listless stare; the shuffling uneasy gait; the infirmity of purpose, which marks every movement of eye and limb; all bespeak the absence of that controlling power without which no man is accountable for his actions.’85 O’Connor’s insanity was discussed in the press – the commission of lunacy being reported in detail. 86 When G.W.M. Reynolds came to O’Connor’s defence after the man was sent to a House of Correction by the Bow Street police magistrate in February 1852, the magistrate, Mr Henry, made a comment on police courts and insanity. ‘Many things are done … which appear in a police-court to be indications of insanity; but there are exceptions to the general rule, and if there were not, such places as police-courts might be dispensed with.’ When the jury visited him at the Manor House, O’Connor’s illness was plainly exhibited, and, in a gesture that links the great Chartist leader with Duncan, he burst into verse, reciting with great rapidity as he struck the metre with his hands on his thighs, the four stanzas of doggerel on him as the lion of freedom, ‘popular among his followers’, ‘come from his den; |We’ll rally around him again and again;| We’ll crown him with laurel our champion to be – |O’Connor, the patriot for sweet liberty.’87 As with Duncan, as with Smith O’Brien, doggerel verse only underlined the point about the ludicrous or bathetic nature of the ultra.88 ‘No doubt,’ wrote Justin McCarthy in a late-nineteenth-century history of England, ‘some of the Chartists were wild enthusiasts; some were halfcrazy fanatics; some were idlers, and what would called in the north country wastrels – men who never wanted to go through any such process of labour.’89 Edward Jones, in his history of Chartism in 1899, also noted that ‘several of the leaders of Physical Force Chartism were suspicioned, on good grounds, to have been insane.’90 O’Connor’s madness certainly proved an important, ‘convenient’ fact, as David Vincent has noted, in the writing of Chartist history: ‘by assailing the rationality of leadership, sought to undermine the significance and ideology of the movement as a whole’.91 David Jones also noted the breakdowns and insanity of Chartists, casualties of the attempt to change the world. 92 George Jacob Holyoake, in a letter entitled ‘Kossuth, O’Connor and Thornton Hunt’, published in the Northern Star, discussed a ‘painful chapter’ when Feargus O’Connor attempted to gatecrash a meeting at Copenhagen Fields in December 1851. The meeting, in which Kossuth

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addressed the crowd of some 25,000 (the Hungarian not wishing to have anything to do with O’Connor since his annoying behaviour towards him at Southampton) was followed by Holyoake acquiescing as a member of the Chartist Executive in the evening in preventing O’Connor from speaking at the Highbury-barn Tavern banquet (when Louis Blanc and G.W.M. Reynolds were present). Holyoake asked whether O’Connor’s friends would not ‘restrain him from committing further humiliations on himself?’ For, he made himself the buffoon of the company – he sank himself down to the level of Elmzlie Duncan; and when a leader of the people so far forgets himself as to play the buffoon, he lowers the entire party whom he represents.93 Like Duncan, O’Connor’s behaviour lowered the character of the Chartists, although Holyoake accepted that, as the radical journalist Thornton Hunt put it, his conduct was ‘evidently not under his own control’.94 Public propriety, duty and character mattered for the Chartist cause, and Holyoake wanted to have Chartist representatives who were able to be independent in their own position, ‘without being intolerant and abusive to everybody else’.95 Duncan’s interventions – in coffee shop, in the streets, in public meetings, showed him seemingly compelled to intrude, compelled to discuss politics, and determined that ‘he would be heard wherever he went’.96 This could be interpreted as the morbid desire for attention. Other ways of interpreting Duncan’s illness, for contemporaries, might include ‘religious enthusiasm, over-study, undue excitement’.97 Duncan himself realised that his progressive enthusiasms might be seen as delusions, as far back as 1845, when he wrote in the Morning Star, that the reader ‘would be half doubting his wits, or sanity, by now, about what he had to say about the Tropics’.98 However we might diagnose his condition, as he became increasingly violent, it seems surprising that he should have remained at large to disrupt public meetings, if so many people recognised he was now mad. Sarah Wise notes that one of the gaps in the legislation of 1847 was ‘the lack of a clause empowering the police to detain a “wandering lunatic” who was not a pauper and who did not belong to the raving variety of madman’.99 Shaftesbury was to raise this point in 17 June 1852, when moving for the second reading of a bill dealing with lunatics at large who did not fall under the existing legislation (8 and 9 Vict., cap.126) concerning wandering lunatics and lunatics mistreated or neglected by their families, a bill which had the support of the Commissioners of Police,

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Commissioners in Lunacy and Home Office, referring to O’Connor when arguing, in the Lords, ‘It was become quite essential that persons so afflicted should not be permitted to wander about merely because they had not committed some absolute crime.’ 100 For friends and public, the safe custody that followed only from ‘overt acts of outrage’ with violence was poor consolation. He referred to the case of ‘Mr. M –’ whose threatening behaviour had required twelve policemen over several weeks in 1848. Shaftesbury saw such cases as ‘particularly rife at moments of public excitement on any subject’. The law as it stood would not allow anyone to be apprehended though ‘notoriously to all intents and purposes a lunatic’ until some positive overt act.101 The bill was withdrawn because of the lateness with which it had been introduced in the parliamentary session. Until he was palpably a danger to himself or others, Duncan could remain at large. The Patriot, reporting his activities in July 1850, did indeed ask in parenthesis, ‘Ought not the sanity of this dangerous lunatic at large to be made a matter of inquiry?’102 ‘The freaks of DUNCAN, the “Chartist poet,” point out the necessity of some such course; for who can feel surprised at any enormity which that person may perpetrate when under the fits of excitement,’ The Patriot commented in an editorial shortly afterwards, on the sentence of the former officer in the Hussars, Robert Pate, tried at the Central Criminal Court in London for an assault on the Queen in late June, suggesting that orders should be given for the good of public safety, in such cases where the capricious and the crazy remaining at large in society, friends were not able to take proper precautions.103 The young gentleman Pate’s oddity was displayed to the public before the attack with a partridge cane, since he had ‘thrown his arms and looks about in a most extraordinary manner in Kensington Gardens’ and been witnessed in Burlington Arcade and elsewhere flourishing his stick (he was sentenced to seven years in prison including transportation to Australia).104 There seems no doubt that some of the descriptions of Duncan in the press as the ‘well known Chartist lunatic’ were aimed as much at associating Chartism with the mental disturbance which Duncan exhibited, as they were in characterising the man’s mental condition. Yet the newspaper evidence suggests that Duncan was not a man wrongfully incarcerated for mere eccentricity or political radicalism. I shall turn in my concluding chapter, to Duncan’s last years. But it is necessary, when situating Duncan’s state of insanity in a world of political excitement, to be clear that whilst one can uncover – and it might well be argued, give exaggerated weight to – a mass of allusions to mad political agitators, deluded democrats, and idiotic gestures, the Chartists were not

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to be excused by contemporaries with the power to punish them, as helpless lunatics. What should be appreciated is how unwilling the authorities were to excuse the Chartists as the victims of folly – the language of political lunacy was to denigrate the Chartists – as mad dogs for instance – but they were not to obtain any licence to criminality as a consequence.105 Mad dogs were shot. ‘Let every dog walk soberly when there is a cry of mad dog,’ the Weekly Dispatch had warned in June 1848.106

CONCLUSION

Medical officers in the public lunatic asylum were supposed to keep notes, on admission of the patient, of their mental state, bodily condition, religion and degree of education, and the history of the case: but the notes kept at Colney Hatch were not deemed satisfactory by the commissioners in lunacy. The brevity of the notes on Duncan that survive are frustrating for the historian but not, therefore, unusual. The notes made on him which were copied into the leather-bound casebook for the ‘Male Side’, Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum at Colney Hatch, make sad reading. They provide an account of his state after his admission on 29 July 1851 (a mere 12 days after the first patients to the asylum arrived and shortly before official inspection and the consecration of the asylum chapel by the Bishop of London) to his demise, which, in scrawled handwriting, failed to get his name right even when corrected: James Elslie

9

William Duncan aged 28 . Single – Author. A Chartist in politics – Infidel in religion – Vegetarian in [living?] This is a case of (by Some designed) moral insanity accompanied with Epilepsy – enormous Share of self-esteem and love of approbation allowing him to behave in a manner becoming a Lunatic for the sake of popularity. His excessive pride forms a Specie of monomania and his temper is so irritable and so little under control that when at all opposed he becomes most furiously maniacal rendering himself unfit to be at large. His Epileptic Fits are of a very mild character – appearing more like Spasmodic action accompanied with momentary insensibility. He is [?] affected by them for some days becoming [dumb?] & refusing his food – His pride has at all times prevented his raising his [being?] to a rational Respectable manner but he has devoted his time to making trash and immoral nonsense which he designates Poetry.

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‘Moral insanity’ was coined by James Cowles Pritchard in 1835 and referred to a madness which consisted of a ‘morbid perversion of the natural feelings, affections, inclinations, temper, habits, moral dispositions, and natural impulses’, but without remarkable disorder or defect of reasoning faculties or insane illusions.1 The adjective ‘moral’ in this usage did not have the modern ethical sense (rather, in Esquirol’s influential usage, meaning ‘psychologic’) but clearly the diagnosis of Duncan’s condition by the medical experts at Colney Hatch did involve moral, theological and political judgement.2 The medical gaze in Duncan’s case identified his failings as the consequence of excessive pride. His character was described in phrenological terms – ‘self-esteem’ and ‘approbation’ – those self-same terms in which the literary adventurer was described in a phrenological journal in 1840, as quoted in an earlier chapter. The medical superintendent for the female department was Dr James George Davey, who was ‘one of those digital philosophers who believe in phrenology and profess to have faith in the more pernicious heresy of mesmerism’, the Medical Times had sniffed, at news of his appointment as medical superintendent at Colney Hatch.3 The medical superintendent for the male department, who presumably wrote the initial case note, was the young Dr William Charles Hood (later Sir Charles Hood), a man who, as resident physician superintendent at Bethlem, would get to know perhaps one of the most famous Victorian lunatics – the artist Richard Dadd. A contemporary of Duncan’s, Dr John Thomas Arlidge, wrote that no ‘form of madness is more terrible than the furor attendant on epileptic fits; none more dangerous’.4 Anti-convulsive therapeutics was not advanced (with use of emetics, bloodletting, even tracheotomies, proposed); epilepsy was stigmatised and linked to moral failure and madness.5 Davey’s account in April 1852, of his treatment of patients for epilepsy as the resident medical superintendent at Colney Hatch, as reported in The Lancet, stressed the role of ‘tonics and a judicious and discriminating diet … In some cases wine and porter were added to nutritious diet … Kind treatment the avoidance of mechanical restraint added to proper diet and regimen had been found the best improvers of the mind and health of the great majority of those who came under his care at the Colney Hatch Asylum.’6 The American hydropath Joel Shew, ironically, advocated a vegetarian diet for epileptics, and quoted approvingly the idea that epilepsy was the same as the ‘electioneering disease’ identified by earlier doctors, which was linked to the madness of popular assemblies stimulated into violent passions by demagogues (the morbus comitialis of the Romans).7

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Presumably, as the case notes indicate, Duncan was still scribbling away, the condemnation of his work by his keepers as immoral trash merely continuing the disparagement in the newspapers which the doctors were, as we shall see, aware of. Hunter and Macalpine, in their study of Colney Hatch, criticise the tendency to apply theory to patients and pass this off as knowledge, and a classification of patients which really masked diagnostic ignorance (‘epithetic psychiatry or psychiatry by denigration of character’), although in Duncan’s case it also expressed a great confidence in passing judgement on unorthodox beliefs.8 The case notes indicated no close interest in Duncan’s personality or delusions as presented to the medical practitioners within the asylum. One wonders what he was writing – new numbers of The Divinearian? Poetic condemnation of his incarceration? Evidently, he was not to be contributor to a magazine produced in Colney Hatch. What else he did, by way of daily work, in an asylum which was intended not only to be selfsupporting through farm, laundry, bakery, tailors and other departments, but also to equip patients with occupations broadly analogous to their former employments, we do not know, although only 245 out of the 514 inmates in 1855 were able to work at all. Was he ever confined as a refractory patient to the rooms padded with vulcanised India-rubber?9 There is no detailed record in his case of extreme violence – there had been a fatality in 1853, the first of its kind at the asylum, when one of the inmates, Armour, killed another, William Windsheffel, an incident which led to parliament ordering copies of the correspondence between the asylum and the Home Office to be published in July. Another aspect of asylum life that Duncan would have experienced was the visits from the chaplain, Henry Murray – an officer of the asylum by law. Permission to leave the asylum to visit relatives was not to be granted to tranquil patients, accompanied by a nurse, until shortly after Duncan’s death: we do not know whether Duncan received visits from his family. 10 The practice of allowing patients to walk accompanied in the neighbourhood was also a later development that Duncan was unable to enjoy. We do not know, beyond the sparse surviving case notes, how he was classified in the institution, which adopted an approach that was criticised by one writer in 1857 as self-fulfilling, ‘as the patients soon become acquainted with the denomination of the class to which they belong and often behave in conformity with it. Thus the lunatic finding himself in a refractory ward will sometimes act up to the part assigned to him when he would otherwise be peaceable.’11 

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‘His general health is good,’ the notes on Duncan claimed, but in January 1853, the notes stated ‘Prone to Epilepsy, the paroxysm being preceded or followed by very great & dangerous excitement & tendency to homicidal violence.’ His brief case notes, if more extensive than those for many of the inmates whose fates were recorded, rather than providing the historian with any extensive material on his behaviour as an inmate, excerpted the account in the Morning Post of his father’s summons for neglecting to maintain him. The medical superintendent (now Dr Daniel F. Tyerman) or his assistant medical officer then added, on 18 February 1854, that Duncan was ‘Now tranquil: but prone to great irritability – He has recently suffered from Epilepsy.’ On 21 May, however, Duncan suffered a ‘rapid succession of convulsions threatening to prove fatal … He is removed to the Infirmary.’ He died after a night in which he had ‘fifty eight fits’ – presumably in that condition where consciousness was not regained, known as status epilepticus. The autopsy revealed a brain ‘generally softened’ – it became a clinical rule following close post-mortem examination of the many epileptic cases in Colney Hatch in the 1850s that fatal convulsions were caused by structural lesions in the brain such as tumours (the asylum also researched the hypothesis that epileptic fits might be linked to climatic conditions and ‘sol-lunar’ forces).12 He died at the age of thirty two. For him there would be no mental recovery, personal liberty and the experience of national progress or metropolitan improvements, of a London of underground railways, trams, and Thames Embankment, which W.E. Adams, a fellow Chartist, looked back on in his old age after the foul shores of the river had been swept away by Bazalgette’s improvements.13 The traces we have of his life more than hint at the tragedies of enthusiasm and mental illness. Beyond the bombast and the grotesque overestimation of talent displayed in Duncan’s literary life and his police court appearances, is probably a story of a family that struggled to cope: the mother and three children living in Scotland, but supported by James Duncan, a brother saving up to emigrate to Australia. One may assume that the family’s break up (if such it was) was linked to the stresses induced by such a violent and notorious son. 14 His father may have survived into his seventies, for we find a James Duncan, born in Scotland, recorded in the 1861 census as ‘dealer in provisions and tea’, living as a lodger at 2 Ravens Row, Whitechapel, lodging with a working jeweller and his family.15 One of James Elmslie Duncan’s brothers seems to have taken over the business in Wapping High Street, for in February 1857 George Duncan appeared in court, after being attacked, alongside a waterman, in his shop, by an Irishwoman.

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George dodged the blows from a large half-gallon jug directed at him after he charged Eliza Honigan with stealing a fish from the shop. She had also taken biscuits and hurled potatoes at him.16  James Elmslie Duncan’s life was a confined one – limited in years and in geography. His surviving writings suggest a world restricted to London, to Deeside, and, only imaginatively, in his propaganda for the Tropics, a paradise in Venezuela. But who knows whether this is simply the impression conveyed by the partial record? Perhaps, as in the case of his intervention in the Reading court in early 1849, in support of Edwin Scrace Wilkinson, there were other episodes of non-metropolitan disruptions. Duncan was not unique in his range of enthusiasms, and I have explored elsewhere the tendency of certain reforms to attract each other. The Irishman Lloyd Jones had declared, so a correspondent of Holyoake wrote when he was in Glasgow, that Socialism was ‘a receptacle for all moral and intellectual delinquents – empty-headed young men bordering on idiocy, babblers and quibblers, long-haired, bearded, and vegetarians, etc.’17 His association with the socialist puritan Concordists in the early 1840s, and his public identification with vegetarians in the later 1840s, even more so than his support for teetotallers, set Duncan apart from the majority. His religious views set him apart too: one reviewer of Flowers and Fruits advised him in 1843: ‘if he duly regard his own happiness and reputation, to renounce for ever that mischievous maudlin affectation of infidel transcendentalism by which very young and very inexperienced men are so apt to be fascinated, at the bitter cost of life-long misery and late regrets.’18 Duncan clearly looked the part of the outré adjunct, with his wearing of a beard causing dismay on the part of Holyoake, Lovett and others – it was a misopogonic age still. The Croydon Chartist and journalist Thomas Frost remembered him as a youth of ardent temperament, more poetic than practical, ‘with long fair hair parted like a woman’s and shirt collar à la Byron’ – i.e., wide open at the neck as Byron liked to pose himself, indeed a recent study of Byron’s sartorial impact on working-class readers, cites this passage.19 It was the international costume of the poet and the literary aspirant, the fashion for the romantic and the mystic as reflected in long hair, open shirt collars and beards was something observed by commentators on Parisian youth in the same period – ‘traces of the decline of the military spirit’ according to one writer. 20 In the threat to the clean upper lip, the associated moustache further represented foreignness:

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Punch depicted a dandy sporting the continental appendage of moustache (and beard) under the title of ‘a growing evil’ in 1849 – an invasion of the ‘English physiognomy’ linked to cheap excursions to France. 21 There was also a suggestion in Frost’s reference, of ‘soft sentimentalities’ and effeminacy, just as in the account in Punch’s ‘Thumbnail portraits, or The man who parts his hair down the middle’ in March 1854 – raised at home or at a girls’ school, agile with needle and thread, wearing ‘turn down collars and cultivates sentimental poetry’, imbiber of non-alcoholic drinks, and adorer of Byron. In an anti-poetaster swipe in Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae in 1829, capital punishment is deemed a suitable punishment for young poets similarly dressed, and imagined mincing to the gallows, eyes in a ‘fine frenzy rolling’, ‘Jenny Jessamyish’, handing out sonnets and elegies to Hangy. But Duncan was no mild young fop.22 Centre-parted hair also had political resonances – commentary on the millenarian oddity John Nichols Thom, aka Sir William Courtenay, had noted his centre-parted hair in 1838, in his ‘assumption of the character of a saviour of the people’.23 The long and centre-parted hair, and the beard, were adopted as a uniform of the male inhabitants of the Concordium, according to Thomas Frost’s recollections – and he recalled that John Goodwyn Barmby the Communist was similarly attired and styled (the centre parting was also associated with the idealist and artist or poet, see for instance the depiction of the character Paul Lefevre in Eliza Lynn’s anonymous story ‘Sentiment and Action’, which was serialised in Household Words in 185524). It was, indeed, a transatlantic look too, with ‘apostles of newness’ in the United States adopting the Byronic look.25 The Concordists, in a rejected address to the London Peace Society in 1843, quoted the poet Shelley, from Queen Mab, ‘Who will assert that had the populace of Paris satisfied their hunger at the ever furnished table of vegetable nature they would have lent their brutal sufferage to the proscription list of Robespierre.’26 Shelleyan diet should have rendered the revolution bloodless. We do not know exactly how Duncan saw his debt to the Shelley of Queen Mab whose verse he used to preface his own collection. The status of this poem was publicised during the trial of the publisher Edward Moxon for blasphemy in publishing the poet’s Works, at the Court of Queen’s Bench in June 1841. Duncan probably modelled himself on Shelley in his republicanism, religious unorthodoxy (but not atheism), vegetarianism and water-drinking. Queen Mab was described in 1858 as the ‘gospel of the Owenites’, and later described as the Chartist Bible; the Chartist poet was selling the ‘handsomely bound’ poetical works of Shelley (‘580 pages, price 2s.!’) at 353 Commerce Strand, Redmead in 1848–1849.27 He was also selling other books, ‘equally cheap’, readers of his paeans learned, and binding and printing were done on low terms.

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Vegetarian food was also to be sold at 353 Commerce Strand, Redmead: genuine scotch oatmeal for 2s for 14lb, and barley, split peas, biscuits, figs and grapes (one assumes the grapes proffered to the no doubt startled American Indian chief were taken from his father’s shop). Despite his good intentions, Duncan’s career (obscure as it remains) was more than tinged with bathos. He was a young man of little talent in poetry and rather more for causing trouble in the radical and progressive circles he was involved with. Large-hearted, but with no discretion, his enthusiasm for an extensive list of progressive causes represents the extreme at a period, the late 1840s and early 1850s, when there definitely seemed to be a ‘tide of progress’. As the Morning Chronicle said, ‘on account of his conduct in connection with the Trafalgar-square émeute’ (as he proudly reported in his peans, also showing off some grasp of French, although the word was used by the press to describe Chartist activities in the metropolis28) he was not only ‘a poet and republican, but an enthusiast of the first water’.29  What of the other ‘enthusiasts of the first water’ that we have encountered in this study? ‘The hum of the “Working Bee” is no more heard in the fens of Cambridgeshire, the several “Morning Stars” that appeared year by year from Ham Common to Whitechapel, shining upon a dietary of milk and vegetables, have fallen, one by one,’ wrote George Jacob Holyoake, in the Contemporary Review in August 1876.30 Briefly Duncan had been in the ‘little armies on the once militant plain of social progress’. He might have been included, had Holyoake cared to in this particular survey, among the political and reforming eccentrics of the era: men such as the Bradford Owenite Samuel Bower and his diet of peas in the company of the American transcendentalists; or the sinister ‘Optimist’ and former spy Pierre Henri Baume with his monkey, his Experimental Gardens on the New North Road, also known as ‘the Frenchman’s Island, where infants were to be suckled by machinery’. Compared with that, perhaps Duncan’s self-penned progressive eccentricities were rather mild. Duncan’s hero Etzler disappeared without a trace in 1846: his former colleagues disappointed to find that he could not be enticed out at the time of the Great Exhibition, although we have seen that the association between Etzler’s fantastic inventions and one exhibited model of an agricultural machine was made. Stoll surmises he died at sea years before.31 Of the other figures we have seen in association with Duncan, the most successful was Stollmeyer. His West Indian career, after the demise of the Etzlerite dream, began with the establishment of a store selling arrowroot

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and Indian maize and developed into a business that led to his becoming the Asphalt or Pitch Lake King of Trinidad.32 With Etzler he had presented the vision of an entirely new mode of transport across the seas, but instead of wind and wave power he was to promote ‘liquid fuel for oceanic steam navigation’, exploiting the distillate of the pitch or asphalt lake in southwestern Trinidad, advocating its application through the Trinidad Colonist, and reported in The Times.33 In Trinidad, where he became a member of the legislative body, he would also introduce the temperance Good Templars organisation to the island – reminiscing to British teetotalers as he recommended lime juice as a substitute for malt liquor, of taking the pledge after meeting Father Mathew.34 The childhood memories of his mother’s tales of Ulm’s conquest by Napoleonic forces, and the quartering of a mass of troops in the family hotel of the White Horse, had made a deep impression on Stollmeyer and he would gain some international attention as Trinidad’s peace ambassador between Germany and France over the question of Alsace Lorraine, in 1890, when he was described as a ‘youthful acquaintance of Bismarck’.35 He would attend the Peace Congress at Geneva in 1890, and, as Merle Curti noted, spent a ‘fair slice of his fortune on picturesque but fruitless peace missions’.36 He supported imperial federation and was the President of the Trinidad branch of the West Indian Civil Rights Defence Union, he would support calls for colonial MPs at Westminster.37 He died at the age of ninety one.38 The aficionado of medico-psychology, Edward King, who had loaned the TES a field and steam carriage, migrated to the United States, as we have seen, taking with him a young family which was to include a future doctor who would attend the mortally wounded President Lincoln, and another son, Claudius, who would be an army surgeon on the Confederate side. King’s triform scheme accepted the possibility of miniature establishments from Maryland, Virginia, Carolina, Tennessee, down to the Appalachia Bay, although emigration to the States ‘would be a severe shock to my patriotism and loyalty’.39 Thomas Atkins, the civil engineer who accompanied Stollmeyer to Harmony Hall and built the ‘Satellite’ for the TES, was evidently more than willing to continue spending his money on works of social progress and science in the 1850s. He spoke about the ‘Satellite’ at a meeting of the Royal Society of Arts in 1856 which listened to Fowler of Bristol’s paper on ‘Cultivation by Steam: Its Past History and Probable Prospects’ which was reported in agricultural and engineering journals, his experimentation identified as an important contribution. 40 He was also devising plans for an educational and instructional establishment (seeking at one point the doubtful support of Pierre Henri Baume) and purchasing land outside

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Oxford for this purpose in 1854.41 Such enthusiasm was hardly surprising since he was a self-educated man, born in Gloucester about 1810, who ‘at the age of twenty-one … scarcely knew the North from the South, or the East from the West’.42 An Owenite, Atkins sent Owen a copy of his verse, ‘The Voice of Steam and Science to the Family of Man’ which had been printed in 1852.43 Identified as a possible provincial agent for the octogenarian Owen’s latter day mission to humanity, Atkins kept Owen informed of his progressive schemes, such as devising imagery to convey ‘the Laws of Positive Science’ (in columnar form along the lines of the spiralling narrative around the column in the Place Vendôme, according to one account). Owen planned to herald the millennium in the year following James Elmslie Duncan’s obscure death. On New Year’s Day in 1855 Atkins displayed a painted scene of ‘new conditions’ and elaborated his own scheme of social amelioration after Owen addressed an audience at St Martin’s Hall in Long Acre, gathered to hear the aged philanthropist usher in ‘the true millennial state of human existence’.44 Owen introduced Atkins as ‘one of yourselves, – a self-taught scientific man, who, with your own habits and manners, has done more, unaided, for you and the population of the world, than all the aristocracies now living’. Like Owen, he had been regarded as a madman ‘but it is only such kind of madmen that can redeem the world from sin and misery’.45 Then Owen convened a meeting at the Hall to present Atkins’s proposal, as the Illustrated London News reported, ‘to establish an industrial and provident moral, scientific, and education association, in connexion with a college to educate youth of both sexes in the practical duties of life – a sort of “model university,” indeed “in which the useful positive sciences of human nature and society – magnetism and electricity, astronomy and geology, chemistry and mechanics – shall be taught be means of easy, industrial, healthy labour.”’46 In May, the month of the aged Owen’s poignant fêting at a ‘World’s Convention’ of reformers, Atkins used St Martin’s Hall to display the grand panorama of creation, science and society depicted on twenty thousand feet of canvas. Many years had been spent in collecting the material for the exhibition.47 Earlier, when shown to the public of Oxford (Atkins was by then a member of the town council), the Oxford Herald reported it as ‘a production sui generis. In its nature, in its scope, in its purpose, it assimilates to nothing which preceded it … a wondrous dream, full of objects strange, startling, of deep interest, but to the bearing of which we have lost the clue’.48 The tradesmen and working-men were apparently appreciative.

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It was openly a propagandist and fund-raising venture, ‘developing a practical education for the millions and new homes for the people’ (as advertisements in London newspapers stated) but proved to be a failure, taking in only £10, although Robert Cooper’s London Investigator praised the display when it moved after fifteen days to the Linwood Gallery in Leicester Square, as a ‘novelty of the right kind’ that all friends of rational progress should see: with its images designed to display his projects for the ‘amelioration of the working classes’, exemplification of the development theory, and geological, astronomical, and zoological scenes. 49 Other reports noted the show was ‘accompanied throughout with select and appropriate music’, and that Atkins’ lecture was earnest and ‘occasionally in the right’.50 The panorama travelled to Birmingham for a more successful run at the Oddfellow’s Hall later in that year.51 During the Crimean War Atkins sought Owen’s aid in obtaining government support for a weapon – a submarine – which would destroy Sebastopol, even seeking an audience with Lord Palmerston (who had been appreciative of his panorama).52 More conventionally Atkins established a gas company in Chepstow in 1856 with his son. This led to Atkins’ Filter and Engineering Company, with an office in the Farringdon Road and later Fleet Street, which provided water-filtering devices to the Royal Navy.53 The Irishman Dr Hugh Doherty, ‘pontifex maximus’ of the British Fourierites,54 who had endorsed the schemes of Etzler in the London Phalanx and pseudonymously in Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, and practically, to the extent of organising an experiment with the ‘Naval Automaton’, abandoned his Fourierite creed in the 1850s, disgusted at the narrow-minded attachment of other Fourierites: writing critically of the Frenchman’s beliefs as improbable and proved erroneous during his own lifetime. Sporting a tricolour during the heady days of May 1848 in Paris, Doherty settled there, and, writing French with ‘originality’ if not with purity, he mystified the English reviewers with his volumes – five in all – attempting an ‘Organic Philosophy’ by studying in turn episcomology, ontology, biology and ‘organic method’ in what the Westminster Review summarised as ‘misspent ingenuity’.55 The Spectator required a ‘Lexicon Dohertianum’ to uncover the meaning, in 1868.56 Doherty supported spiritualism, with his friend the Swedenborgian and homeopath James John Garth Wilkinson, with whom he visited Paris in the year of revolution in 1848, in the company of the radical Irish aristocrat Lord Wallscourt, who died there, of cholera.57 Wallscourt’s ghost appeared to him to reassure his old friend of his amity, after Doherty’s anxieties about refusing to run the nobleman’s Irish estates on philanthropic lines. 58 Doherty was long-lived, dying in 1891.

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In 1879 John Goodwyn Barmby resigned from his Unitarian ministry at Westgate chapel in Wakefield, where he had belonged to the local board of education, supported a range of radical causes from Mazzinian nationalism and female suffrage, endorsed the development of Unitarian ritual in worship, published Unitarian hymns for special services and further collections of poetry such as The Poetry of Spring and The Return of the Swallow. When he was minister at Topsham in Devon, the Western Times in 1853 described the Poetry of Home as ‘exceedingly sweet versification’, which expressed ‘a lofty and cosmopolitan spirit which keeps above any jars of opinion differences of creed or peculiarity of sect’.59 In Wakefield he also led a ‘Band of Faith’, a brotherhood and sisterhood intended to spread liberal ideas in theology and so develop ‘the broad church of the future’. The Wakefield-born novelist George Gissing was to use his name for a character in In the Year of Jubilee. Barmby retired to his birthplace of Yoxford, in that ‘fair vale of Suffolk’, dying at Vines Villa in October 1881: he was buried at St Michael’s church in Framlingham. 60 His daughters by a second marriage (to a daughter of the governor of Wakefield gaol) included Beatrice Helen Barmby, author of Gisli Sursson a drama; Ballads and poems of the Old Norse days and some translation (1901). Robert Buchanan, the Ayrshire-born journeyman tailor, Owenite socialist missionary and aspiring poet (indeed, Holyoake recalled him as ‘addicted to poetry, in which he succeeded better than any of the competitors in verse by whom he was surrounded’ 61) who had briefly been editor of the Morning Star with Duncan, under what circumstances we will never know, helped establish one short-lived ultra-reform newspaper in London, The Spirit of the Age, in 1848, joined a League of Social Progress with other prominent Owenites, and edited the Weekly Tribune. Settling in Glasgow he became proprietor and editor of the leading radical and freethinking working-class weekly Glasgow Sentinel, in October 1850.62 Compared with the Morning Star’s miniscule circulation, Buchanan was now associated with a paper which claimed an average ‘weekly circulation of six thousand copies … thus at once took the first place among Scottish Journals which it has ever since maintained’.63 This ‘self-made man of the very highest class’, according to The Athenaeum, had risen to become ‘a leader in politics and sociology’, supporting further parliamentary reform in the late 1850s. Although bankrupted and forced to sell the printing and publishing premises and plant, and the copyright of the Sentinel, Glasgow Times, Penny Post in July 1860 he announced the Industrial News, A Journal of Trades’ Organisations, Co-operative Enterprise, and the Rights of Labour in May 1862. He died at his son’s house in Sussex in March 1866.64 This son, the more famous and talented poet, Robert W. Buchanan, had issued his first volume of poetry, Poems and Love Lyrics, at sixteen.

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 The Galician Pole (‘Citizen of the US of Panslavia’), explorer and naturalist Dr Johann Lotsky, who pestered Thomas Carlyle for literary work in the early 1840s, announced to readers of Notes and Queries his collection of ‘those strange mementoes of the times’ in 1856: a ‘Quisquilinae Literariae Londinenses’, which included flying leaves, pamphlets and journals of the ephemeral radical causes of the age – republican, infidel and Chartist – and which, he opined from his home at Gower Street, would prove a ‘fertile source for the searches into the minds of the English and London people’ in the future. Perhaps Lotsky collected Duncan’s ephemera: but little remains of Duncan’s work among the fragile literary detritus of London radicalism.65 Duncan’s poetry was rediscovered by the late Victorian vegetarian Andreas Gottschling, who was seeking information about the Ham Common pioneers of vegetarianism, and reprinted in his little progressive (ethical socialist) journal Home Links.66 Subsequently the ephemeral ballads and journals were collected: two of the peans appear in a bound volume of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century broadsides on political and economic themes in the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature at the University of London, presumably part of the bibliophile Herbert Somerton Foxwell’s collection, in the Edwin Seligman collection of works on economics held at the University of Columbia since 1930 – The Divinearian being cited in Harold Faulkener’s Columbia University monograph Chartism and the Churches. A Study in Democracy in 1916, and in the British Library – which received copies of some of Duncan’s peans which were kept by George Cruikshank and presented by Mrs Cruikshank. That Cruikshank kept papers produced by the strange character who had interrupted one of his temperance platform appearances may simply be down to his hoarding of a paper picked up or sent to him, as his biographer, Robert Patten has suggested.67 He features as a bizarre character in modern accounts of the Chartists in London, as he did at the time. His few surviving Chartist dirges and ballads, allegedly printed in their thousands, are now virtually available to institutions able to afford digitised collections of microfilmed material. My own copy of Flowers and Fruits was owned by the Sitwells: apparently forming part of the library of the Sitwells at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire (or perhaps from the library in their Tuscan castle): it would be fitting if Duncan’s verse had intrigued Edith, the poet and author of The English Eccentrics, perhaps it is more fitting that the copy was unread. The pages were left uncut.68

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In Flowers and Fruits, Duncan wrote about man’s nature as ‘made to rejoice’. Yes, man was made to mourn, ’tis said: On Nature too the fault is laid: But man, tell me, – may it not be Thy woes originate with THEE? One woe from other source that springs, Man on himself a thousand brings; And for one woe of Nature’s cause, How many spring from human laws: From institutions ill contrived, Which are from darker times derived … 69 This verse was written, no doubt, under the influence of the Owenite critique of current social arrangements, and the socialist doctrine of character.70 But where did Duncan’s woes come from? His crazy antics, his relationship with his father, that strange mixture of William Topaz McGonagall and ‘Citizen Smith of Tooting’ – of bad to average poet (no compelling poète maudit), of wastrel and radical enthusiast – make him a figure of interest. But it would be wrong to claim him as a more important figure than he was. There were more prolific and much better Chartist poets than Duncan. His journalism engaged in the issues of the day from an eccentric and solipsistic angle. Seeking attention, he was an embarrassment to the Chartist cause, his vagaries a useful way to ridicule the movement as ‘specimens of Chartism’. He was aware himself of the role that laughter played as the response of those in power, Scourge for a Gag asking (with unconvincing metaphor dictated by the rhyme scheme): ‘You chorus our song with laughter’s gong, but think ye ’twill be laughter long?’ Ian Haywood has discussed the ‘Burkean tactics of reactionary satire’ displayed in Puppet-Show (which punished ‘peevish prattling persons preaching pattern progress principles’ 71), in Punch (which was at least alert to the danger of unthinking laughter on the part of the political establishment in late April 1848, fearing ‘that ominous asinine laughter’ of the Commons might be re-echoed ‘after the Irish fashion this day with the voice of cannon’72), and other journals in 1848, refuting ‘the rationality, sophistication and dignity of radical and republican politics’ and turning radical political ideology ‘into a pathology of infantile and displaced libidinal behaviour: egotism, low desires, violent impulses, delusions of grandeur’. Certainly Duncan’s treatment by the press fits this approach – and critics from radical circles such as Holyoake could perceive the damage he did to progressive causes.73

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Duncan was a troubled young man whose mental illness we cannot diagnose satisfactorily at this distance and with so little information. His journalism is fragmentary, the speeches that he was no doubt prepared to give in police courts were not delivered or were curtailed, his pamphlets and many of his advertised broadsides have failed to survive. There was something performative about Duncan, from the moment he offered his poems to the world (recall the simile of the theatrical curtain in Flowers and Fruits) to his next role as the gauche and not very impressive editor of an obscure radical journal. A lot may be put down to youthful inexperience and posturing. But from 1848 onward Duncan’s persona seems to be comprised of stage gesture and declamation, and not simply because the press depicted him as an attention-seeking and self-important nonentity. It turned out that this was not the folly of youth, although the medical expert dealing with Duncan at Colney Hatch seemed to think his condition involved lunacy ‘for popularity’. What does James Elmslie Duncan’s career amount to – what does it mean? Beyond the ludicrous anecdote and the farcical-tragic aspect, can one talk about Duncan’s impact or achievement? A very minor bit player in the drama of 1848, Duncan’s predicament echoed the consignment of Chartism to history by his incarceration. The Apostle of the Messiahdom was a young man beguiled by rhyme and self-absorbed whether through mental illness or egotism, who had, echoing the self-confidence of the dreamers and schemers he presented to the readers of the Morning Star, adopted the role of an oracle of progression. He tried to create a heroic self, through the noble artist of his fragment of a novel (itself, proposed to depict his heroes of the age) and self-dramatising as the man with the red beard, chosen by the people as their poet. In his youthful poetic voice, while the muse was not yet sacrificed to enthusiasm, James Elmslie Duncan wrote an epitaph, ‘Time and Eternity,’ lines ‘supposed to be Written with the Finger on the Sea Beach’: These words are traced upon the sand By a frail, youthful, human hand, And soon the surges will efface Whatever here that hand may trace. But, should a fellow-mortal chance Upon these tracings slight to glance, Although they be but – ‘tracings slight,’ O! Scorn them not, but read aright: For what are works of human hands, However vasty or sublime, But feeble tracings on the sands?

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The surges are the type of Time, And in the ocean there you see The emblem of Eternity.74 Here, in this poetry, at any rate, was the recognition of the tragedy of human ambitions.

NOTES

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3

Introduction

Lancaster Gazette, 13 July 1850, p.5, imparting ‘metropolitan gossip’. On Ernest Jones, see ‘The Chartists and their Laureate’, English Review, October 1851, pp.55–86; and M. Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). The phrase concerning Cooper appears in a review, The Athenaeum, 932, 6 September 1845, p.869, of Cooper’s The Purgatory of Suicides. A Prison Rhyme. In Ten Books (London: J. How, 1845). Literary and art scholars, and philosophers of aesthetics, necessarily have concerned themselves with the problem of value: of how to distinguish between the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in poetry for example. I.A. Richards’ brief chapter ‘Badness in Poetry’ (in Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924; London: Routledge, 2001) attempts to define this in terms of ‘worthless’ – where the ability to communicate is successful – and the merely ‘defective’. Marcel Duchamp advocated bad art as a conscious act, declaring that ‘bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion,’ see S. Crangle, ‘Dada IS Bathos! Or: Of the Hobbyhorse Endlessly Rocking’, in S. Crangle and P. Nicholls, eds, On Bathos: Literature, Art, Music (London: Continuum, 2010), p.30. Keston Sutherland, in ‘What is Bathos’ in the same collection, p.9, rejects the idea of bathos as simply ‘flat, inadequate or ridiculous poetic language’ or the OED definition of a ‘ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax’. In the period under study, there was interest in defining good and bad art, thus Josiah Gilbert’s Art, its Scope and Purpose; or, a Brief Exposition of its Principles: A Lecture Delivered at a Mechanics’ Institution (with subsequent additions) (London: Jackson and Walford, 1858) p.77: defined it as ‘That which results from imperfect perception and that arising from false method’. Reflections on the mediocrity of poetry, the relative harm of bad poetry, and interest in poetry written by unusual people, are to be found in R. Southey, Lives of Uneducated Poets, to which are added attempts in verse, by John Jones, An Old Servant (London: H.G. Bohn, 1836), p.164; a humane treatment of the difficulties of the bad poet are to be found in the preface to Thomas Park’s Works of the British Poets: Including Translations from the Greek and Roman Authors (36 vols; London: Sharpe, 1828), vol.11, p.16. The intriguing suggestion is made by Andrew Hobbs, ‘Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800–1900’, Victorian Periodicals Review 45:4 (Winter 2012), pp.488–492 [pp.490–491], that poetry, to judge from the quality of work admitted into press by local newspaper editors, was ‘a method of communication or a

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5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13

14 15

16

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS way of thinking that was open even to those with little or no poetic ability. It was imagined as just another style of talking or writing.’ R. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 (1894; London: Merlin Press, 1969); R. Postgate, Story of a Year, 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p.131; G.D.H. Cole and R. Postgate, The Common People, 1746–1946 (revision of earlier work published in 1938; London: Methuen, 1968), p.321. The account in the latter is notably inaccurate. D. Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p.82 (the quotation about London Chartism at its most dangerous, p.221). W.H.G. Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp.192-193. See also P.M. Ashraf, Englische Arbeiterliteratur vom 18. Jahrhundert bis zum ersten Weltkrieg: Entwicklungstendenzen im Überblick (Aufbau-Verlag, 1980), p.267, p.419. See also Ashraf’s Introduction to Working Class Literature in Great Britain (GDR, 1978). J.R.T.E. Gregory, ‘James Elmzlie Duncan (fl.18221851)’ in K. Gildart and D. Howell, eds, Dictionary of Labour Biography vol.12 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp.76–83. ‘The Chartists, Old and New’, The Leader, 26 May 1855, p.495. See A. Whitehead, ‘Dan Chatterton and his “Atheistic Communistic Scorcher”’, History Workshop Journal 25:1 (1988), pp.83–99. D.J. Rowe supposed it ‘not unreasonable to regard as mentally disturbed’ the few extremists in ‘London Radicalism in the Year of the Reform Bill’, in J. Stevenson, ed., London in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp.149–176 [p.166]. The word ‘progressive’ is not too much of an anachronism in Duncan’s case since he employed the associated ‘progression’ in his journalism; see R. Williams, Keywords. A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976; London: Fontana Press, 1988), p.243. Goodwyn Barmby hymned ‘moving on’ in ‘Move On’, The People’s Journal 3:57 (30 January 1847), p.63, with the final lines: ‘The hand is moving from the sword, |The heart is moving towards the Lord! |Move on! Keep moving! |Progress is the law of loving.’ William Lovett the Chartist recalled being commissioned to make a model of a ‘model village’ for Morgan, see Life and Struggles of William Lovett in His Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom with some short account of the different associations he belonged to and of the opinions he entertained (1876; this edition: 2 vols, London: G. Bell, 1920), vol.1, p.43. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 10:117, September 1843, reviewing Luke Hansard’s Hints and Reflections for Railway Travellers and Others; or, a Journey to the Phalanx (3 vols; London: G. Earle, 1843). Another good essay for presentation of the panacea approach to reform is ‘Led by Ideas’, Chambers’s Journal 97, n.s., 8 November 1845, pp.289–291, which refers to nostrums as varied as allotments, temperance, peace, galleries and schools, restoration of Merrie England, and universal cricket. J.G. Barmby, ‘The Old Country and the New Country; or, Home Colonisation and Emigration’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 14:160 (April 1847), pp.266–268. ‘The Universal Philanthropist’, The Comic Almanack (London: J.C. Hotten, 1848), between pp.240–241, the philanthropist, holding an unfurled sheet entitled Grand Scheme of Universal Benevolence, is about to kick the tattered father, ‘Why, you impudent scoundrel! Asking me for anything! Haven’t I made you? – would you ever have been known, if it hadn’t been for me? And is this the return you make me? Interrupting me, too, at a moment when I am perfecting a grand benevolent plan of Universal Brotherhood and Community of Goods, for the amelioration of the whole Human Race? – Why, you ungrateful wretch, get out of my house, and learn to love your benefactors!!!’ ‘Robert Owen and Socialism in Britain’, North British Review 12:23 (November 1849), pp.86–114 [p.86]. Saturday Magazine 29, February 1840, published an essay on Socialists by ‘W.M.’ in which the sect was described as one ‘whose object is to introduce a

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23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

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specious generalization of larceny and an universal libertinism into the health of their country one man endeavouring to substitute his crude nostrum for the results of all the wisdom and experience of the past the fruit of the common sense and intelligence of every age’. J.G. Hepburn, A Book of Scattered Leaves: Study and Anthology, part 1 Poetry of Poverty in Broadside Ballads of Nineteenth-century England (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000), p.59. It refers to Duncan’s A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! about Duncan’s ‘brief imprisonment there for persistent reciting of his verse in the street’. This was Pean 7, and was actually prose and verse addressed by Duncan to Walter Cooper in the guise of the Chartist John James Bezer. The key study is J. Davis, ‘A Poor Man’s System of Justice: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal 27 (1984), pp.309–335. J. Ewing Ritchie, About London (London: W. Tinsley, 1860), p.8. A fascinating biography of a speculative news reporter is that of Frederick Town Fowler, who reported on Chartist meetings in London, for The Times and other papers, and whose brushes with police courts are detailed in the cross examination during the indictment of Joseph Fussell at the Old Bailey, for seditious speech, 3 July 1848, see Proceedings of the Central Criminal Court, Ninth Session, 1847–1848, 3rd July 1848, pp.340–343 [p.343]; accessed via Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 8 October 2013) (t18480703-1677). ‘Penny-a-liners’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1 February 1845, p.98. See J. Davis, ‘A Poor Man’s System of Justice’, on the press interest in these courts, p.317. ‘Penny-a-liners’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1 February 1845, p.98. Percy Vaughan published Early Shelley Pamphlets (London: Watts, 1905) and, with Thomas J. Wise, The Necessity of Atheism. For his life, see the reference in B. Cooke, The Gathering of Infidels: A Hundred Years of the Rational Press Association (Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2003), p.78. Shelfmark NCE p.v.47, no.2 was wrongly catalogued with the author’s autograph. The Pforzheimer copy was later bound with Shelley’s Queen Mab, published by James Watson c.1845 and three other works. Watson sold Etzler’s work at the same period. Not that this fugitive record is unusual in the history of radical individuals and groups – for Chartism, there is no copy of the Chartist Hymn Book, for Goodwyn Barmby’s communist groups the communist periodicals are incomplete. Star of Freedom, 20 November 1852, p.232. Weekly Dispatch, 11 June 1848, p.282, reporting complaint of Co-operative League concerning reports in Morning Chronicle. On government reporters as ‘political prostitutes’, ready to talk up a protectionist or free trade meeting according to the needs of the newspaper, but always prepared to belittle working Chartist speeches, see ‘L’Ami du Peuple,’ Northern Star, 17 June 1848, p.3, ‘Possessing a certain amount of pot-house wit, picked up principally at ‘Coger’s hall, the ‘Coal Hole,’ and other similar establishments, they are only too happy to exhibit their “talents” in turning into ridicule the proceedings of the people, and making the wrongs and sufferings of the many, the subjects of ribaldry and burlesque’. Alba H. Warren, English Poetic Theory 1825–1865 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950), p.20, quoted in U. Schwab, The Poetry of the Chartist Movement (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987), p.174. See M. Sanders, ‘“A Jackass Load of Poetry”: The Northern Star’s Poetry Column, 1838– 1852,’ Victorian Periodicals Review 39:1 (Spring 2006), pp.46–66. A. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p.138; U. Schwab, The Poetry of the Chartist Movement, p.15. A. Schnepf, Our Original Rights as a People: Representations of the Chartist Encyclopaedia Network and Political, Social, and Cultural Change in Early Nineteenth Century Britain (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), pp.65–68.

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40

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THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS Reflections on the European Revolution of 1848. By a Superior Spirit, reviewed in Gentleman’s Magazine, 184 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans; Wright of Tamworth 1848), p.401. The quotation is at p.191 of a work which lauds the poet-statesman Lamartine, and contrasts Shelley with O’Connor in relation to Kennington Common. C. Mackay, ‘A Discourse on Poetry and on the Duties of the Poet’, The People’s Journal, 20 February 1847, pp.108–112. ‘Politicians’, London University Magazine 1:4 (1849), pp.151–157 [p.152]. The Labourer; a monthly magazine of politics, literature, poetry, &c, 3 (1848), p.130. The Labourer advertised its features in the Northern Star, 1 May 1847 thus: ‘5. POETRY AND ROMANCE, since these are important branches of educational progression.’ The Divinearian, p.5. ‘A Triad of Novels’, Fraser’s Magazine 42 (November 1850), pp.574–590 [p.576]. T. Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections. Literary and Political (London: Sampson Low, Marsh, Searle and Rivington, 1880), p.38. See J.D. Burn, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (1855; London: Tweedie, 1856), p.191, cited in D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), p.186. This is quoted in an essay on ‘Modern Poets’ in The Rambler. A Catholic Journal and Review 9:51 (March 1858), pp.188–207 [p.191]. The madness of poetry appears in William Wanley’s oft-reprinted Wonders of the Little World (1678), in an entry on the poet Malachus of Syracuse, as excerpted in a paragraph in the ‘Literature’ department of Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 2 January 1848. On ‘furor poeticus’ in more detail, see F. Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination (University Park, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1992). W. Cooper Dendy, The Philosophy of Mystery (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841), p.101. In the American Miscellany of Popular Tales, Essays, Sketches of Character, Poetry, and Jeux d’esprit. By Transatlantic Authors, published in London by Berger of Holywell in 1840, p.14, there appeared the following snippet: ‘Fate of Poets There are (vide a New York paper) 5023 poets in the United States. Of these, 91 are in the state prisons, 511 in lunatic asylums, and 280 in the debtors’ prisons.’ J.C. Badeley, On the Reciprocal Agencies of Mind and Matter, and on Insanity. Being the Lumleian Lectures, Delivered at the Royal College of Physicians, A.D. 1851 (London: J. Churchill, 1851), p.34. The seventeenth-century poet and dramatist Nathaniel Lee’s portrait by William Dobson was engraved by Watts and retailed in 1778 with the legend ‘Nath. Lee the Mad Poet’. On the eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, and the construction of his mad reputation, see C. Mousney, Christopher Smart: Clown of God (Bucknell University Press, 2001). Innes is obscure – his doggerel quoted in a plea for more information by a contributor, Edward F. Rimbault, to Notes and Queries 10 August 1850, p.166. On Blake’s reputation, see [J.A. Heraud], ‘The Last of the Supernaturalists’, Fraser’s Magazine, March 1830, pp.217–235; the comment by Robert Southey, The Doctor (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), vol.6, p.116, and commented on in a review of Southey’s work in The University Magazine, May 1847, as ‘the assumed character of a madman … himself quite insane’, p.617; A. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, ‘Pictor Ignotos,’ With Selections from His Poems and Other Writings (2 vols; London: Macmillan, 1863), vol.1, p.338; The Athenaeum announced Clare’s confinement in York lunatic asylum in 14 October 1837. Eliza Cook’s Journal 3:94 (15 February 1851), pp.241–243, [p.241], in an essay on Clare, associated his fate with the trials of other peasant poets. Dean Dudley, Pictures of Life in England and America; Prose and Poetry (Boston: French, 1851) provides one eyewitness account of Clare in the asylum, pp.117–121; see also J.R. Dix, Pen and Ink Sketches of Authors and Authoresses (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1852), pp.79–82. The delusions of the peasant poet are discussed

NOTES

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48 49 50 51

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by Mary Russell Mitford in Recollections of a Literary Life, or, Books, Places, and People (London: R. Bentley, 1857), pp.161–162. C.A. Eaton, Rome in the Nineteenth Century (3 vols; Edinburgh: Constable, 1820), vol.3, p.239. J.F. Nisbet, The Insanity of Genius and the General Inequality of Human Faculty Physiologically Considered (London: Ward and Downey, 1891), ch.3, ‘The Poetic and Literary Faculties of the Insane – Mad Poets and Philosophers – Half-Geniuses – Genius and Insanity Contained in Blake’. Interestingly, this work, in relation to Duncan’s supposed epileptic condition, notes, p.66, ‘Occasionally there is great intellectual activity produced by the epileptic condition, which seems to be caused by a wave of morbid excitement passing over the different cerebral centres. There is then a wonderful aptitude to conceive things quickly and to examine them under their most brilliant and poetical aspect.’ Nisbet included Cowper, Chatterton, Byron, Shelley, Southey among insane poets. A review of J. Percival, ed., The Appeal from Bethlem (London: Effingham Wilson), a collection of verse by Pearce, a prisoner in a lunatic asylum, in Journal of Psychological Medicine 4 (1851), p.234. ‘Notes and Sketches. Employment of the Imagination’, Morning Post, 15 November 1855, p.6. For Tennyson and madness, and the reception of Maud, see E.F. Shannon, ‘The Critical Reception of Tennyson’s “Maud”’, PMLA 68:3 (June 1953), pp.397–417, especially pp.404–405 on Tennyson’s treatment of the protagonist’s mental illness. S. Roberts, Radical Politicians and Poets in Early Victorian Britain (Lampeter: E. Mellen Press, 1993), p.134. His paean, ‘The Murdered Chartist’ is alluded to by T. Randall, in ‘Chartist Poetry and Song’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts, eds, The Chartist Legacy (Rendlesham: Merlin Press, 1999), p.174; his two Northern Star-published poems are listed in M. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Weekly Dispatch, 30 July 1848, p.370. The firm’s ingenious marketing, including its verse, is noted in J. Flanders, Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain (London: HarperCollins, 2006), pp.94–95. C. Kingsley, Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography (New York: Macmillan, 1887), p.242. Notes and Queries, 20 November 1852, p.493. J.H. Stocqueler, ‘Calcutta as it is. No. II. Social Habits’, Asiatic Journal, May–October 1843, p.578; Sinks of London laid open: a pocket companion for the uninitiated, to which is added a modern flash dictionary containing all the cant words, slang terms, and flash phrases now in vogue, with a list of the sixty orders of prime coves: embellished with humorous illustrations by George Cruikshank (London: J. Duncombe, 1848), p.114. It was a place of rough language; see for instance the reference to ‘St Giles and Wapping’ in ‘His Honor, the Judge, and the Press’, Southern Australian, 15 November 1842. Divinearian, p.5. For reflections on Fletcher’s comment, see ‘Ancient and Modern Ballad Poetry’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Review 61:379 (May 1847), pp.622–644 [p.631]. The quotation appears in ‘A.A.’, ‘The History of an Old Song’, Eliza Cook’s Journal 1 (October 1849), p.345; ‘G.L.C.’ Notes and Queries, 5 January 1850, p.153, notes that these were not actually Fletcher’s own words, but those of the Earl of Cromarty in his ‘An Account of a Conversation concerning a right Regulation of Governments, … in a letter to the Marquis of Montrose’. Divinearian, p.5. M. Vicinus, The Industrial Muse: A Study of Nineteenth Century British Working-Class (London: Croom Helm, 1974), p.96. This was a serialised essay; the quotation appears in the first part, at p.170. The series extolled Byron. ‘Our Monthly Review’, The Citizen: A Monthly Journal of Politics, Literature and Art 2:9 (July 1840), p.141.

246 56 57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66

67 68

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS C. Lee and D.B. Wyndham Lewis, eds, The Stuffed Owl. An Anthology of Bad Verse. Selected and Arranged by D.B. Wyndham Lewis and Charles Lee (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1930), p.viii, p.x. ‘Thomas Campbell – Modern Poetry’, British Quarterly Review 9:18 (1849), pp.385–399 [p.395]. The description is Charles Bray, The Philosophy of Necessity: Or, the Law of Consequences; as applicable to Mental, Moral, and Social Science (2 vols, London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841), vol.2, p.633. In actual fact the British Fourierites were keen, at least in Doherty’s London Phalanx, to distinguish between Owenites and themselves, in relation to religion and property. Doherty himself wrote the entry on Fourier for The Supplement to the Penny Cyclopedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (vol.1, London: Knight, 1851), in which appeared (p.600): ‘The Phalansterians have made little progress in England owing perhaps to the abstruseness of their writings They have not appealed to the popular feelings and interests in this country as in America probably from a fear of being misunderstood and misrepresented as political agitators and sceptical Socialists.’ See P. Pilbeam, ‘Fourierists in France and Britain’, in S. Aprile and F. Bensimon, eds, La France et L’Angleterre au XIXe siècle: échanges, représentations, comparaisons (Paris: Creaphis, 2006). See A. Wilson, ‘Chartism’, in J.T. Ward, Popular Movements c.1830–1850 (1970; London: Macmillan, 1978), p.128. The Rambler 60 (13 October 1750), as quoted in J.A. Garraty, The Nature of Biography (London: Cape, 1958), p.140. This phrase, or the variation ‘politico-poetical’, was current at the time, see, for instance, reviews of the poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger, M. Rattler, ‘Of a Philosopher, Patriot, and Poet’, Fraser’s Magazine 40:139 (November 1849), pp.531–545 [p.534]. The interest in the literary and cultural aspects of the Chartist movement is a development of the last three decades, although the study of Chartist poetry draws on pioneers such as the Soviet scholar Yuri V. Kovalev, editor of Anthology of Chartist Literature. Poetry of the British Working Classes, 1830s–1850s (Moscow: International Publishers, 1956). A good study of the links between (democratic) politics and literature is Taylor, Ernest Jones, which argues for Jones’ ‘late romanticism’ being, p.vi, a ‘perfect preparation for a political career’ in this period. All have their entries in the ODNB (2004), see J.H. Wiener, ‘Henry Hetherington (1792 –1849)’; R.K. Webb, ‘William Johnson Fox (1786–1864)’; M. Lee, ‘John Goodwyn Barmby (1820–1881)’; S. Roberts, ‘William Thom (1798?–1848)’. See L. De Vries, ‘Orrible Murder. An Anthology of Victorian Crime and Passion compiled from The Illustrated Police News (London: Book Club, 1974). See, for reports in The Times from 1823–1861, A. Suzuki, Madness at Home. The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (London: University of Berkeley Press, 2006), pp.25–38, the quotation from p.26. Suzuki, Madness at Home, p.38. M. Chase, ‘Digital Chartists: Online Resources for the Study of Chartism’, Journal of Victorian Culture 14:2 (2009), pp.294–301; the comment on the dangers of study ‘toodriven by journalistic sources’ at p.300. Chase notes Minor Victorian Poets and Authors, http://www.gerald-massey.org.uk; and Chartist Ancestors, http://www.chartists.net/ which I found useful, for the 6 March 1848 Trafalgar Square riots which included Duncan. I used 19th Century British Library Newspapers and Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition for Northern Star, the latter covering all available variant editions. See also M. Sanders, ‘The Chartist Text in an Age of Digital Reproduction’, Journal of Victorian Culture 14:2 (2009), pp.301–307. The collaboration between the British Library and Olive Software Inc., in 2001, which included digitisation of a sample of the Weekly Dispatch. See Gale collections Nineteenth Century Collections Online and Making of the Modern World.

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Thus references to Duncan in The Patriot in 1850 via NewspaperArchive.Com (http://newspaperarchive.com/advancedsearch).

1 2

Aberdeen Journal, 22 May 1850, p.5. J.F. Murray, The World of London (London: Blackwood, 1843), p.225, reprinting an essay in Blackwood’s Magazine (also published in Aberdeen Journal, 5 January 1842). See also ‘Hard Work in the Bakehouse’, Chambers’s Journal 39, January–June 1863, pp.43–44, which refers to the Scottish preponderance as ‘one of the curiosities of trade in this country’. On Duncan’s support for reform of bakers’ working conditions, see The Divinearian, p.1: perhaps stimulated by evidence to the Commons’ Sanitary Commission from Dr William Guy in 1848, reported in the press. Post Office London Directory, 1841 and 1842. The Divinearian, p.3. The journal, priced at three halfpence, was initiated in Scotland in 1832, and then published in London by W.S. Orr. It explained its principles in 1:13 (28 April 1832), p.103: ‘articles are partly original, consisting of tales, sketches of society (chiefly of the middle ranks of life), and matters of solid and useful information. Another part of the work consists of extracts from new or old books, not apt to be in the hands of general readers; and here the united principles of information and amusement are also adopted. Mr Chambers would be happy, for his own part, to make the work exclusively of a useful cast, but he fears that what might be added to its solidity would detract from its circulation, and, consequently, lessen its real usefulness.’ Morning Post, 16 April 1846, p.7. ‘M.S.O.,’ ‘The Physiology of the Epicier’, Westminster Review 2:4 (1836), pp.355–325 [p.364, p.365]. ‘Sketches of Paris and the Parisians. Part V. The Parisians’, Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, 16 August 1845, pp.396–400 [p.399]. ‘A.M.H.,’ ‘Heads of the People’, Westminster Review, October 1839, p.88, contrasting Kenny Meadows, Heads of the People, with Les Francais Moeurs contemporaines, and Pictures of the French. Drawn by Themselves (London: W.S. Orr, 1839), pp.86–96. London Metropolitan Archives, All Hallows London Wall, Registers of Baptism. Alexander Boyd Duncan of 25 Hibernia Road, Hounslow, died 24 May 1920, leaving £1280 5s 9d to James Chave, laundry proprietor and Herbert Gordon Duncan, decorator (his nephew), see Index of Wills and Administrations, National Probate Calendar. Kent’s Original London Directory (London: H. Kent-Causton, 1823), p.105; see Post Office London Directory, 1836, p.164, where Duncan is listed as Scotch agent. Morning Post, 9 October 1822, p.1; ‘Law Sittings’, Morning Post, 16 December 1836; Monthly List of Bankrupts Certificates and Dividends advertised in the London Gazette during the Year 1836 (The Law Journal), ‘DUNCAN James, of St. Mary Axe, in the city of London, cheesemonger, d.c. [dealer and chapman] Official assignee, G. Gibson, Basinghall-street. – Sols. Mitchell & Hill, New London-street. Fiat. Oct.31.’ Pigot’s Commercial Directory, 1842, p.503, listing him as Scotch provision agent; Charles Duncan is listed at Miller’s Wharf, Lower East Smithfield. B. Weiss, The Hell of the English: Bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1986), p.14. Several of the children eventually emigrated there: Alexander Boyd Duncan appears on the Australian Electoral rolls, residing in 1914 at Footscray, Melbourne. Gordon Duncan married Helen Warner in 1854, in Melbourne, Victoria, and then Margaret Barlow née Smyth in Victoria in 1878, and died while on holiday in London in August 1906. His son was Herbert Gordon Duncan, who married in 1908. Charles Duncan appears to have died in Tasmania.

3

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Chapter 1. ‘Londoner of Birth, Scottish by Parentage’

248 16

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THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS See ‘Caledonian Asylum,’ Morning Chronicle, 29 May 1843, p.3. Sampson Low, The Charities of London (London: Sampson Low, 1850) has the following, p.140: ‘The charity of the Scottish Hospital is applicable to the poor mechanic, the artisan, and labourer, natives of Scotland, with their wives, widows, and children, resident in the metropolis and its immediate neighbourhood, who, not having acquired any parochial settlement in this country, must otherwise be exposed to the utmost wretchedness or beggary.’ J. M’Turk, ‘Scotsmen in London’, in C. Knight, London (London: H.G. Bohn, 1851), p.322. Review of Verses of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (London: J. Watson, 1851), in The Spectator, 22 March 1851, p.282. Massey’s poetry won praise in other quarters, e.g., Freemason’s Quarterly Magazine n.s., 2 (1854), p.79, reviewing The Ballad of Babe Christobel, with other Lyrical Poems, thought here there was criticism of his conversion of the muse ‘into a political heroine’. ‘Edward Noble’, from Flowers and Fruits, p.40. Morning Star, 1845, issue 4, p.31. Admittedly, this is an unsigned paragraph but it has Duncan’s style about it. James Duncan, reported in Lady’s Newspaper, 11 May 1850, p.266. Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.60. The journal had sections on popular science, poetry, moral essays, narratives, articles of instruction and entertainment. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 8 February 1851, p.239. In this period, the masthead of the journal featured a light-emitting lyre. Among the comments praising poetry, one may cite Eliza Cook’s Journal, 13 July 1851, p.163: ‘Poetry is the first and last utterance of nature’s heart the truest best exponent of the voice of humanity The aspirations of its highest examples must be true.’ Thus Hythe, the Wapping of Colchester. The Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art: Collected from the Various Departments of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, History, Biography, Art-industry, Manufactures, Inventions and Discoveries, Local and Domestic Scenes, Ornamental Works, Etc., Etc., vols 1–2 (London: J. Cassell, 1852), p.231. ‘Overland to Blackwall,’ Leisure Hour 1433, 1879, pp.380–383 [p.382]. ‘Overland to Blackwall,’ p.382. ‘Bird’s Eye View of the London Docks’, Illustrated London News, 27 September 1845, p.204. The Times, 30 August 1849, p.7. The Spectator, 25 October 1851, p.340, noted, ‘Improvements in the London Docks. The Hermitage gates of the London docks in High-street, Wapping, have just been opened for the admission of shipping. They have been closed for many years and the water had remained so long in the basin that it has often become troublesome to the neighbours who were much annoyed by the noxious vapours emitted by it. The directors intend to use these gates for the ingress of very large vessels.’ First Report of the Commissioners appointed to Inquire whether Any and What Special means may be requisite for the Improvement of the Health of the Metropolis. Metropolitan Sanitary Commission (London: Clowes, 1847), p.2. Thus John Alfred Langford asserts in Cooper’s Journal 1:17 (week ending 27 April 1850), p.264, in ‘The Poet’s Heritage’, that he may escape from ‘my little dingy office,– | A little dingy room, – | Oh, my spirit freely wanders mid flowers and perfume’. C. Mackay, Thames and its Tributaries, or, Rambles among the Rivers (London: S. Bentley, 1840), p.81. The Divinearian, December 1849, p.1, p.8. The Vegetarian Advocate, 15 November 1848, p.47, discussed vegetarianism and cholera. The Divinearian, p.8. Mariners’ Church, Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Gospel Temperance Magazine 27:18 (June 1846), p.901.

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‘Aberdeen’, The Imperial Cyclopaedia (1850), p.5. ‘Back to Scotland’ All the Year Round 14:338 (14 October 1865), pp.277-281. London Gazette, 17 March 1843, p.922. A ‘Thomas Terry’ appears as committee member, Venezuelan Transit Company, with Duncan, Morning Star, 10 January 1846, issue 1, p.6. Morning Post, 19 June 1849, p.7; ‘Thames [police court]’, Northern Star, 30 June 1849, p.8. See the street directory for 1842. The street numbering is altered, with the site of the Gun Tavern now 75 High Street: where Duncan’s business was, is now an estate agents. C. Knight, London (London: H.G. Bohn, 1851), vol.3, p.50; [G.A. Sala] ‘Jack Alive in London’, Household Words 4:89 (6 December 1851), pp.254–260. Dickens writes about Wapping in the ‘Uncommercial Traveller’ essay, ‘Wapping Workhouse’, All the Year Round 43 (18 February 1860), pp.392–396, coming upon a popular place for suicide at ‘Mr Baker’s Trap’, before visiting the workhouse. See T.A. Critchley and P.D. James, The Maul and the Pear Tree The Ratcliffe Highway Murders (London: Constable, 1971). See P.G. Hamerton, Etching & Etchers (London: Macmillan, 1868), p.115. See K. Pyne, ‘Whistler and the Politics of the Urban Picturesque’, American Art 8:3/4 (Summer / Autumn 1994), pp.60–77. Other representations of Wapping about this period include Thomas Hosmer Shepherd’s watercolour of the shipyard and drydock known as the Gun Dock at Wapping, c.1850. Summer Excursions in the County of Kent, along the Banks of the Rivers Thames (London: W.S. Orr, 1847), p.28. Summer Excursions in the County of Kent, p.28. ‘Wapping’, in B. Weinreb, C. Hibbert, J. Keay and J. Keay, The London Encyclopaedia (London: Macmillan, 2010), p.983.

Chapter 2. Flowers and Fruits

Grits are coarsely ground oatmeal. The Healthian, November 1842, p.96. This was actually Hore’s Steam Wharf, no.272, Wapping, which operated a London to Dundee service in 1845, and was then managed by Elizabeth Hore, widow of William Hore: she died in 1856, see Gentleman’s Magazine, December 1856, p.782. There was an Aberdeen Steam Wharf at 257, Wapping, c.1848. The advertisement appears just below a poem by John Goodwyn Barmby, entitled ‘Anti-Butchery Rhyme’. See J.E.M. Latham, Search for a New Eden. James Pierrepont Greaves (1777–1842): The Sacred Socialist and His Followers (Madison Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999). C. Lane, The Law and Method in Spirit Culture: an Interpretation of A. Bronson Alcott’s Ideas and Practice at the Masonic Temple, Boston (Boston: J. Munroe, 1843), p.7. Penny Satirist, 27 July 1844, p.3. See ‘Our Postliminous Pop at “Coningsby”’, John Bull, 22 June 1844, pp.389–390, for a satirical treatment of the journal, as edited by Disraeli. G.J. Holyoake, The History of Co-operation (2nd reprint: London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), vol.1, p.265. ‘Hymn to Mercy’, New Age, March 1842, p.32, as ‘Harriett Downing’. See Monthly Review, January 1841, p.122, for a review of Downing’s dramatic poem, which sought to present a sympathetic depiction of a being who yet had a germ of good, ‘The object of this drama is to carry out the principle, that nothing which God has made can be deemed reprobate, or be finally and eternally lost.’ The obituary in The Athenaeum, 22 March 1845, p.291, noted, ‘Her mind was masculine and her sympathies extensive,’ and that ‘She had a singular penchant for tracing the accidental associations of the lunatic intellect.’ ‘Touched in the Head’ appeared in G.A. Fleming’s Union: A Monthly Record of Moral, Social, and Educational Progress, 1842. We learn, from New York Mirror, exhibition of the National Academy of Design, 30 May 1835, that Harriet Downing was ‘Mrs Oliver,

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15 16 17 18

19

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS author of several operas and miscellaneous poems, published under the name of Harriet Downing, painted at London in 1833, R. Peale NA. This is certainly the representation of a very extraordinary woman. How such a hand could convey to paper and press the contents of such a head appears truly wonderful. The picture is well painted and the attitudinizing must be attributed to the taste of the poetess and not to that of the painter.’ Rembrandt Peale’s portrait survives. The other poets published in the New Age, and The Healthian, were Fanny Lacey, I. Scott, ‘M.D.,’ and ‘D.H.B.’ Educational Circular and Communist Apostle n.s., no.5, March 1842, p.40. ‘Court Circular’, Penny Satirist, 20 January 1844, p.1. The journal published a highly appreciative review of A. Campbell, ed., Letters and Extracts from the M.S. Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves (2 vols; Ham Common: Concordium; London: J. Chapman, 1843–45), 20 January 1844, p.2. G.J. Holyoake, ‘A Dead Movement Which Learned to Live Again’, Contemporary Review 28 (August 1876), pp.444–461 [p.448]. ‘Ballooning; or, Modern Cloud-visiting’, Penny Satirist, 27 September 1845, p.2. On the White Quakers, see ‘Movements in Mind; or, the Spirit Working’, Penny Satirist, 30 March 1844, p.2; and A. Nicholson, Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger; Or, An Excursion through Ireland, in 1844, For the Purpose of Personally Investigating the Condition of the Poor (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1847), p.114: ‘These people bitterly denounce others, but take liberties themselves under pretence of walking in the spirit, which by many would be considered quite indecorous. The men wear white hats, coats and pantaloons of white woollen cloth, and shoes of undressed leather; the women likewise dress in white, to denote purity of life.’ See A. Hobbs, ‘Five Million Poems, or the Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800–1900’, Victorian Periodicals Review 45:4 (Winter 2012), pp.488–492. T. Frost, Reminiscences of a Country Journalist (London: Ward and Downey, 1886), p.67. For another depiction of the victim of cacoethes scribendi, see W. Gaspey, Physiology of ‘Muffs’ (London: Willoughby, 1848), about the conceited and frivolous bachelor male, which has a chapter, V, with a splendid woodcut titlepiece of a scribbling writer in a garret by Delamotte, on the ‘literary muff’: ‘never so supremely ridiculous, as when afflicted by the cacoethes scribendi,’ (p.53) and suggesting that ‘poetry run mad’ would find its appropriate niche in newspapers and magazines published, emulating the journal produced in a lunatic asylum in Dumfries, in the private and public madhouses of London, see Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 2 January 1848, p.8, for a review. ‘A.M.H.’, ‘Heads of the People’, Westminster Review, October 1839, p.89. ‘J.E. Duncan’, New Moral World, vol.11, 1 October 1842, p.116: ‘A Suggestion’, although the punctuation is ambiguous. World of Fashion, July 1843, p.154. It was also published in his collection of verse, Flowers and Fruits, p.57. Verse published in Cheltenham Free Press in 1843: 4 March (sonnet, ‘On Discovering a Mountain Daisy’, p.70), 18 March (‘Forget me not’, p.86), 25 March (‘Friendship’s Offerings. To – –’), 1 April (‘Love’s Offerings. To – –’, p.102), 22 April (‘Solitude. Impromptu on being requested to write on this subject’, p.126), 29 April (‘The Flower o’ the Dee’, p.134), 6 May (‘The Little Sportsman. No.1 Cupid’s Tent.’). Cheltenham Free Press 1844: 17 February, 27 April (‘The Lovers’), 11 May (elegiac stanzas published, p.150, and ‘Ploughing Match’ declined, p.148), 20 July (‘Ploughing Match’, p.232), 3 August (Jem Bunt’s verse), 14 September (‘The Lad wi’ the dark rolling eye’). G.J. Holyoake, The History of the Last Trial by Jury for Atheism in England: A Fragment of Autobiography, Submitted for the Perusal of Her Majesty’s Attorney-General and the British Clergy (London: J. Watson, 1850), p.1.

NOTES 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36

37 38 39 40

251

See O.R. Ashton, ‘Chartism and Popular Culture: An Introduction to the Radical Culture in Cheltenham Spa, 1830–1847,’ Journal of Popular Culture 20:4 (Spring 1987), pp.61–81, for the town’s Chartist activity. Cheltenham Free Press, 23 September 1843, p.299. Sperry’s collection, The Midnight Muse; or, a Collection of Miscellaneous Poems was published for him in Cheltenham and retailed in London by Whittaker, see Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 15 May 1841 [p.2]. New Moral World 7, 30 May 1840, p.1266, reported that he declined relief from the Social Body, further than that members would individually feel inclined to subscribe to his shilling volume of verse (presumably The Practice of Charity, a pamphlet which had stimulated the controversy), so that it would cover the expense of publishing (300 subscribers), he having already had 1,000 circulars printed. ‘Ballater’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 2:79 (3 August 1833), p.212. On this, and a good description of Ballater, see W. Howitt, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets (2 vols; London: R. Bentley, 1847), vol.1, pp.480–486. W.J. Linton, Memories (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1895), p.172. See S. Roberts, ‘William Thom (1798?–1848)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27194 [accessed 13 November 2012]; The Reasoner 33 (1847), review of Thom’s poems, pp.37– 39; Northern Star, 25 March 1848, p.3; W.J. Linton, Memories; A.T. Quiller-Couch, ed., The Oxford Book of Verse (1919), p.655, and a chapter in O. Ashton and S.F. Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer (London: Cassell, 1999). Illuminated Magazine 4 (November–April 1845), pp.49–52 [p.49]. See Chartist Circular 2:106 (2 October 1841), p.444. The third and fourth stanzas of the poem, Cheltenham Free Press, 27 April 1844. A contrast, as Mike Sanders has pointed out to me, is to be seen in Eliza Cook’s poetry, where ploughman and plough figure in verse concerned about the ‘green waste’ of common land, see ‘God Speed the Plough’, in The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook. Complete Edition (London: F. Warne, 1870), pp.173–174. See ‘Ploughing Matches’, Aberdeen Journal, 26 February 1840, p.4, reporting the formation and activities of a number of plough match associations in the area. This was not a new coinage to apply to the British empire – it had been used to describe the Spanish Empire. This is an allusion to Prospero’s words to Ferdinand in The Tempest, Act 4, scene 1. ‘The Ploughing Match’, Cheltenham Free Press, 20 July 1844, p.232. Cheltenham Free Press, 14 September 1844, p.296. Duncan is echoing phrases from Scottish ballads, with the idea of the ‘dark rolling e’e’ appearing in ‘Maid of Castlecary’. Cheltenham Free Press also published ‘Molly of Wapping,’ the address given was Wapping Old Stairs, the author, ‘Jem Bunt’, using the name used by Matthew Barker, wrote verse as ‘The Old Sailor’. Cheltenham Free Press, 22 April 1843, p.126: ‘ ’Tis sweet to lie beneath the verdant shade | Of rustling foliage where the zephyrs lurk, | While Night o’er earth doth draw her curtain dark | And on the velvet sward incline the head.’ Flowers and Fruits, or Poetry, Philosophy and Science (London: printed for the author, 1843). I am grateful to staff at the New York Public Library for photocopying this copy. The work was reviewed in New Moral World 12 (5:31, 3rd series), 27 January 1844, pp.242– 243 in the same number as the posthumous edition of J.P. Greaves’s letters. See also Cheltenham Free Press, 20 April 1844, p.122. New Moral World, 28 October 1843, p.144. Merriman published Owenite works. New Moral World 12 (5:32, 3rd series) 3 February 1844, p.256; see also New Moral World 12 (5:34, 3rd series), 23 March 1844, p.312. Flowers and Fruits, p.10. Flowers and Fruits, p.11.

252 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS J. Garwood, The Force of Circumstance: A Poem (Birmingham: J. Guest, 1838). See the lines, p.5, ‘… a type of that untroubled bliss | Nature designed for every living thing. | Ah! Why is man alone, of all her flock, | The prey of care, and misery, and want?’ Review of Ebenezer Jones, Studies of Sensation and Event, Poems (London: C. Fox, 1843) in New Moral World, 10 August 1844, p.55. A point I owe to Mike Sanders. W. Thom, Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-loom Weaver (London: Smith, Elder, 1845), p.73. Flowers and Fruits, p.54. Flowers and Fruits, pp.49–52. See O. Goldsmith, ‘An Elegy on the Glory of her Sex, Mrs. Mary Blaze.’ ‘Elegiac Lines On the Death of ―’, in Flowers and Fruits, p.22. Illustrated London Life, 9 April 1843, for obituary and portrait, and Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 4 April 1843, p.5. For portraiture, see her representation in Don Juan in 1837, in the Museum of London collection; and as Psyche from the Burlesque, in the British Museum collection. Flowers and Fruits, pp.19–20. There appeared in the Mirror of Literature, 8 April 1843, p.220, the following: ON THE DEATH OF MRS HONEY. She falls, she passes to the tomb, Not in the coarse of slow decay, But in the glory of her bloom, And in the zenith of her day. ‘Mark!’ such the solemn voice of Fate, Surveyed the dazzling things of earth, ‘How weak the prop – how brief the date Of beauty and inspiring mirth!’ ‘The Little Sportsman, or Cupid’s tent’, in Flowers and Fruits, pp.11–14. Flowers and Fruits, p.58. See ‘A Few Words on the Remuneration for Authorship’, The Phrenological Journal, 13, n.s., vol.11 (1840), p.230. Flowers and Fruits, p.15. See ‘A Few Words on the Remuneration for Authorship’, The Phrenological Journal, 13, n.s., vol.11 (1840), p.228. Flowers and Fruits, p.41. See C. Oldstone-Moore, ‘The beard movement in Victorian Britain’, Victorian Studies 48:1 (autumn 2005), pp.7–34. The Times, 20 March 1843, p.7. ‘Reason and the Razor’, Punch, 18 February 1854, p.60. ‘Much ado about nothing’, Hood’s Magazine and Comic Miscellany 10 (1848), p.188. ‘New Fashion of Wearing the Beard’, Morning Chronicle, quoted in The Penny Satirist, 16 January 1841. For ‘bearded refugees’, see Great Tom. A University Magazine (Oxford: Mansell, 1861), June, p.61. On the image of the artist in this period, see A. Sturgis et al, Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (London: National Gallery, 2006). ‘Is Belief in a Deity of any kind morally beneficial,’ at Branch A 1. Fourth Night,’ Oracle of Reason 102 (1843), p.305. I owe the pun to Dr Christopher Guyver. For the representation of the Chartist as ‘unshorn’, see Northern Star, 24 February 1838, p.4, for O’Connor’s contrast between real labouring men, and the LWMA, and other references throughout the history of the paper, including the late address of O’Connor ‘To the Fustian Jackets, the Blistered Hands, and Unshorn Chins’, Northern Star, 16 March 1850, p.1.

NOTES 64 65 66 67 68

69

70 71

72 73 74 75 76

77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

253

S. Roberts in Ashton, Fyson and Roberts, The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson (London: Mansell, 1995), p.64, cited in J. Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p.135. ‘Mr Ironside’s Account of the State of the French Republic’, The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 3 June 1848, p.2. ‘A Chant for the Illustrious “Democratic” Dodgers’, Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 1 May 1852, p.8. T. Hughes, ‘Prefatory memoir’ in Kingsley, Alton Locke, p.xxv. ‘The Cissor’, Sharpe’s London Magazine, July 1848, pp.18–21 [p.18], on the thoughts of a man perceiving what he believes to be revolutionary proclamations, 10 April 1848, outside London; [H. Spencer], ‘Manners and Fashion’, Westminster Review 61:6 (April 1854), pp.357–392 [p.357]; see also ‘The Beard’, Westminster Review 62:121 (July 1854), pp.26–36 [p.27] regarding: ‘that degree of liveliness which authorizes us to pronounce it a movement’; on Punch’s depiction of the bearded Chartist, see Oldstone-Moore, ‘The beard movement in Victorian Britain’, p.10. ‘Glimpses of Character. Second Paper’, Eliza Cook’s Journal 3 (14 September 1850), pp.308–309 [p.309]; F.B. Head, A Faggot of French Sticks (Paris: Galignani, 1852), e.g., p.8, a stroll around the Boulevards, a ‘region of beards’. See the allusion to moustaches, beards, and wide-awake hats, and thus the ‘appearance of foreign political refugees and sympathizers,’ in a procession to greet John Frost’s return, ‘Chartist Demonstration in London’, Leicester Chronicle, 20 September 1856, p.1. ‘A London Interior’, Illustrated London Life, 11 June 1843, p.157. See the follow up correspondence from a retired military man, ‘C.S,’ entitled ‘Mustaches and Beards Prejudicial to their Wearers,’ The Leader, 19 April 1851, p.375, which refers to the article in number 54, and notes a contemporary journal ‘lavishing … its artistical and caricatural wit upon foreigners, wearing mustaches or beards’. A. Rowland, The Human Hair Popularly and Physiologically Considered with Special Reference to Its Preservation, Improvement and Adornment, and the Various Modes of Its Decoration in All Countries (Piper Brothers, 1853). C. Oldstone-Moore, ‘The beard movement in Victorian Britain’, p.7. ‘To My Elderly Friends’, Household Words, 23 May 1857, pp.501–507 [p.504]. ‘The Beard Movement’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 6 May 1855, p.14, reporting the predicament of T.E. Brierly, who wore a beard as a protection from bronchitis. In Holyoake’s article, ‘The Razor and English Institution,’ in Reasoner, 22 January 1854, p.54, appears the comment, ‘any return to the custom of nature is a wholesome sign and will lead to other simplicities of taste. The hydropath and the vegetarian now witnesses one of his recommendations adopted. Others may follow.’ Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 12 May 1849, p.301. Duncan is possibly half quoting here from Balfour’s description of Britannia, at the death of Nelson, in verse, ‘The Death of Nelson’, from Contemplation with other Poems (Edinburgh: Constable, 1820), p.317; the phrase reappears in Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, describing Sir Percival’s reaction to his wife. Printed in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 20 May 1848, p.654, with some variation (for instance, sun lit lake’ becomes sun-lit lane’). ‘The Heroine and Her Adviser’, ch.2 of Edward Noble, in Flowers and Fruits, p.33. Flowers and Fruits, p.32. Flowers and Fruits, p.37. Flowers and Fruits, p.47. Flowers and Fruits, p.47. Educational Circular and Communist Apostle, n.s., no.6 (May 1842), p.46. He is described, in the year of his death, as the ‘late high priest of the Inner Life and Transcendental Sect’, in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, reporting a ‘Meeting of the Exeter Branch of the Cold Water association’, 27 August 1842.

254 86 87

88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101 102 103

104

105 106

107

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS E. Pond, ‘Pantheism’, The Biblical Repository and Classical Review, April 1850, pp.243–273 [p.266]. A.F. Barham, A, an Odd Medley of Literary Curiosities, Original and Selected, by A.F. Barham (London: the Author, 1845), p.1. The description of Greaves as far gone in theosophy is from F. Espinasse, Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893), p.275. Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.60. ‘Ode to Father Mathew’, Comic Almanack (1844), p.28. On Mathew in London, see J.F. Quinn, Father Mathew’s Crusade. Temperance in Nineteenth-century Ireland and Irish America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p.105. Illustrated London News, 5 August 1843, pp.85–86. ‘The Chartist Teetotaler Associations’, Teetotaler, 10 April 1841, p.336. Teetotaler, 14 November 1840, p.168. Teetotaler, 18 May 1839, p.168. Flowers and Fruits, p.64. Flowers and Fruits, pp.59–60. Flowers and Fruits, p.61. R. Owen, Lectures on an Entire New State of Society: Comprehending an Analysis of British Society, Relative to the Production and Distribution of Wealth; the Formation of Character; and Government, Domestic and Foreign (London: J. Brooks, 1830), p.11. The Fourierists also accepted this: moral, intellectual and physical. Flowers and Fruits, p.62. Flowers and Fruits, p.62. The cold water cure tested! Or, the hydropathic treatment of diseases established by the combined testimonies of actual experience, and the most eminent medical men, particularly of ‘the present time’ (London: Cleave, 1846). Defence of a Vegetable Diet (c.1843, price 1d, second thousand, 1844); Vegetable Diet for the Million! Priced 3d, available via James Duncan, advertised in Flowers and Fruits; and Guide to Health and Longevity (price 6d, or according to Flowers and Fruits, ‘at a low price’). New Moral World 12 (5:39, 3rd series), 23 March 1844, p.312. Cheltenham Free Press, 20 April 1844, p.122; Literary World 30 (28 August 1848), p.89. See also New England Farmer, 1857, p.431, and misquoted as J.E. Dawson, in L.B. Coles, Philosophy of Health: Natural Principles of Health and Cure, or Health and Cure without Drugs (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1851), p.58. See L. Nead, ‘Mapping the Self: Gender, Space and Modernity in Mid-Victorian London’, for a history of Holywell Street, in R. Porter, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.167–185, on its history as a place of radical publications in the 1830s and in the next decade, pornography. The journal does not appear to have lasted. The Grahamite journal had published letters from William Lambe the vegetarian doctor, of London, see Graham Journal of Health and Longevity 3 (1839), pp.99–100. Duncan actually quotes the six following lines too. See Northern Star, 2 November 1843, p.15 (in an essay on priestcraft), The Crisis, 7 September 1833, p.8, prefacing a piece on ‘Machinery’, in The Lancashire and Yorkshire Co-operator; and, heading a chapter on Robert Owen, in J.M. Morgan, Hampden in the Nineteenth Century; or, Colloquies on the Errors and Improvement of Society (2 vols; London: E. Moxon, 1834), vol.2, p.74. M.S. Kalim, The Social Orpheus: Shelley and the Owenites (Lahore: Research Council, Government College, 1973) argues that the Owenite relationship to poetry was primarily to view it as a vehicle for propaganda, but also as inspiration, as humanity’s noblest feelings, and as part of the science of morals, see Social Orpheus, p.47, p.50, pp.72–73. Examples of verse written against infidels and socialists include J.C. Fyler, Stanley; or, The Infidel Reclaimed, and other Poems (London: Rivington, 1838); G. Beddow, The Miracles in Egypt, Sketches of Socialism and other Poems (London: Hamilton, Adams,

NOTES

108

109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

125

126

1 2

255

1839); P. Landreth, The Poet. The Infidel, with Miscellaneous Poems (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1840); and J.W. Ord, ‘The Believer and the Socialist’ in The Bard and Minor Poets (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1842). New Moral World 12 (5:31, 3rd series), 27 January 1844, pp.242–243. Advertisements for his work are in New Moral World, 3 February 1844, p.256, 23 March 1844, p.312, 23 November 1844, p.176, 28 June 1845, p.436, July 19 1845, p.460. These advertisements extract from newspaper reviews. The review of Duncan’s work is noted in Kalim, Social Orpheus, p.60, although as James Elinslie Duncan. L. Hunt, ‘Keats,’ in Imagination or Fancy; or, Selections from the English Poets (1844; 2nd edn, London: Smith, Elder, 1845), p.316. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 11 (January 1844), p.65. The Spectator, 11 November 1843, p.1075. The Athenaeum, 27 January 1844, p.87; The Satirist; or, the Censor of the Times, 17 December 1843, p.410. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 19 November 1843, p.8. The ‘Nine’ were the muses. Duncan in ‘Love’s Offering’, Flowers and Fruits, p.18, argued that he needed but one muse rather than invoke the nine, – his muse was glossy haired and dark eyed. Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 2 December 1843 [p.2]. The Era, 3 December 1843, p.3. Railway Times (1843), p.1221. Illustrated London News, 30 December 1843, p.426; comments reprinted in advertisement in New Moral World 12 (5:32, 3rd series), 3 February 1843, p.256. Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, 18 November 1843, pp.337–338 [p.337]. Flowers and Fruits, p.27. ‘Commerce’, Chambers’s information for the people (Edinburgh: W. and R. Chambers, 1849), vol.2, p.501. The Gretna Green Memoirs by Robert Elliott, with an Introduction and Appendix by the Rev. Caleb Brown (London: Elliott, 1842), p.ix. Review of E.N. Brown, Erro, A Romantic Poem, The Metropolitan, January to April 1841, 30, p.19. See also ‘Giles Geffroy, the man of genius who wrote poetry,’ Ladies’ Cabinet of Fashion, Music and Romance, September 1847, pp.129–138. In fact, a glance at the lyrics of ‘Kate Kearney’, by Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), indicates the model for Duncan’s verse: ‘O did you not hear of Kate Kearney? | She lives on the banks of Killarney; | From the glance of her eye, | Shun danger and fly, | For fatal’s the glance of Kate Kearney. | For that eye is so modestly beaming, | You’d ne’er think of mischief she’s dreaming;|Yet oh! I can tell,| How fatal the spell |That lurks in the eye of Kate Kearney.’ ‘Mary and the Mossy Old Stile’, L. Ritchie, ed., Friendship’s Offering of Sentiment and Mirth (London: Smith, Elder, 1844), p.123; Flower and Fruits, p.48; The Gift of Friendship: a Token of Remembrance for 1850 (Philadelphia: Anners, 1850); Anguera’s Collection of Popular Ballads Composed and Arranged for the Guitar and dedicated to His Pupils (Boston: S.W. Marsh, 1849); The Casket. A Collection of Ballads Composed & Arranged by Frank Howard (Boston: S.W. Marsh, 1849). Illustrated London News, 27 January 1844, p.50.

Chapter 3. Herald of Progression

Review of ‘Reciprocal Free Trade’, British and Colonial Review, in Leeds Times, 18 November 1843, p.6. The essay refers to teetotal, vegetarian, Etzlerite, and other schemes. Literary Gazette, 4 January 1845, p.13.

256 3

4 5 6

7 8 9

10 11 12

13

14 15

16 17

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS George John Ford of 11a (Breeme’s Buildings), Beech Street, was a temperance supporter, see The Scottish Temperance League Register and Abstainer’s Almanac (Glasgow: League Office, 1851). A jury decided Ford wilfully set fire to his premises, but he was found not guilty at the Old Bailey, see ‘London fires in 1845’, Mechanics’ Magazine 44 (28 March 1846), p.230. Morning Star, December 1844, issue 1, ‘Our Opening Address’, p.1. Morning Star, December 1844, issue 1, p.1, fifth paragraph of ‘Our Opening Address’. The idea of a ‘boasted nineteenth century’ was current by the 1830s. See the label for the members’ library of the ‘Society of Independent Religious Reformers’, 14 Newman Street, London; J.E. Ritchie, The Religious Life of London (London: Tinsley, 1870), pp.359–360. Perfitt edited the People’s Abstinence Standard and True Social Reformer, printed by William Horsell, in 1850. T. Carlyle, ‘Signs of the Times’, Edinburgh Review 49:98 (June 1829), pp.439–459 [p.443]. The Phalanx or Journal of Social Science (New York, 1843), p.30. New Age, November 1843, p.127. Etzler’s work was discussed on the continent: François Vidal’s ‘Études sur le Principe de la Réparation. Deuxième partie’, La Revue Indépendante (Paris, 1845), pp.52–86 [p.63], referred to Le paradis mis à la portée de tous les hommes, characterising him as a practical man and English engineer who had built ‘many ingenious machines which were now being used in America and England’ (my translation). Etzler’s work appeared in Germany as Die Auswanderung nach der Tropenwelt (Ulm: Miller, 1847); and Das Paradies für jedermann erreichbar, lediglich durch Kräfte der Natur und der einfachsten Maschinen. Allen einsichtvollen Männern gewidmet von J.A. Etzler. Nach den zweiten englischen ausgabe (Ulm: Heerbrandt und Thämel, 1844). Two Visions of J.A. Etzler (Author of the Paradise within the Reach of All Men, By Powers of Nature and Machinery, and Other Writings Connected Therewith.) A Revelation of Futurity (Ham Common, Surrey: Concordium, 1844), p.14. New Age, 1 May 1844, p.224. The Crisis, and National Co-operative Trades’ Union Gazette, 17 May 1834, p.42; G. Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler, technological utopianism, and British socialism: the Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezuelan missions and its social context, 1833–1848’, English Historical Review 101 (April 1986), pp.351–375 [p.356]. For a fictional treatment of Etzler in Britain, see R. Antoni, ‘Trial of the Satellite or How My Great Great grandfather Almost Lost His Virginity On His Fifteenth Birthday’ in Conjunctions. 25th Anniversary (Bard College, 2006); and R. Antoni, As Flies to Whatless Boys (New York: Akashic Books, 2013). Duncan does not figure. New Moral World 10 (3:15, enlarged series), 9 October 1841, p.115; New Moral World 11 (4:51, 3rd series), 17 June 1843, p.428 (letter from Stollmeyer); New Moral World 12 (5:10, 3rd series), 2 September 1843, pp.79–80 (printing an address by Etzler sent via Stollmeyer); New Moral World, 1 February 1845, p.255 (Stollmeyer to the editor). This was a reply to a statement which appeared 18 January 1845, in which there was no clear idea about why the leadership at Harmony Hall had not adopted Etzler’s schemes. New Moral World 12 (5:32, 3rd series), 3 February 1844, p.256. Poor Man’s Guardian, 10 June 1843, p.24; Morning Chronicle, 16 October 1843, p.3; ‘The Loss of the Pegassus [sic]’, Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 5 August 1843 [p.2]; ‘Etzler’s Mechanical System – Agriculture and Inland Transport, – By One of His Friends’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 28 January 1844, p.2; and Cheltenham Free Press, 27 January 1844. Penny Satirist, 15 June 1844, p.2. The comment on Strange appears in ‘A Concordist’, Penny Satirist, 19 February 1842, p.4. Etzler’s reply to any earlier review appeared in 7 January 1843. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 5 (1838), p.806; J. Hackshaw, Reminiscences of South America: From Two and Half Years’ Residence in Venezuela (London: Jackson and Walford, 1838), p.234.

NOTES 18 19

20 21 22 23

24

25

26 27 28 29 30

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For Kiderlen (1813–1877), who became an American consul, see Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (New York: E. Appleton, 1888), p.533. C. Rotteck, General History of the World, from the Earliest Times, Until the Year 1831 (transl. Frederic Jones; Philadelphia: C.F. Stollmeyer, 1840); ‘Hering and Hahneman [sic],’ Journal of American Institute of Homeopathy, 1916, p.1364, recalling the carniol with Hahnemann’s bust, presented to him. Hahnemann asked Stollmeyer to pass on his regards to Constantine Hering, the leading American homeopath. C.F. Stollmeyer, The Sugar Question Made Easy (London: Effingham Wilson, 1845), p.10. See I.K. Eastburn, Whittier’s Relationship to German Life and Thought (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania, 1915), pp.27–29. [Benjamin S. Jones], Abolitionrieties, or, Remarks on some of the members of the Pennsylvania State Anti-Slavery Society for the eastern district, and the American Anti-Slavery Society (privately published, 1840), p.29. New Moral World 10 (3:15), 9 October 1841, p.115. James H. Young (the sixth son of James Young, merchant established in Antwerp who was sometime Lord Provost of Aberdeen) and Adrien Delcambre invented the pianotype, which was patented in March 1840. Young, briefly a director of the TES (see Morning Star, 12 July 1845, issue 27, p.216) also printed Fourier, and was president of the Phalansterian Tract Society, see London Phalanx, 1843, p.413; ‘Fourier and the Phalansterians’, Christian Remembrancer 5:25 (1843), pp.15–39 (p.20). London Phalanx reported the process. For an image of the machine, see Journal für Buchdruckerkunst, Schriftgiesserei und die verwandte Facher, Berlin 1843, reproduced at: http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/362888/view See ‘New Motive Powers’, Magazine of Science, and School of Arts, 23 October 1841, p.238, excerpting from Inventor’s Advocate; The London Journal of Arts and Sciences (and repertory of patent inventions), vol.19, p.230, new patents sealed in 1841, ‘Conrad Frederick Stollmeyer … for certain improvements in obtaining and applying motive power by means of winds and waves for propelling vessels on water and driving other machinery being a communication.’ For the association with Bessemer, we have Stollmeyer’s recollections: there is no mention in Sir Henry Bessemer, FRS: an Autobiography (London: Offices of Engineering, 1905). James Young’s brother, Arthur Young, established a Fourierist colony, ‘the Phalansterium’, in the Benedictine Abbey of Citeaux near Dijon, and Etzler is reported to have intended to superintend some of his machinery there, reported in The Times, see New Age, 1 May 1844, p.224, and also account in Hansard’s Hints and Reflections for Railway Travellers, vol.1, ch.7. For recent research, which I have not been able to consult, see J. Fornasiero, ‘The Philosopher and the Phalanstery. Alterations to the Portrait of Arthur Young (1810–1895)’, in Cahiers Charles Fournier 20 (2009). Arthur Young’s Appendix A to his Sociology–Diagrammatically–Systematized (London: Houlston, 1890), p.161 refers to the Youngs’ support for Bessemer’s bronze powder manufactory, to which Arthur Young attributed the financial difficulties he faced as projector of the Citeaux community, see also Bessemer’s Autobiography, p.60. See record of the marriage, officiated by the perpetual curate, Reverend Robert Lovelace Hill, in the London Metropolitan Archives parish register of marriages at St Luke’s, accessible via Ancestry.com. The register therefore provides a sample of Etzler’s handwriting, in his signature. Fleet Papers 3 (15 July 1843), p.224. The journal was printed by Vincent Torras, associated with the Concordium. The Movement 19 (20 April 1844), p.149; Fleet Papers 3 (15 July 1843), p.224. See G. MacLean, Cazabon: An Illustrated Biography of Trinidad’s Nineteenth Century Painter (Port of Spain: Aquarela Galleries, 1986), p.120. Morning Star, December 1844, p.5. See the note to inquirers ‘R.B.S.’, ‘W.G.’, and ‘One Tired of His Country,’ etc., Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 26 January 1845; Post Office London Directory (London: Kelly,

258

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS 1846), p.495. The description of Powell appeared in W.J. Linton, ‘Who were the Chartists?’ Century Magazine, 23 January 1882, pp.421–430 [p.429]. ‘Poetry of Reality’, Morning Star, December 1844, issue 1, pp.3–4; ‘The Visions of Etzler’, The Movement, Anti-Persecution Gazette and Register of Progress 26, 8 June 1844, p.207. Holyoake wrote that Etzler ‘regarded mechanics not as a department of science, but as a species of poetry’, The History of Co-operation (2 vols; Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1875), vol.1, p.213. For the ‘arithmetical poem’ verdict, see the Fourierite The Harbinger: Devoted to Social and Political Progress (New York and Boston) 1, 1845, p.383. The Phalanx, p.271; J.B. O’Brien published at 6d The Dialogue between Messrs Clear, Flat, Dunce, and Grudge (London: O’Brien, 1843). ‘T’, ‘Paradise (to be Regained) On Earth’, The United States Magazine and Democratic Review 13 (November 1843), pp.451–463 [p.451]. New Moral World, 5 July 1845, p.444, the author appearing as ‘Lucian Redivivus’. Watts was author of The Yahoo. A Satirical Rhapsody (New York: H. Simpson, 1830). Cheltenham Free Press, 7 December 1844, p.392; Cheltenham Free Press, 15 March 1845, p.86. New Moral World, 30 November 1844, p.182; New Moral World, 21 December 1844, p.208 (Thom). ‘Etzler’s Paradise’, Northern Star, 27 July 1844, p.7. See also Northern Star, 27 January 1844, p.3. ‘To the Employed’, Northern Star, 14 December 1844, p.1. Northern Star, 23 November 1844, p.3. For advertisements, see Northern Star, 8 February 1845, p.2. S. Stoll, The Great Delusion. A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth (New York: Hill and Wang 2008); G. Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler’; M. Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society’, ch.10 in N. Thompson and C. Williams, eds, Robert Owen and his Legacy (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2011), pp.197–217; W.H.G. Armytage, Heaven’s Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), ‘phase III’, ch.2. Stoll, The Great Delusion, p.122. B. Hindle, ‘The American Industrial Revolution Through Its Survivals’, in R.S. Klein, ed., Science and Society in Early America: Essays in Honor of Whitfield J. Bell, Jr. (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1986), p.295. Emigration to the Tropical World, for the Melioration of the Condition of all Classes of People of all Nations was a 6d tract published by the Concordium Press. Emigration to the Tropical World (1844), p.1. Etzler, at the Parthenium, to an audience of some 200, reported in Northern Star, 2 November 1844. Synopsis of Etzler’s Plan of Emigration to Venezuela, South America (Newcastle: W.B. Leighton, 1844) did note, in point 8, the abolition of slavery. Etzler lectured at Lord Nelson Street Assembly Rooms in Liverpool, and Newcastle in 1845, see Liverpool Mercury, 17 January 1845, p.22. He also delivered a talk at the Chartist venue of Carpenter’s Hall, Manchester, see The Movement 2:59 (29 January 1845), p.38. For the departure of TES members from Bradford, see Bradford Observer, 19 February 1846, noting twenty families, of about 60, set off by coach from Bradford on their way to Venezuela. See Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 13 August 1842 [p.4], ‘as it is desirable that the great discoveries of J.A. Etzler should become generally known, this Second Edition is presented to the Public in a such a way (price and form) that its purchase may come “within the reach of every one,” thereby insuring an immediate and most extensive circulation.’

NOTES 49

50 51

52

53 54 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

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For Bradford and Bingley societies, see Northern Star, 7 December 1844, p.1; and letter in Bradford Observer from ‘Friend of progression’, 12 June 1845, p.7. Joseph Hartley sent news of the Etzlerite activity in Bradford (originally via a Bradford Universal Regeneration Society in a large room at Stott Hill) to Northern Star, see ‘To Readers and Correspondents’, 30 November 1844, p.4. The four-page Synopsis of Etzler’s Plan lists officers of the Newcastle branch: John Hewitson as president, Thomas W. Carr as secretary. The branch broadcast the support of George Crawshay Junr (of the iron works firm, a future supporter of David Urquhart), Joseph Price (glass manufacturer) and Henry Watson, another local manufacturer, John Dobson (the well-known architect), William Brown an engineer, and David Laing, an iron founder, following Etzler’s demonstrations of his models at the Temperance Hotel in Newcastle. Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.197. George Hillary of Bingley’s letter calling for mutual union between Etzler and Owen, New Moral World 12 (5:32, 3rd series), 3 February, appeared on the same page as an advertisement for Duncan’s publications, p.256. Hillary had already written about Etzler, see New Moral World 12 (5:14, 3rd series), 30 September 1843, p.112. Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler’, p.351; Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.200. One early instance of a Chartist interested in Etzler was the transported (in 1842) Chartist-Owenite William Sherratt Ellis, discussing the American’s ideas with Thomas Cooper, as reported by Cooper, see Northern Star, 26 November 1842, p.7. New Moral World, 23 November 1844, p.176. Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.198. New Moral World, 15 March 1845, p.299. From 1844 a North Staffordshire ‘Potters’ Joint Stock and Emigration Company’ appeared, surviving into the late 1840s, with a Potters’ Examiner and Emigrants’ Advocate, see A. Redford and W.H. Chaloner, eds, Labour Migration in England: 1800–1850 (1926; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964), pp.180–181; J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p.192; J.L. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-class Experience in Britain and the United States (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p.125. ‘G.J.H.’, ‘The Visions of Etzler’, The Movement, p.208; and Reasoner, 11 April 1849, p.239, referring to the comment he had made earlier in The Movement. G.J. Holyoake, The History of Co-operation, vol.1, p.140. Waldie’s Journal of Belles Lettres – reprinted in The Farmer’s Register 1:11 (Richmond; April 1834), p.657, had declared of the work, ‘He out-Owens Owen himself and bids fair if he can get his machineries into operation to be the greatest benefactor of his race.’ An early endorsement of ‘T.A. Etzler’ in England, via this edition, came from Andre Vieusseux, ‘Student in Realities’, Serious Thoughts (London: Brooks, 1836), vol.1. Polytechnic Journal 7:3 (September 1842), p.202. The Spectator, 30 July 1842, p.739, reviewing part 1 of The Paradise within the Reach of All Men without labour by powers of nature and machinery. An address to all intelligent men. In two parts (second English edition). The Era, 21 August 1842, p.6, ‘perhaps we might use the word mad with more propriety.’ Literary Gazette, 30 July 1842, pp.531–532. The London edition was reviewed in United States Democratic Review 13:65 (November 1843). J.A. St John, ed., Utopia: or the happy republic (London: Rickerby, 1845), p.254. Penny Magazine, 26 August 1843, pp.326–328, noted the natural and man-made phenomenon of floating islands: Humboldt described those created in Mexico. A positive treatment of Etzler, as if his machinery actually functioned, rather than being a ‘mechanised land of Cockaygne’, as heralds of later renewable energy schemes, appears in E. Granter, Critical Social Theory and the End of Work (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp.40–43 (the quotation from p.40).

260 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

76 77 78

79 80

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THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS See La Phalange (4.8, 3rd series), 17 September 1841, pp.133–134, for an article on Etzler’s inventions and the propaganda in London; Morning Star, 14 June 1845, issue 23, p.178; London Phalanx, March 1843, pp.294–301. G. Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p.146. The quotation is from John Goodwyn Barmby, ‘Jubilate Deo’, The Promethean, January 1842, issue 1, p.8. See, for example, report of Fleming’s lecture in Macclesfield, New Moral World, 30 November 1844, p.182. C. Babbage, ‘On the Effect of machinery in reducing the Demand for Labour’, an addition, in the second edition, of 1833, to his best-selling On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures (London: Knight, 1833). R. Buchanan, The Past, The Present, and the Future. A Poem by Robert Buchanan (Manchester: A. Heywood, n.d.), pp.47–48. New Moral World, 22 February 1845, pp.282–283. New Moral World, 15 March 1845, pp.298–299. A point made by Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.209. Illustrated London Life reported Henson’s new steam-powered aerial ship, 1 April 1843, p.57; as did Illustrated London News, 1 April 1843, pp.233–234. Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, writes of the ‘technologically exhilarating 1840s’, p.201, when Etzler’s schemes appeared no more ridiculous than railways had earlier done. From Pinang Chronicle, reprinted in Australian Daily Journal, 27 June 1844, p.408. Northern Star, 2 November 1844, p.8; New Moral World, 30 November 1844. Morning Star, 5 April 1845, issue 13, p.101; Morning Star, 12 April 1845, issue 14, p.109; Mechanics’ Magazine, 11 October 1845, p.256. For Atkins’ efforts to develop this machine from 1843 under Etzler’s patent, see Journal of the Bath and West of England Society for the Encouragement of Agriculture, Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, 1860, p.434. He apparently ‘spent his last penny’ on the rotary digging machine, see Journal of Society of Arts and Sciences, 1 February 1856, p.176 for this, and the detail about the sparsely attended lecture. The Satellite, as a ‘locomotive instrument’, was also to be applied to inland transport, using windmills and water reservoirs to provide energy, as ‘stationary water power mills’. See R. Pemberton, To The Bishops and Clergy of all Denominations and to all Professors and Teachers of the Christian World on Robert Owen’s Proclamation of The Millennial State to Commence this Year 1855 (London: Saunders and Otley, 1855), pp.109, 111–112. Northampton Mercury, 27 September 1845 [p.3]. See ‘The Steam Plough’, Household Words 1:26 (21 September 1850), pp.604–607 [p.605] ‘the spectators made a long morning’s holiday while the Slave did his ploughing; and hoped that his success would lead as it ought to many other morning holidays.’ Mechanics’ Magazine, 11 October 1845, p.256. He published a pamphlet entitled An essay on the creation and advantages of a cultural and commercial triform stock, as a counter-fund to the national debt, etc. (London: Lupton Relfe, 1825), a plan ‘by which, The Interest shall be derived from latent Sources of Wealth, rather than from Taxation; The Condition of the Poor be much ameliorated; The British Colonial Dependencies populated and protected; British Manufactories, Commerce, and the British Commercial Navy, increased; The General Stock of British Wealth considerably augmented; and The Government furnished with the means of raising large Sums of Money in particular Emergencies on better terms than by Loan’; E. King, ‘Emigration and Colonization’, Morning Post, 22 February 1827 [p.4]; Literary Gazette, 20 July 1844, p.463. The second pamphlet, also published by Longmans, was reviewed in The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, pp.413–414 [p.413], from whence the quotation from the pamphlet is derived.

NOTES 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100

101 102 103 104 105

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Review in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine of Colonization on principles of Pure Christism, reprinted in The Mirror of Literature, amusement, and instruction 1:17 (25 April 1846), pp.270–271 (p.271). Freemason’s Quarterly 2 (30 September 1844), p.373. King, Bliss Not Riches: Love One Another, or You Will Torment One Another: colonisation on principles of pure Christism designed to render perfect human character, and earthly bliss; affording glimpses of earthly happiness for the destitute and wretched; and hints to the damned, on the way to be blessed, to which are subjoined suggestions for a prospectus of a South-Africa Colonisation Company, etc (Bicester: Smith, 1840), pp.11–13. King, Bliss not Riches, p.3. J.G. Barmby, New Systems of Association Reviewed (1845). See review in Hood’s Magazine 6 (July–December 1846), p.95. King, Bliss not Riches, p.25. On Warner, see Anita McConnell, ‘Samuel Alfred Warner (1793/4–1853)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. The inscription was: ‘Presented to Edward King by the Members of the Tropical Emigration Society as a mark of his Kindness and Universal Exertions for the Welfare and Success of the Society.’ Text published by D.S. Smith on Rootsweb site, 23 January 2002, archived at: http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/OXFORDSHIRE/ 2002-01/1011806214. ‘Russell’s Steam Carriages’, in R. Cort, The Anti-rail-road journal: or, rail-road impositions detected (London: Lake, 1835), p.65. Stollmeyer, The Sugar Question Made Easy, p.18; Morning Star, 11 October 1845, issue 40, p.317. Detailed descriptions were reprinted elsewhere, e.g., Dundee, Perth and Cupar Advertiser, 17 April 1846, p.1; Manchester Courier, 15 April 1846, p.2. The Artizan, October 1845, p.207. Family Herald, 18 November 1844, p.440; Notes and Queries (11, 3rd series), 5 July 1862, p.19. A detailed description appeared in Literary Gazette, 30 October 1841, p.703; a five point summary of advantages of speed, safety, reduction in the number of those required to manage the sails, appeared in an advertisement at the back of Two Visions of J.A. Etzler. Repertory of Patent Inventions and other Discoveries and Improvements in Arts, Manufacturies, and Agriculture (London) n.s., 16 (July to December 1841), pp.254–255. On Etzler’s ambition, New Moral World, 30 November 1844. New Moral World, 15 March 1845, p.299. Ironside had read Andreas Smolnikar’s objections to Etzler: ‘he is not for true freedom to the world,’ which appeared in the New York paper Regenerator, 8 April 1844. See the response, Morning Star, 5 April 1845, issue 13, p.101. Armytage, Heaven’s Below, p.189; London Phalanx, p.490. The Peacemaker and Court of Arbitration (Philadelphia) 8 (1889), pp.191–193 [p.192]. Bessemer, as consulting engineer, helped Young and Delcambre with their typesetting machine; Young assisted Etzler with ‘a car destined to transport materials and for other objects’, see Armytage, Heaven’s Below, p.189, patented 12 April 1842. See Morning Post, 30 January 1835, p.1; The Passions of the Human Soul, p.v. According to James ‘Shepherd’ Smith, ‘Shepherd Smith the Universalist: the Story of a Mind: Being a Life of the Reverend James E. Smith, M.A. (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, 1892), at that point associated with Hugh Doherty’s Phalanx, pp.215–216. See ‘Lever’, ‘Navigation, Ship Building, and Sea Transport. – No.V’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 8 June 1845, p.5. ‘Lever’, ‘Navigation, Ship Building, and Sea Transport. – No.VI’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 15 June 1845, p.5. On the Margate experiment, see Mining Journal; Mechanics’ Magazine 39 (1843), p.89; Family Herald, July 1843, translated in J.G. Dingler’s Polytechnisches Journal 89 (Berlin,

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108

109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116

117 118 119 120 121 122

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS 1843), p.255 and elsewhere in the German press. The letter from Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper was reprinted in colonial papers, e.g., Colonial Times (Hobart), 10 October 1845. Stollmeyer, The Peacemaker 8 (1889), p.193, recalled the Nore experiment ‘fully proved the practicability of the plans. The Admiralty and various capitalists were applied to, to introduce the invention, but did not respond.’ On Doherty’s invitation, the Penny Satirist’s correspondent, 24 June 1843, p.1, referring to an invitation from English friends to Etzler, would seem to corroborate this claim. ‘New Invention in Navigation’, Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 19 August 1843 [p.1]. ‘Description of a Mechanism for Applying the Motion of Vessels, caused by the Power of the Waves as a Motive Power for Propelling Vessels, thereby Superseding Steam or any Other Artificial and Costly Power, Invented by Y.A. Etzler’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 29 July 1843, pp.98–93; Stollmeyer, ‘A Floating Island’, Mechanics’ Magazine, 14 October 1843, pp.298–299. The automaton was to allow Atlantic crossings to be undertaken in three or four days, with the equivalent of 36,000 horsepower, readers learned from an extract from an Etzlerian pamphlet, in ‘Present Struggles and their Final Issues’, Church of England Quarterly Review 15 (April 1844), p.382. L.J. Hansard, Hints and Reflections for Railway Travelers and Others; or, A Journey (3 vols; London: Earle, 1843), vol.1, p.70; see also vol.1, pp.96–99. Hansard possibly alludes to a paper ‘Observations upon the Section of Breakwaters as heretofore constructed with suggestions as to modifications of their forms. By Lieut. Col. H.D. Jones R.E., Assoc. Inst. C.E.’ Hansard set out his national debt scheme in pamphlets such as A Death-Blow to Evil; The Reviving Life of Good! The Moral Power of the Press; and Good. A Proposition on the National Debt with the Ways and Means of the Riddance from all oppressive Taxes. New Age, 1 November 1843; Cheltenham Free Press, Morrison replied, 21 October 1844, p.331, to a letter published by C.F. Stollmeyer, on a floating island, 14 October 1843, p.326, and subsequent editions of the paper published their correspondence (Morrison stating he had read and respected Etzler’s work, see 4 November 1843, p.347). Morrison’s prospectus for an ‘Association for the advancement of Astral and other Sciences, Phrenology, Magnetism, &c., and for the Protection of Students,’ was reported in the New Age, 1 February 1844, pp.168–170. Le Correspondant (Paris), 1843, pp.451–452. The journalist noted coverage in the Naval and Military Gazette. Morning Star, December 1844, first issue, p.3. Morning Star, December 1844, first issue, p.2. Morning Star, December 1844, first issue, p.3. The Divinearian, p.1. New Moral World, 15 March 1845, p.298. ‘Sketches; by James Elmslie Duncan’, Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.58. Gregory Claeys quotes more of this passage in his essay, ‘John Adolphus Etzler,’ p.353, without identifying the author as Duncan. For the interplay between literature and the inventor in this period, see ch.2 in C. Pettitt, Patent Inventions – Intellectual Property and the Victorian Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). J.G. Whittier, ‘The City of a Day’ in Prose Works of John Greenleaf Whittier (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866), vol.2, from The Stranger of Lowell. Whittier knew Stollmeyer from his abolitionist work. ‘Emigration to the Tropical World’, from Flowers and Fruits, reprinted in The Sun Beam, pp.4–6 [p.5]. ‘The Tropics, according to Europeans’, from Flowers and Fruits, Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.58. The passage reappears in Sun Beam, slightly varied in punctuation. New Moral World, 1 February 1845, p.255. Synopsis of Etzler’s Plan of Emigration to Venezuela, South America, point 13. Duncan alluded to the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus, author of Essay on the Principle of Population (first published 1798) and the notorious pseudonymous work

NOTES

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125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142

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popularised as Book of Murder. Vade-mecum for the Commissioners and Guardians of the New Poor Law Throughout Great Britain and Ireland: Being an Exact Reprint of the Infamous Essay on the Possibility of Limiting Populousness (1839) by ‘Marcus’ – seemingly a Malthusian tract but probably propaganda against the New Poor Law system. The tract alluded to is Chambers’s Miscellany of Useful and Entertaining Tracts, no.6, ‘Manual for Infant Management’. Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.205; Chase also notes that Oastler, recipient of a copy of The Paradise, may have been ‘Marcus’. See the pro-Etzlerite series of letters penned by Hugh Doherty as ‘Lever’, e.g., letter V, ‘Shall Men Work for a Living?’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 2 March 1845, p.5, letter IV, 23 February 1845, p.5, cited Greaves and Etzler among leaders in the ‘universal, or philanthropic, scientific, and social movement’, and asserted that animal food was ‘unnecessary, partly unwholesome, and very expensive in labour to obtain’. Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.59; also Sun Beam, pp.6–7. ‘Emigration to the Tropical World’, from Flowers and Fruits, reprinted in Morning Star, December 1844, issue 1, p.3; also Sun Beam, p.6. Morning Star, 1 February 1845, issue 4, p.30. Campbell, ed., Letters and Extracts from the Ms. Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves, both quotations from vol.1, p.139. Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.64. The phrase ‘divinized humanities’ also appears in the New York paper, The Herald of the New Moral World, April 1842, p.59, in a sketch entitled ‘Love Culture’. J.M. Ludlow, ‘The Christian Socialists of 1848’, The Economic Review 3:4 (October 1893), pp.486–500 [p.487]. Morning Star, 15 February 1845, issue 6, Sketches. III, p.47. In New York Daily Tribune, 22 August 1845, reprinted as ‘Poets of the People’: reviewing the second edition of Rhymes and Recollections of a Hand-loom Weaver. Morning Star, 8 March 1845, p.66. The dinner was held 26 February 1845. ‘William Thom, the Weaver Poet of Inverury’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 13 April 1845, p.7. It inspired J.P. Philip’s ‘The Blind Boy at one of his Pranks’, a painting at the Manchester Royal Institution exhibition, see The Art Union, 1842, p.234. It sold for 20 guineas. See ‘Thom’s Poems’, Westminster Review 40:2 (December 1843), pp.312–334, and reprinted elsewhere, e.g., Campbell’s Foreign Semi-Monthly Magazine, 1844, p.111, for description of custom work – essentially assistance for journeymen weavers. Morning Star, 1 February 1845, issue 4, p.30, ‘Sketches, by James Elmslie Duncan. Thom, the Scottish poet’. The physical description comes from ‘Dead men whom I have known; or Recollections of Three Cities’, Macmillan’s Magazine 9:52 (February 1864), pp.337–343 [p.338]. The writer, the editor David Masson, thought: ‘Nor do I think that beyond a kind of Chartism by mere position he cared an atom about politics’ (p.342); but see F.G. Black and R.M. Black, The Harney Papers (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1969). Mackaye, in Kingsley’s Alton Locke, refers to the verse of Thomas Cooper. Incidentally, there was another radical poet in Aberdeen, John Mitchell, whose verse from Poems and Radical Rhymes was quoted in the Chartist Circular, see ‘The Politics of Poets. IV’, for ‘The Peer and the Peasant’, 24 October 1840, p.231. Morning Star, 1 February 1845, issue 4, p.31 (sketch of Thom); and additional material. Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.61. W. Walker, The Bards of Bon Accord, 1375–1860 (Aberdeen: 1887), p.473. For Chartist links, see Ashton and Roberts, The Victorian Working-Class Writer, p.53. J.A. Etzler, Emigration to the Tropical World (printed by the Concordium, Ham Common, Surrey and sold by Watson, Cleave and Hetherington at 6d in 1844), pp.6–7.

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143 C.F. Stollmeyer, The Sugar Question Made Easy (London: E. Wilson, 1845), reviewed in Northern Star, 12 April 1845, p.3; British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter 6:11 (May 1845), p.105. 144 The Sun Beam, reprinting ‘Emigration to the Tropical World’ from the second edition of Flowers and Fruits, p.6. Duncan quoted passages from Milton’s Paradise Lost, Book V: ‘But I will haste, and from each bough and brake, | Each plant and juiciest gourd, will pluck such choice |To entertain our Angel guest, as he |Beholding shall confess, that here on Earth | God hath dispensed his bounties as in heaven’, and ‘ … fruit of all kinds, in coat | Rough or smooth rind, or bearded husks, or shell, | She gathers, tribute large, and on the board |Heaps with unsparing hand’, Sun Beam, p.5. Luke Hansard, Hints and Reflections to Railway Travellers (3 vols; London: Earle, 1843), vol.1, p.97, uses precisely the image of the roast beef-eating John Bull, to suggest the difference between visionary Germans such as Etzler, and commonsensical Britons. 145 History of Co-operation, vol.2, p.260; T. Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections – Literary and Political, pp.49–50. On Holyoake’s support for Etzler, see Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler’, p.360. 146 See New Moral World 10 (3:49, 3rd series), 4 June 1842, p.400, for advertisement for The Promethean, no.4, the contents listing ‘The Epic of a Life, or the European Pariah, an Autobiographic poem, by the editor’. Book 1 was ‘The Dreamer’; book 2, ‘The Infidel’. 147 ‘Socialism in Britain’, North British Quarterly Review 12 (1850), pp.86–114 [p.88]. 148 The Times, 7 June 1847, p.4 (about the People’s International League). His name appears as ‘John Goodwin Barmby’ in his first published collection of verse. 149 See, for example, a series entitled ‘Barmby’s Letters’, in Southern Star and London and Brighton Patriot, in 1840, covering topics such as secret ballot, and the Chartist epic poem, 7 June, p.4. This epic (298 pages), set in Germany, Ernest, or Political Regeneration: in Twelve Books; London (unpublished); printed for the Author by R. Gadsden, Upper St. Martin’s Lane: 1840. Barmby’s series broke off, having asserted that ‘A poem is the highest exertion of human genius and wisdom,’ when he went on a continental tour, to be among the ‘social reformers’ in Paris, see Southern Star, 14 June 1840, p.1. For the epic’s seditious reputation see H. Martineau, Autobiography (3 vols; Boston: Osgood, 1877), vol.1, p.416 (which also refers to the poet’s glossy hair parted down the middle); for the printer’s trepidation, see the Quarterly Review 65:129 (December 1839), pp.153–193 [p.154]. It is worth recalling too, the prediction that the poem would render the ‘Chartist-cause … immortal … for it is a work of genius’, see ‘The Chartist Epic’, Monthly Magazine 11:7 (July 1839), pp.1–38 [p.35]. For a recent appraisal, see M. Allison, ‘Poetic Vanguardism and Popular Revolution in Capel Lofft’s Forgotten Epic’, Nineteenth-Century Literature 67:3 (December 2012), pp.285–311. 150 New Moral World 8 (1:5, 3rd series), 1 August 1841, p.74, and p.75 for ‘the Communist, or Communitarian School’; Monthly Magazine 4 (1840), pp.207–209. 151 [R.W. Emerson], ‘English Reformers’, The Dial 3:2 (October 1842), pp.227–247 [p.239]; ‘George Sand’, in M.F. Ossoli, Woman in the Nineteenth Century: and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition and Duties of Woman (New York: Tribune Association, 1869), p.78, alluding to a poem of that title. On Barmby, see Matthew Lee, ‘Barmby, (John) Goodwyn (1820–1881)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2005 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1445, accessed 13 November 2012]. 152 W.H. Gilman, ed., The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson: 1841 – 1843, vol.8, Journal J, 1842 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), p.187. 153 Morning Star, 1 February 1845, issue 4, p.32. 154 Morning Star, 15 February 1845, issue 6, p.48 (postponing continuation of ‘Luther’); and 8 March 1845, issue 9, p.67 (continuation from issue 7, p.51). For adverts for Communist publications, Morning Star, 1 February 1845, issue 4, p.32; Morning Star, 15 February 1845, issue 6, p.48. 155 Morning Star, 8 March 1845, issue 9, p.68.

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156 ‘The Tears of England!’ Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 14:160 (April 1847), p.251. 157 ‘Poetry. – An Essay’, The People’s Journal 6, 1846, pp.34–36 [p.34]. 158 From The Promethean, cited in W.H.G. Armytage, ‘The Journalistic Activities of J. Goodwin Barmby between 1841 and 1848’, Notes and Queries 3:4 (1956), pp.166–169. 159 ‘Proclamation! To the Inhabitants of Cheltenham’, Oracle of Reason, 13 August 1842, p.280. 160 G.J. Holyoake, ‘The “Promethean,” Not by Shelley’, Oracle of Reason 13, 19 March 1842, pp.105–107 [p.105]. Barmby had written about Shelley for The Charter, see ‘remarks on Shelley. – by J.G. Barmby’, 31 March 1839, p.154. 161 ‘D.’ reviewing The Promethean (no.4) in The Union: A Monthly Record of Moral, Social, and Educational Progress (1842), p.184, predicting that if he dropped his Messiah delusion, he would be ‘a respectable occupant of certain departments of the Drama’. On the Promethean club, see The Charter, 20 October 1839, p.9. The verse, dated 20 September 1840, appears in The Promethean, June 1842, issue 4, pp.58–61. 162 ‘J.G.B.’ Monthly Magazine 6:31 (July 1841), pp.73–84 [p.81]. See B. Shaaban, ‘Shelley and the Barmbys’, Keats Shelley Journal 41 (1992), pp.122–138, especially pp.129–130. A.J. Booth, Robert Owen, the Founder of Socialism in England (London: Trübner, 1869), p.194 notes: ‘Although Shelley justly occupies a foremost place among the poets of the century, it unfortunately happens that there are passages in “Queen Mab” and others of his poems that give expressions to the peculiar opinions of persons who are quite unable to appreciate the real beauties of the great poet. There can be little doubt that it was for this reason that he enjoyed so much popularity among the Socialists.’ Poetry does not figure largely in Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites – in passing, p.221. See Kalim, The Social Orpheus: Shelley and the Owenites, based on a University of London MA (1960). 163 See ‘Literature’, Penny Satirist, 3 December 1842, p.3; ‘Sights of Books’, Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 31 December 1842 [p.3]; ‘Literature’, Penny Satirist, 12 August 1843, p.3; New Age, 1 September 1843, p.95. 164 The first number of Reasoner, 3 June 1846 (which declared itself to be Communistic in Social Economy), p.14, describes the whitewashed walls and plain white deal of the Bromley group of the Communist church. Other Communist groups were in Bedworth and Coventry. 165 See Barmby, ‘The Old Country and the New Country; or, Home Colonisation and Emigration’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 14:160 (April 1847), pp.266–268. 166 The verdict on Barmby’s genius appears in ‘Socialism in Britain’, North British Review 12: 23 (November 1849), pp.86–114. People’s Review 1, February 1850, p.4, discussing this article, asserted: ‘no author known to Industrial literature ever wrote such eccentric things or did such extravagant ones as Mr Barmby.’ For the quotation from Barmby, B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), pp.152–153. 167 Educational Circular and Communist Apostle n.s., no.4 (February 1842), ‘Books received’. A poem from this work is quoted at p.32. Advertised in the press, e.g., Ipswich Journal, 11 May 1839, p.1, for a review, see The Aldine Magazine of Biography, Bibliography, Criticism and the Arts 1 (June 1839), p.325: ‘The author of this little brochure – a youth only seventeen – has all the faults – can it be wondered at?– of a young poet. But, malgré his faults – his redundancy of epithet, his innumerable expletives, his unhappy rhymes, his unconscious imitations of the peculiarities rather than of the beauties of favourite writers – he is a poet. He is a poet; and he gives hope and promise of better things to come.’ See also New Monthly Belle Assemblée, July 1839, p.46. For the poem in The Charter, see ‘The Convention for Ever!’, The Charter, 5 May 1839, p.235. 168 J.G. Barmby, The Madhouse (London: Stocking; Yoxford, Bird, 1839). 169 J.G. Barmby, ‘Old Man and Young’, Leader and Saturday Analyst, 31 January 1852, p.111.

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170 See Linton, Memories, p.172: ‘More poetic than Tupper, not only in appearance … in his callow days was a very earnest itinerant all-on-his-own-hook preacher of a sort of socialism’; E.F. Richards, Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 1844–1854 (London: J. Lane, 1920), Mazzini to Emilie Ashurst, 17 September 1847, p.65: ‘I merely contented myself with stating that you had an immense admiration for his talents and beard.’ 171 ‘A White Quaker in Trouble’, Lloyd’s London Weekly Newspaper, 6 October 1844, p.4. His court appearance was also reported in Morning Chronicle, 3 October 1844, p.7. Goodwyn Barmby married Catherine, second daughter of Bridstock Watkins of London, at Marylebone, in late 1841. See Barbara Taylor, ‘Catherine Isabella Barmby (1816/17– 1853)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/41339, accessed 13 November 2012]. 172 J.H. Friswell, About in the World, Essays by the Author of ‘The Gentle Life’ (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1864), p.182. 173 ‘Charge Against Goodwyn Barmby’, Lloyd’s London Weekly Newspaper, 3 November 1844, ‘To Correspondents’, p.6. Members of the Social Institution, John Street, Tottenham Court Road, and a ‘Manchester Socialist’, had earlier written to disassociate themselves from Barmby as result of the press reports, see ‘Mr Goodwin Barmby’, in Lloyd’s London Weekly Newspaper, ‘To Correspondents’, 13 October 1844, p.6. 174 Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 5 July 1846, p.3. 175 W. Minto, ed., Autobiographical Notes of the Life of William Bell Scott: and Notices of his Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends, 1830 to 1882 (2 vols; New York: Harper and Brothers, 1892), vol.1, p.174. 176 Frost recalled, Forty Years’ Recollections, p.58, ‘He was acquainted with Wilhelm Weitling, who was then in London; had correspondents in Paris, Lyons, Lausanne, Cologne, New York, and Cincinnati; and was conversant with the whole range of Utopian literature, from Theopompos and Euhemerus, to Weitling and Albrecht.’ 177 ‘Robert Owen and Socialism in Britain’, North British Review, p.537. A notice of Communist Chronicle, no.39, in Reasoner 1 (1846), p.44, classed Barmby among ‘eccentric geniuses’. 178 ‘Social utopias’, Chambers’s Papers for the People 18 (1850), pp.1–32, [p.29]. The author was Thomas Frost, who fell out with Barmby over communist propagandising. 179 J.M. Morgan, A Tour Through Switzerland and Italy, in the Years 1846–1847, in Letters to a Clergyman (London: Gilpin, 1850), p.52. 180 G.S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman: With Chapman’s Diaries (London: Archon Books, 1969), p.191; J. Myerson, Studies in the American Renaissance (Boston: Twayne, 1979); Latham, Search for a New Eden, p.140. 181 Morning Star, 3 January 1846, issue 52, p.414. The New Age reviewed the Life of Mesmer which Buchanan published, 1 September 1843, p.95. 182 New Moral World, 15 February 1845, p.272. 183 New Moral World, reported in The Charter, 3 November 1839; Robert Buchanan also published verse, see ‘Black and White Slavery’, Northern Star, 2 June 1838, p.7. On Buchanan, see his son’s recollections, ‘Latter Day Leaves. VI. My Father and the Owenites’, The Echo, 23 July 1891, p.1. 184 New Moral World 64, 11 January 1840, p.1024. The Penny Satirist, 20 June 1840, p.3: ‘This is a Socialist poem. We are glad to see the Socialists writing poetry, for it leads their minds to the contemplation of a beau ideal in philosophy. The most of them delight in the laid-ideal, or ugly ideal, which poetry has a tendency to correct, when it is employed to good purpose. The work before us shows considerable talent, though we can scarcely call it poetic talent.’ The description of Buchanan comes from H. Jay, Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life, His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), ch.3; scholarly estimation from Kalim, The Social Orpheus, p.149. 185 Buchanan, The Past, The Present, and the Future, p.6. 186 The Times, 20 August 1841, p.6.

NOTES 187 188 189 190 191 192 193

194

195 196 197 198

199 200 201 202 203 204

205 206 207 208 209 210

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‘What shall we do to be saved’, Morning Star, 12 April 1845, issue 14, p.106. ‘What shall we do to be saved’, Morning Star, 12 April 1845, issue 14, p.107. ‘What shall we do to be saved’, Morning Star, 12 April 1845, issue 14, p.108. He is described, wrongly, as a Fourierist in U. Kirchberger, Aspekte deutsch-britischer Expansion. Die Überseeinteressen der deutsche Migranten in Grossbritannien in der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), p.126. ‘What shall we do to be saved’, Morning Star, 3 May 1845, issue 17, p.132. ‘What shall we do to be saved,’ Morning Star, 31 May 1845, issue 21, pp.163–164. The word had been used in French economic literature in the 1830s, in relation to Robert Owen, and ‘le système de socialisation’. Williams, Keywords, p.287, under ‘socialist’ notes that in a period of ‘very intense and rapid political argument and formation, and until well into the 1840s other terms stood level with socialist, or were indeed more common’. The word ‘societarian’ was used by John Goodwyn Barmby in The Promethean, see comment in The Union: a monthly record of moral, social, and educational progress 1:5 (1 August 1842), p.184. Morning Star, 31 May 1845, issue 21, p.165, ‘the affright of the priest in the presence of a new agent, the printing press. It was the terror and dazzled amazement of the men of the sanctuary, in the presence of the luminous press of Gutenberg’. The actual phrase is, ‘Helas! dit-il, ceci tuera cela,’ from the chapter entitled ‘Ceci tuera cela.’ New Moral World, quoting ‘The Advent of Steam’, Illuminated Magazine, in 20 July 1844, p.27. ‘What shall we do to be saved,’ Morning Star, 31 May 1845, issue 21, p.164. ‘What shall we do to be saved,’ Morning Star, 31 May 1845, issue 21, p.164. It was renamed by 1 February 1845 a weekly journal of Industrial Organization, Moral Improvement, and Educational Reform. The Tribune was advertised as a ‘Home and Foreign Colonization Journal’ in New Moral World, 18 January 1845, p.248: reporting on the Potteries Emigration Society along with the tea party to Etzler, sketches, essays and reviews – it was published at 40, Holywell Street, but I can find no surviving copy. Morning Star, 1845, issue 4, pp.29–30. Morning Star, 1845, issue 4, p.32. ‘A.A.,’ ‘Now is the Time for Agitation’, Morning Star, issue 6, 15 February 1845, pp.41– 42. ‘A.A.,’ ‘Now is the Time for Agitation’, Morning Star, issue 6, 15 February 1845, p.42. English Chartist Circular 2, issue 135, p.330; issue 136, p.334: letters from Etzler and Stollmeyer; reviews of Paradise appeared in issue 83, p.110 and issue 128, p.304. Revelation 2:26–28, ‘I will give him the morning star’; and Revelation, 22: 16, ‘I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.’ It also figures in the verse ‘Hellas’ by Shelley. The title is of course, related to the idea of a dawn of freedom and liberty, and figures in verse and prose. Feargus O’Connor had edited an Evening Star in 1842–1843. See Morning Star, 21 October 1840, for the explanation that the journal title reflected Fourier’s notion of a Phalanx as a public building for domestic and other conveniences rather than the ‘mono-stare’ or monastery. Northern Star, 12 April 1845, p.3. On the series, see Morning Star, 8 March 1845, issue 9. On the value of Etzler’s scheme, see reply to inquiry from ‘A poor man, London’, in ‘To Readers and Correspondents’, Northern Star, 21 December 1844, p.4. ‘The Past, Present, and the Possible; or, Passages in the Life of a Cosmopolite.– Tropical Emigration’, Illuminated Magazine 1845, pp.97–124; Northern Star, 21 June 1845, p.3. The Harbinger, vol.1 (1845), p.224. Morning Star, 12 July 1845, issue 27, p.216, and repeated Morning Star, 19 July 1845, issue 28, p.224. Morning Star, 5 April 1845, issue 13, p.101. New Moral World, 28 June 1845, p.436 (as James Emslie Duncan).

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211 Morning Star, 12 September 1846, issue 35, p.280 (director); Morning Star, 10 January 1846, issue 1, p.6 (committee of inquiry). 212 The Herald of the Churches, or Monthly Record of Ecclesiastical and Missionary Intelligence 3, May 1846, pp.106–107. 213 Hampshire Advertiser, 14 March 1846. Actually Morning Star shows only a few were from Leicester, 28 March 1846, issue 12, pp.91–92. 214 Bradford Observer, 23 April 1846, p.8. Ramsden was as an early shareholder, Morning Star, 15 February 1845, issue 6, p.48. 215 Reasoner 25, 1846, p.304: ‘Mr Mugeridge [Solomon Mugeridge] … forwards a communication touching one Mr Beal, Mr Etzler and the Morning Star so long and minutely written that it would occupy a parliamentary recess in reading. As this is not the first time similar papers have occupied our attention we think of applying to the Tropical Emigration Society for indemnity.’ 216 Port of Spain Gazette, 21 April 1846 (Mr Scott in the council); response to Powell in 19 May 1846; Stollmeyer’s letter in defence, published in 22 May 1846. Stollmeyer’s abstemious (vegetarian and teetotal) habits were noted, in 22 May 1846. 217 The National Archives (hereafter TNA), Home Office, HO45 /1609, material relating to emigration to Venezuela. For press coverage, for example, ‘Tropical Emigration Society’, Bradford and Wakefield Observer, 2 July 1846, p.7; ‘Failure of an Emigration Scheme’, Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 19 June 1846, reprinting Liverpool Albion’s publication of a letter from S. Walcott of the Colonial, Land and Emigration Office at Westminster, 5 June 1846. Bradford Observer, 19 February 1846, p.8, reported a group of nineteen families, some 50 individuals, setting off from Bradford. 218 South Australian Register, 4 November 1846 [p.3]. 219 See TNA, HO45/1609, report of the Solicitor General George Knox and Thomas F. Johnston, Agent General Immigrants, Trinidad, Port of Spain, 13 April 1846, examining four volunteers, including Thomas Brooks, born in Westminster, aged thirty, and formerly employed as book manufacturer by Duncan’s publisher Smith, Elder, joining in 1844 a month after the formation of the TES, ‘induced by the pamphlets of the Society and reports of Stollmeyer and Etzler’. Brooks suffered swellings and sores from sandflies and mosquitoes on arrival, and finding the diet of salt fish and plantains not agreeing with him. One of those who did settle in Trinidad was Thomas Carr, son of the merchant and agent for supply of Newcastle coal to Russia, John Thomas Carr. 220 Morning Chronicle, 10 July 1846, p.3. 221 Social Hymns: for the Use of the Friends of the Rational System of Society (various editions). A review of ‘Socialism in Britain’, in the North British Review poured scorn on the poetry of the Social Hymns, see p.111. See Kalim, The Social Orpheus, pp.149–150. On Bredell, see The Champion and Weekly Herald, 22 January 1838, col.1180; New Moral World 8 (1:10), 5 September 1840, p.152. 222 Morning Star, 21 October 1846, issue 39, p.311. 223 See Morning Star, 27 January 1847, no.42. The verdict comes from p.334. 224 The Sun Beam, p.5. 225 ‘Colonial Emigration’, Dublin Review, June 1847, pp.388–408 [p.396]. 226 ‘Emigration to Texas’, Northern Star, 10 April 1847, p.2. 227 See E.L. Lach, ‘King, Albert Freeman Africanus’, entry in American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2005), supplement 2, p.318. 228 C.W. Day, Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies (2 vols; London: Colburn, 1852), vol.2, p.58. 229 The Times, 20 November 1845, p.1; Morning Post, 4 October 1845; for allegations of shady background, Morning Post, 23 October 1846 [p.4]; Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.209. Bradshaw’s Railway Gazette also carried news of Stollmeyer and Etzler’s enterprise, 1846, p.663: ‘As the passage will occupy three weeks and the Legislative Council is now in session no time will be lost (the surveys being completed) in bringing

NOTES

230 231 232 233 234 235 236

237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244

245 246 247 248 249 250 251

252 253

269

the claims of this company before the Colonial Assembly. The construction of this rail is to be of wood instead of iron, by which a saving 3,000l. per mile will be effected, with the advantage being enabled immediately to commence the undertaking, without being subjected to any delays, which would likely to occur by the shipment of iron from this country. Mr Etzler, we understand, has been armed with powers to act and has been put in communication with some of the most influential residents in the colony.’ ‘Emigration to Venezuela’, The Times, 24 August 1869, p.10; and a separate scheme promoted by Margaret Amanda Pattison, reported in ‘The English Colony in Venezuela’, Hampshire Advertiser, 4 September 1869, p.4. The Sun Beam (London: W. Strange). The printer was M. Elliot, 14 Holywell Street, Strand. On the first number, indeed, the verse from Queen Mab was reprinted. ‘A Word to our Readers’, Sun Beam, p.4. New Moral World, 1845, p.436; Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p.204. At least, Lloyds’ Weekly Newspaper, 22 June 1845, notices, ‘J.E. Duncan. Apply at the office, to which it was sent. We know nothing about it.’ The title, ‘the Nineteenth Century’ was not unusual, see Self-indulgence: a tale of the nineteenth century (1812); the journal The Adventurer of the Nineteenth Century (1823); Glenfell, or Macdonalds and Campbells; an Edinburgh Tale of the Nineteenth Century (1823); Goslington Shadow: a Romance of the Nineteenth Century (1825); The Anglo Irish; or, Love and Politics; a Tale of the Nineteenth Century (1828); Malvagna. A romance of the nineteenth century (1835); Sydney Clifton, or Vicissitudes in Both Hemispheres. A Tale of the Nineteenth Century (1839). Sun Beam, p.5. Sun Beam, p.7. The quotation is from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. An allusion presumably to Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler’, p.361. Listed in his A Scourge for a Gag, 1d (Collins, Holywell Street). Reasoner, 26 December 1858, p.416; London Investigator, September 1854, p.96. National Reformer, 20 February 1847, p.11, the letter from Powell dated 3 January 1847. Reasoner, 16 December 1846, ‘Utilitarian record’, p.6; for 14 June 1847 lecture, see Reasoner, ‘Utilitarian Record’, p.56; Reasoner, 9 June 1847. Truelove sold the works of Etzler and other social, theological and political reformers at the adjoining no.22, John Street, see advertisement in National Reformer, 10 October 1846, p.16. On the Finsbury Literary Institute, see Reasoner, 26 April 1848, p.43. See Goodway, London Chartism, p.69, on the ‘last acute economic depression of the Chartist decade’ with increased mortality over 1847–1848 and straitened conditions though 1848 and 1849. ‘The Recent Emigration’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 15 (November 1848), pp.768–775 [p.768]. F.E. Lodge, ‘Hunger and Reform’, London Telegraph, 1 April 1848. The Rambler, 15 April 1848, p.321. Reasoner, ‘Utilitarian Record’, 16 December 1846, p.6. Reasoner, ‘Utilitarian Record’, 24 March 1847, p.34. ‘New Publications received, to July 7, 1847’, The People’s Journal, 17 July 1847, p.6; ‘conference of vegetarians’, p.5. ‘Influence of Turnips upon the Imagination’, Reasoner 3:68 (15 September 1847), p.512; see [S. Brown], ‘Physical Puritanism’, Westminster Review 57 (April 1852), pp.405–452, ‘Apostle Greaves as his disciples sometimes called him was preaching it in certain literary circles some years ago, as a sort of potato-gospel for the salvation of a degenerate race; and Henry Sutton, a young poet of some little mark, is the apostle’s apostle to this day.’ The Reasoner 101 (3 May 1848), p.320. The journal ran from May to July 1848. G.J. Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1905), vol.1, p.50.

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254 G.J. Holyoake, Rudiments of public speaking and debate: or, Hints on the application of logic (New York: McElrath and Barker, 1853), p.123, p.129. 255 H.S. Sutton, Quinquenergia, or, Proposals for a New Practical Theology (London: J. Chapman, 1854). Sutton, like Duncan, rejected secularism or the absence of theology. Sutton denied he was in receipt of revelations in offering his new theology (‘If I am Shiloh, I can say unaffectedly, I am at least not aware of it,’ p.iii). 256 ‘Literary Notices’, Howitt’s Journal of Literature and Popular Progress, vol.2 (24 July 1847), p.61. 257 Christian Reformer; or, Unitarian Magazine and Review, n.s., vol.4 (January 1848), p.45. See also Christian Remembrancer 14 (1847), p.229, ‘a subtle and mischievous though unintelligible attempt to revive the mystic theosophy of Jacob Behmen, under its most pernicious aspect. Revelation, and even the being of a God, are allegorised to a perfect evanescence. The inward illumination of Quakerism, the poetry of Shelley, the political economics of Fourier, the idealism of Schelling – all are absorbed and caricatured into a monstrous whole, which anticipates a new era, and a new spiritual church and organization of mankind, in which marriage, animal food, and religion in all its forms, shall be extirpated: it is to be a spiritual communion without Bible, Church, or Law.’ 258 ‘Literary Notices’, Howitt’s Journal, 24 July 1847, p.62. 259 G.J. Holyoake, History of Co-operation, vol.1, p.265. Did the verse actually exist? – in Flowers and Fruits, p.58, there appears, ‘A couple of couplets, no.1, contains the parenthetical lines: ‘On happening to surprise – O, ye Gods! A ‘fair ladye’ EN CHEMISE.’ See R. Francis, Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and their Search for Utopia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), for a recent presentation of this verse, now identified, by mistake, as relating to a statue in the Concordium garden. 260 G.J. Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering, vol.1, pp.51–53 (quoting the lines at p.51, but calling the author Emslie Duncan). 261 Subtitled, ‘an Ode to the Woman Power’, The Promethean, January 1842, issue 1, p.9. 262 Morning Star, no.21, 30 May 1846, p.168. 263 On Reasoner and Holyoake, see Morning Star, issue 21, 30 May 1846, p.168; other notices, see Morning Star, 2 September 1846, p.209; Morning Star, 21 October 1846, issue 39, p.112. 264 Morning Star, 3 May 1845, issue 17. 265 Morning Post, 4 December 1843, p.6. 266 M.A. Loose, ‘Poetic, Popular, or Political? Chartism and the Fate of Political Poetry’, in H.R. Bean, M. Chasar, eds, Poetry after Cultural Studies (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), p.87–114 [p.88]; M. Sanders, ‘“A Jackass Load of Poetry”: The Northern Star’s Poetry Column, 1838–1852’, Victorian Periodicals Review 39:1 (Spring 2006), pp.46– 66 [p.58]. 267 Northern Star, 11 July 1846, p.4. On Harney, see Sanders, ‘A Jackass Load of Poetry’, pp.54–55. 268 Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p.173. 269 See Morning Star, 27 January 1847, issue 42, p.336. 270 J.B. O’Brien, Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality: With the Author’s Reflections on the Causes and Character of the French Revolution, and his Estimate of the Leading Men and Events of that Epoch. Also, His Views of Democratic Government, Community of Property, and Political and Social Equality (London: Hetherington, 1836), p.219: ‘believing that the system of community must be the work of wisdom and knowledge, not of force or law, I believe Etzler’s book to be one of the best that ever appeared for the purpose.’ 271 National Reformer, 17 April 1847, p.343. 272 See ‘A Few Words more to the Conservatives’, Fraser’s Magazine 13 (January 1836), p.91, in an essay which also prints, pp.90–91:

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Tis the voice of our country, from shore unto shore It calls on each Briton to slumber no more; It bids us arouse, ere our birthright be gone, And rally, like men, round the Altar and Throne. The God of that altar, through tumult and war, Ever beam’d upon England his bright leading star; Ever pour’d on our fathers his blessing divine; And ne’er shall their children prove false to his shrine. Round the throne of our Monarchs for ages have stood, Saints, heroes, and sages, the great and the good; Unshaken by foes from without, hath it been, And it shall not be canker’d by traitors within. Too long, oh! too long has a Faction held sway, That piecemeal would dribble Old England away, That would take from her King and her Nobles their own, And cover with insult the Altar and Throne. But it shall not avail them the voice is gone forth That shall dash to the whirlwinds their impotent wrath, When Britain, uproused and indignant at length, Thus bares, like a giant the arm of her strength. Here we stand for Old England her rights and her laws – ’Tis the cause of our country – God prosper that cause! Unimpair’d to our children those rights shall descend: We will live to preserve them, or die to defend. 273 G.P.R. James, The Convict; or, The Hypocrite Unmasked, A Tale (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1847), p.34.

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

Chapter 4. Peans for the People

‘John Bull Kicks the Old Year Out, And the Old Year reads him a Moral’, Punch 15, 23 December 1848, p.273. In a similar vein, see Horace Smith, ‘Comfort for Bad Times’, New Monthly Magazine, August 1848, pp.409–410. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p.166. ‘Blowing Past’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 250 (14 October 1848), pp.241–242 [p.241]. For its non-political pose, see remarks prefacing an article on the demise of Paris fashions, ‘Longchamps’, 10 June 1848, p.377, ‘It is well known that politics are altogether excluded from the pages of this Journal, its object being rather to harmonise and elevate the character of the people, than to excite those disturbing emotions which are so often awakened by the perplexing problems of political science. Therefore have we, in these stirring times, allowed the tide of revolution to sweep across our European continent, without tracing out its course, or speculating on its probable results.’ ‘The Saxon, the Celt, and the Gaul’, The Economist, 29 April 1848, pp.477–478 [p.478]. M. Chase, Chartism: A New History, p.294. ‘Politicians’, The London University Magazine 1:4 (1848) pp.151–157 [p.151]. See, for instance, ‘Sosthenes’, Anti-Revolutionary Tracts (London: Joseph Masters, 1848), praised by The Ecclesiastic as ‘straightforward commonsense’. See ‘J.S.’, Lays and Rhymes for the Times (London: G. Bell, 1848). For anti-revolutionary verse and thoughts on the relationship between military service and poetry, see W.M.W. Call, ‘Tenth of April,’ in his Reverberations (London: Chapman, 1849); the association between the ‘TENTH of APRIL’ and the third edition of the ‘poet of Conservatism’, Robert Story’s Songs and Poems (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849), p.7; M. Constable, a private in the 49th Regiment, and his verse collection,

272

9

10 11 12 13

14

15

16

17

18

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS dedicated to the Queen, ‘Peace to the Shamrock, Thistle and Rose’ in Songs and Poems (Dublin: McGlashan, 1848). ‘Fritz and Liolett’, later editors of the magazine The Looker On, in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Triumph of Truth, and other Poems (London: Sherwood, 1849) addressed the poet-orator Lamartine in the first poem, which urged caution on the French. Jane Maria Davis published ‘Song: Written on the Eve of the Monster Chartist Meeting’ in The White Chief’s Urn (London: Spencer, 1850), which referred to the ‘madness of despair-wrought dreams’, p.129. ‘Sibthorpius. A Lay of Modern London, made in the year 1848’, by ‘T. Blabbington Macsqually’, parodying Macaulay’s Horatius, in The Puppet Showman’s Album (1848). Earlier lampoons included Hurrah for the Charter, by Charles Hattwood (1841). For newspaper poetry, see ‘The 10th of April’ from Englishwoman’s Gazette, in Lancaster Gazette, 6 May 1848, p.4; and ‘A Patriotic Chant’, from The Guardian, in (for example) Leicester Journal, 21 April 1848, p.4. ‘Hood’s Poems’, Edinburgh Review 83:168 (April 1846), pp.375–390 [p.376]. The introductory essay was by William Howitt, the essays were by Samuel Smiles, No.1 was on Robert Nicoll; Béranger was No.II, Thomas Cooper was No.III, Samuel Bamford was No.IV, and Victor Hugo was No.V. See the review in The Spectator, 9 December 1848, p.1190, of Henry Morley’s Sunrise in Italy, etc., Reveries (London: J. Chapman, 1848), the verse ‘Morning in Europe’ and ‘Morning Clouds’ – which also has critical things to say about England. Foreign Quarterly Review, April 1843, pp.58–72, reviewing Gedichte eines Lebendigen, mit einer Dedikation an den Verstorbenen (‘Poems of a Living Man with a Dedication to the Dead) Zweite Auflage Zurich und Winterthur 1841–2, p.62. The Times published a ‘furious’ anti-papal verse from this collection, 17 October 1845, p.7. ‘German Poets and Poetry’, Chambers’s Papers for the People 9 (1851), pp.1–32 [p.29] described him as ‘a very terrible poet. For every evil he has one remedy – the sword’. ‘The Song of Hate. From the German of Herwegh – Translated by Dr Bowring, MP’, reprinted from Western Times, 11 September 1847, in London Pioneer, 30 September 1847, p.382. A review of Herwegh’s poetry, and other German poets, appears in Art. II, ‘Recent German Poets. Freiligrath and Herwegh’, The Christian Teacher (London: J. Chapman, 1848), pp.35–61. See P.S. Robertson, Revolution of 1848: A Social History (1952; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), for comments on this ‘despotic and dreamy young man’, pp.171–173; see S. Liptzin, Shelley in Germany (New York: Columbia University Press, 1924), for the impact of Shelley on the young poet, p.49. Northern Star, 18 March 1848, p.3; Northern Star, 6 May 1848, p.3. See also, ‘Letter from the poet Herwegh to the King of Prussia’, Morning Post, 19 January 1843; ‘His Majesty the King of Prussia and Mr George Herwegh’, The Court Magazine and Monthly Critic, 1 March 1843, p.63. On Lamartine, see a reported ‘defence of poetry’ he made to deputations from the Paris colleges, in Kendal Mercury, 18 March 1848; on Baudelaire, see T.J. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois. Artists and Politics in France 1848–1851 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), p.141, quoting from Oeuvres posthumes (1908), Mon cœur mis à nu (1848). T.H. Gill, Songs of the Revolution (London: Mudie, 1848). The work was printed by Barker of Wortley. A greater poet, Arthur Clough, The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich: a Long Vacation Pastoral (Oxford: Macpherson, 1848), features a ‘radical hot’ Oxford undergraduate, who is ‘the poet, the speaker, the chartist’ (p.53). In ‘Modern English Poets’, readers were told that Browning was sternly but quietly republican, but that he considered political discussion as a poet infra dig, in American Whig Review, December 1851, p.466. J.G. Barmby, ‘Louis Blanc’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 15:172 (April 1848), pp.249–251; ‘Lamartine. Translated from the French of M. de Cormenin’, Howitt’s Journal, 3:64 (18 March 1848), pp.185–189; ‘Albert the Artizan; one of the French Provisional Government,’ Howitt’s Journal 3:67 (8 April 1848), pp.235–236; see Barmby’s letter to

NOTES

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30

31 32

273

Moncure Conway, in Conway’s Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p.335, written on 17 June 1870. ‘Letters from Paris. No.1’, Howitt’s Journal 3:65 (25 March 1848), p.207. Christian Reformer, July 1848, p.435. The article, ‘Systematic History: Or, a Brief Synopsis of the Ten Societary States,’ appeared in The Truth-Seeker in Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, n.s., 1848, pp.17–22. Northern Star ‘received’ from James E. Duncan and G. Cowley, 1 February 1845, p.5, 19 April 1845 saw the publication of the verse. Northern Star, 1 July 1848, p.3, noticing A Song for the Times (Cheltenham: T. Willey); The Bonny Bird; a Radical Rhyme (Dundee: A. Barnet) and J.C. Blumenthal, The Sounds of the Times (Newcastle upon Tyne: T. Dodds). Ernest Jones’ six poems, Songs of Democracy, appeared as fly-sheets in 1856–1857. The phrase comes from a review of Carlyle’s essay on Chartism, Monthly Chronicle 5 (1840), pp.97–107 [p.99]. The Divinearian, p.8. The following Pe-ans for the People (½d, Kerton, 5, Paul’s Alley, Paternoster Row) exist: [no.1] A tocsin ‘gainst tyranny or the British Marseillaise [Copy in Goldsmiths’ Library, G.L. Broadsides Collection 616 (2) vol. VI.]; [no.2] A Scourge for a Gag; or A cat o’ nine tails to flog Russell and Grey [G.L. Broadsides Collection 616 (1) vol. VI., and in British Library, pressmark 1871 e.1(232)] ‘Mr Duncan the Divinarian has published a Scourge for a Gag which he denominates a froth foam. There is some truth in the description,’ The Reasoner, 24 May 1848, ‘Editor’s Box’, no.33. Duncan sent material to Reasoner, 7 June 1848 listed as ‘received’, 5 July 1848; [no.3] The Murdered Chartist [copy in British Library, 1871 e.1(232), and reprinted in the Northern Star, 9 September, 1848]; [no.4] Smock frocks and fustian jackets, or Honour to Hodge and Jim lyrics; [no. 5] Blood Money to Pay Powell the Spy! [copy of second edition, in British Library, 1871 e.1(232)]; [no.7] A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! [copy in British Library, 1871 e.1(232)]. Pe-ans 1–5 were all published before 15 December 1848. Other Pe-ans were: God Save the People; The Feast of Infant Flesh; and Tributes to Cobden, Cooper and Hetherington. P. Scheckner, An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class, 1830s – 1850s (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), p.25. This collection excludes Duncan. V. Neuburg, Popular Literature: A History and Guide from the Beginning of Printing to the Year 1897 (London: Woburn Press, 1977), p.133. Thom, Rhymes and Recollections, p.76. Northern Star, 25 March 1848, p.3: GRATITUDE TO THE MARTYRED POET OF THE PEOPLE. He lived in penury, he died in want — He fought with tyranny and warred with cant People, — respect the man respected you He lived neglected — give the dead his due. The songs he left you to your hearts appeal, Show to his dear ones that he made you feel, They — they were sacrificed that you might learn What thoughts within a patriot’s heart should burn, Dying, a glorious legacy he gave Songs to admire and helpless ones to save. The Spectator, 18 March 1848, p.16. Tocsin ‘gainst tyranny. Thomas Cooper sent news of Thom’s death via a letter in Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 March 1848, p.292. On Cooper’s lectures to raise funds for Thom, see Reasoner 71 (6 October 1847), ‘Utilitarian Record’, p.89. Support came from

274

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

46

47

48

49 50 51 52

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS James Watson, G.J. Holyoake, and W.J. Fox. The Caledonian Society of London also raised funds for his family, see London Telegraph, 5 April 1848, p.4. See The Life of Thomas Cooper, with an introduction by John Saville (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971), pp.313–315; and Linton, Memories. See D. Large, ‘London in the Year of Revolutions’, in Stevenson ed., London in the Age of Reform, p.204. J. Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1990), p.79. See Robert Burns, ‘For a’ that, and a’ that.’ A. Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, p.68, p.140. G.J. Harney visited Burns’s birthplace, see ‘A Northern Tour’, Northern Star, 26 August 1843, p.8. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p.176. The poem appeared in Northern Star, 22 April 1848, p.3. Sanders, ‘A Jackass Load of Poetry’, p.59; on ‘Wapping Old Stairs’ and the ‘Marseillaise’, see ‘The Chartist Demonstration’, Morning Chronicle, 13 June 1848. Eliza Cook’s Journal, 10 November 1849, p.30. ‘Fighting for a Song’, Punch, 7 October 1848, p.155. A Scourge for a Gag [G.L. Broadsides Collection 616 (1) vol. VI, and in British Library, pressmark 1871 e.1.(232.)]. On this, see The Harbinger; or New Magazine of the Countess of Huntingdon Connexion, January 1853, p.11, ‘In one instance the delirious mother had been endeavouring to assuage she cravings of nature by eating the flesh of her dead infant reminding us of that terrible old curse Thou shalt eat the fruit of thine own body Deut xxviii 53.’ C. Boyce, ‘Representing the “Hungry Forties” in Image and Verse: The Politics of Hunger in Early-Victorian Illustrated Periodicals’, Victorian Literature and Culture 40 (2012), pp.421–449. In attacking the Whigs, Duncan merely echoed other critics of Whig treachery for, as ‘Chartism’, Fraser’s Magazine 37:221 (May 1848), pp.579–592 [p.580], noted, they abandoned ‘their own illegitimate offspring’, in the Reform agitation, and then dealt with it with ‘neglect, unkindness, and calumny’. Interestingly, the anti-Whig Puppet-Show made the point, apropos of a line ‘And Keepsake writers settle England’s fate,’ about leading Whigs’ literary pretensions, 2 September 1848, p.200: ‘It is a well-known fact, that nearly all the leading Whigs have been small and unsuccessful poetasters in their time. We mean to review their “poems” some day.’ This image, of steel pens, and aristocratic blood for ink for petitions, is found elsewhere in Chartist writing, see Murphy, reported at Chartist Convention, Cork Examiner, 24 April 1848, p.3; James A. Ball’s speech, reported at the trial of Manchester Chartists at Liverpool Assizes, Morning Post, 20 December 1848, p.5. On vengeful language against Russell and Grey see Goodway, London Chartism, p.89; and, for press commentary, see, for instance, the commentary in ‘The Premier versus the People’, in People’s Press, 1 July 1848, pp.123–124. For comparison between Russell and Castlereagh, see ‘The Tenth of April’, People’s Press 2:19 (June 1848), p.89. Edinburgh Monthly Magazine 64:393 (July 1848), p.112; see also Eugene, ‘Lord John Russell and Odillon Barrot’, Reasoner, n.s., 2 (1849), pp.22–23; ‘First Report of the Council of the People’s Charter Union’, Republican 2 (1848), p.39. John Wade’s Unreformed Abuses in Church and State (London: Effingham Wilson, 1849) referred, p.227, to ‘the Sidmouths of the Home Office’. ‘Editor’s Box,’ Reasoner 34 (21 June 1848), p.61. A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! Peans for the people, no.5, Blood Money to Pay Powell the Spy! Schnepf, Our Original Rights as People, p.74, on the shift from 1848 onwards, as the mass platform and changing popular tastes and the cheapening of printed material compelled and permitted Chartist writers to produce novels.

NOTES 53 54

55

56 57

58 59 60 61

62

63

64

275

See Cooper’s Journal: or, Unfettered Thinker and Plain Speaker for Truth. See Reasoner, 25 April 1849, p.271, on the Carlile Monument List, subscriptions include ‘Mr Duncan’s book, per Mr. Wilde’ at 1s 6d’ – presumably Flowers and Fruits, which retailed at this price when advertised by the publisher William Horsell. ‘A short inscription,’ Holyoake suggested, in Reasoner, ‘such as would be within the limits of the prescribed Cemetery rules might tell of the years of imprisonment which Carlile endured in furtherance of the principles of free discussion. And such an inscription might prove instructive to readers of epitaphs who wander over Kensall Green Cemetery. By this Carlile though dead might yet speak.’ Of the classes offered by Ulrike Schwab, in The Poetry of the Chartist Movement, p.178, of 1. lyric authors known at the time as Chartist poets, with large poetical production over a long period of time and wider reception; 2. Chartists who wrote poetry; 3. socially committed poets who ‘belonged to the surroundings of Chartism’; and 4. Chartists who contributed to the remaining literature of Chartism. Duncan fits the third class best, but with the proviso that he gained notoriety briefly, as a ‘Chartist Poet’. M. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p.7. See ‘The Metropolitan Districts. Letter XIX,’ Morning Chronicle, supplement, 1 February 1850, p.50. See A. Smith, ed., Gavarni in London: Sketches of Life and Character: with Illustrative Essays by Popular Writers (London: Bogue, 1849), for Thomas Miller’s sketch of the coal-heaver, also identified as anti-Chartist, ‘he would cuff even Cuffey himself if he dared to oppose him. He became a “special,” to protect himself …’ (p.44). ‘Metropolitan Chartist Hall’, Northern Star, 22 January 1848, p.4. Northern Star, 6 May 1848, p.5; Northern Star, 20 April 1850, p.4. This organisation, as the name implies, promoted co-operation. Established as a result of ‘Letters on Labour’, by William Howitt in The People’s Journal, it was supported by Goodwyn Barmby, see ‘Co-operative League’, Northern Star, 2 January 1847, p.3. Tocsin ’gainst Tyranny. This work was, in a parody of the formula for registration of work at Stationer’s Hall, ‘registered at the Hall of Albion, Fingal’s cave, and Free to the Whole World’. The copy in the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature, University of London, may be a later edition as the events it refers to mean it must have been published in June 1848. Northern Star, 23 September 1848, p.3; P-J. Béranger, One Hundred Songs, translated by W. Young (London: Chapman and Hall, 1847), p.vi; ‘The Translator’, ‘The Deluge. The Latest Song of’, The People’s Journal 4 (1848), p.214: ‘Before the fall of the Restoration, it will be remembered that Béranger, the far-seeing eye of the prophet, and the bold free voice of the people’s poet, issued some oracular warnings, which might have averted the impending fate, but did not. For some time back it has been understood that he had hung up his bard’s lyre to remain henceforth in silence; but it wanted, to consummate the signs of the times, one voice yet from the song-poet of the nation, and he has broken the silence to send forth this prophetic warning to the blinded rulers, which they of course will pass unheeded, but which the people, through the length and breadth of France, will be drinking in ere this be published.’ On Béranger’s stimulus to British radicalism, see J. Phelan, ‘“The Good Time Coming”: British Utopian Socialism in the Wake of 1848’, in F. Vieira and M. Freitas, eds, Utopia Matters: Theory, Politics, Literature, and the Arts (Oporto, Portugal: Editora da Universadade do Porto, 2005), pp.153–168 [p.157]. H. de Balzac, ‘The Grocer’, in Pictures of the French: Delineations of Literary and Graphic Delineations of French Character (London: W.S. Orr, 1840), p.13. See J. Phelan, ‘Clough, Arnold, Béranger, and the Legacy of 1848’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 46:4 (Autumn 2006), pp.833–848 [p.837]. The Economist, 2 February 1850, p.128, reviewing Ebenezer Elliott’s More Verse and Prose. By the Corn Law Rhymer, vol.1 (London: C. Fox, 1850).

276 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72

73 74 75

76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS Northern Star, 11 March 1848, p.8. An illustration appeared in the Lady’s Newspaper, 11 March 1848, pp.214–215, reproduced in Goodway, London Chartism, p.112. See I. Haywood, ‘George W.M. Reynolds and the “Trafalgar Square Revolution”: radicalism, the carnivalesque and popular culture in mid-Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture 7:1 (2002), pp.23–59. The Spectator, 11 March 1848, p.86. TNA, HO, MEPO 2/64, Return of number, age and name of prisoners apprehended for riotous conduct etc in Trafalgar Square (A Division 9 March 1848), ‘James E. Duncan’. See Goodway, London Chartism, p.115, tabulation based on 127 known rioters. Bow Street Police Court, see The Standard, 8 March 1848, p.1. See Newcastle Guardian, 5 August 1848, p.5, ‘another Chartist Leader. – At the Thames (London) police Court, on Friday afternoon, James Elmslie Duncan, of 353, High-street, Wapping’. Puppet-Show, 18 March 1848, p.8. See also Puppet-Show Almanack for 1849, illustration entitled ‘March – The Trafalgar Square Revolution’. Goodway, London Chartism, p.115; p.126. See ballads in the National Library of Scotland, e.g., ‘The Ragged Riot’, by Birt, Great St. Andrew Street, Seven Dials; ‘A lot of snobs set out one day |As I to you declare, sirs, |And met together in a lump | All in Trafalgar Square, sirs.’ For other middle-class verse on the Chartist disturbances, see ‘J.S.’ Lays and Rhymes for the Times (1848), for the ballad ‘The Chartists are Coming’; and M. Archer Shee’s Lay of the Lincoln’s Inn Legion. Monday, April 10th, 1848 (1848). On Arnold and Chartism, see G.W.E. Russell, ed., Letters of Matthew Arnold (2 vols; New York and London: Macmillan, 1900), vol.1, p.4. Northern Star, 18 March 1848, p.5. Goodway, London Chartism, cites TNA, MEPO 2/64. For a description of the poverty of the district, see Illustrated London News, 22 May 1847: ‘densely-peopled, dirty, confused, huddled locality’. ‘City Clubs Their Nooks Corners and Comicalities Etched and Sketched in Divers Perambulations about Town by a Walking Gentleman No. III. The Knights of St John of Jerusalem’, Mirror Monthly Magazine, July 1849, p.46: ‘that centralised spot … the pages of political history have made it too notorious; for who does not recollect its elections, its hustings, its parliamentary and its parochial conflicts, its Henry Hunt harangues, its Wakley and its Whig orations, its Hicks’s Hall, with its sessional prosecutions of paupers and pickpockets, its forensic logic, learning, and latitude – not forgetting its perpetual orations both radical and revolutionary?’ Morning Chronicle, 4 April 1848, p.7. Morning Chronicle, 4 April 1848, p.7. Goodway, London Chartism, argues for the Kennington Common episode being a fiasco only in the ‘massive over-reaction of their opponents’ (p.77), a myth built on the desire to present inter-class support for order and orderly change rather than revolution. The photography formed the basis of the engraving in Illustrated London News, 15 April 1848, reproduced in Figure 20; and reproduced in L’ Illustration, Journal Universel, p.424. C.E. Jerningham, ‘France in 1848’, Dolman’s Magazine and Monthly Miscellany of Criticism 8:42 (1848), pp.88–97 [p.90]. On the organ, and a hostile account of the infidel headquarters, see ‘The Working Classes of London. Ch.VIII’, The Scripture Readers’ Journal, January 1856, pp.347–353 [p.369]. Facilities included ‘a coffee-room, furnished with pictures, and a pianoforte, and where refreshments may be had at a very reasonable rate of charge, the quality of the viands being subject to the inspection of the Committee of Management; here are to be found the newspapers and all the popular periodicals of the day, and in this coffee-room convivial or harmonic meetings as they are called are held in the evening.’ The Times, 1 June 1848, p.4. The Times, 1 June 1848, p.8; also reprinted in the provincial press, e.g., Leeds Mercury, 3 June 1848, p.8.

NOTES 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93 94 95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104

105 106 107

277

Morning Chronicle, 1 June 1848, p.4. See also Northern Star, 3 June 1848, p.8, quoting Morning Advertiser. Central Criminal Court. Sessions’ Paper. Ninth session, Held July 3rd, 1848. Minutes of Evidence (London: Hebert, 1848), p.349, accessed via: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 8 October 2013), July 1848, (t18480703-1677). ‘Talbot Gwynne’, The School for Dreamers (London: Smith, Elder, 1853), as summarised in New Quarterly Review 5 (1853), p.245. [J. Sturge,] The Suffrage. An Appeal to the Middle Classes (Birmingham: Hudson, 1842), p.12. F. Wheen, Karl Marx (London: Fourth Estate, 1999). ‘Popular Colleges’, The Rambler, 19 February 1848, pp.149–151 [p.149]; The Economist, 1848, p.968. Murray’s Magazine 7 (1890), p.674. See A. Rothstein, A House on Clerkenwell Green (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1966), p.39. The Times, 1 June 1848, p.8. This refers to the incident when Joseph Williams, who had led a procession, addressed the crowd from the window of a house in Whitecross Street, the crowd at Redcross street, collected outside Cartwright’s small coffee-shop, a Chartist site, after a meeting at Clerkenwell Green, to be met by police truncheons when they failed to disperse and ‘serious injury’, see Morning Post, reported in ‘Chartism and Repeal in the Metropolis’, Northern Star, 3 June 1848, p.8. See ‘The Trials of the Chartist leaders. Trial of Fussell’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 9 July 1848, p.3; Goodway, London Chartism, p.124. Goodway, London Chartism, p.125. Goodway, London Chartism, p.125. The Times, 1 June 1848, p.8. ‘The Case of Mr Mitchel.– Threatened Disturbances in London’, Morning Chronicle, 30 May 1848, p.6. The Times, 1 June 1848, p.8. See complaints by three Wapping coal-whippers about the centrality of the publican for their employment and the disgusting beer made for coal-whippers reported by the London United Temperance Association in G.W.M. Reynolds’s The Teetotaler, 4 July 1840, p.12. Flowers and Fruits, p.65. See, for instance, the review of dietetic reform works by Charles Lane, Sylvester Graham and John Smith of Malton, in People’s Review, 1850, pp.68–72. The Newspaper, 3 June 1848, p.181; ‘Chartist Disturbances in London,’ Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 4 June 1848, p.10. The congregational minister Benjamin Parsons published the penny Tracts for Fustian Jackets and Smock Frocks in Stroud (1847–9). Morning Post, 1 June 1848, p.4. See TNA, MEPO 2/66, statement re Clerkenwell Green, cited in Goodway, London Chartism, p.275, endnote 138. For a youthful mob orator frightened at the ‘sight of a red coat’, see J. Kingsmill, discussing the case of a transported Chartist medical student, Chapters on Prisons and Prisoners and the Prevention of the Crime (3rd edn, London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1854), p.243. London Telegraph, 1 June 1848, p.3; reprinted also in Weekly Telegraph, 3 June 1848, p.52. TNA, MEPO 2/66, account of John Faulk, of 12 Good Street, Tottenham Court Road, one of two shorthand writers attending the early meeting at Clerkenwell Green to take notes of Duncan’s speech, but injured by the mob, and then, allegedly, by the police. John Bull, 26 May 1849, p.323, recalled both the murder and the Chartist demonstration there, in reporting the laying of the stones of ten new churches.

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108 ‘Verdict against Sir George Grey and the Police, in the matter of the Chartist meetings in Nova Scotia Gardens, and Bonner’s Fields, Held on Sunday, the 4th of June’, Northern Star, 24 June 1848, p.5. See Goodway, London Chartism, for an account of Bethnal Green, 4 June 1848, pp.119–122. The weaver’s death on 17 June was returned as caused by blows received at Bethnal Green. According to the instructions of coroner Baker, he died of a ‘natural death which might have been accelerated by violence, administered by some persons unknown’, (Northern Star) see Goodway, London Chartism, p.122. 109 Northern Star, 9 September 1848, p.3; reprinted in Roberts, Radical Politicians and Poets, p.135. 110 The number of those in the crowd, which ‘became very great’, following him, is the estimate given in the Morning Chronicle, 5 June 1848, p.3. 111 The Times, 6 June 1848, p.7. 112 See Hertford Mercury and Reformer, 10 June 1848, p.2, for Duncan, ‘the bearded poet of Clerkenwell Green’, parading the streets. 113 ‘The National Convention’, Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Dublin), 6 April 1848; Morning Post, 5 April 1848, p.3. 114 ‘A Reporter in Trouble’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 11 June 1848, p.4. 115 Morning Chronicle, 5 June 1848, p.3. 116 The Times, 6 June 1848, p.7. 117 The Times, 10 June 1848, p.7. 118 B. Porter, The Refugee Question in mid-Victorian Politics (1979; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.86; C. Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialism in Britain. 1840–1860 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), p.45; H. Weisser, April 10. Challenge and Response in England in 1848 (Lanham, New York: University Press of America, 1983), p.113. 119 E.D. Bancroft, 14 April 1848, Letters from England 1846–1849 (New York: Scribner, 1904), p.59. 120 ‘Paris Clubs in London’, Punch, 12 August 1848, p.74. 121 Tocsin ‘gainst Tyranny. On foreign propagandists, ‘Frenchmen in England’, Morning Post, 13 April 1848, p.5 (from which the quotation on dirty linen is derived); ‘How to Treat a Foreign Propagandist’, Punch 14, 1848, p.182 (with pictorial advice); and, in retrospect, but still believing in their significance in April 1848, W. Johnston, England as It Is: Political, Social and Industrial, in The Middle of the Nineteenth Century (London: J. Murray, 1851), vol.1, p.346, ‘foreign propagandists of democratic tumult’. 122 See The Murdered Chartist, BL pressmark 1871 e.l. (232). 123 ‘The O’Connorville Harvest Home’, Northern Star, 16 September 1848, p.3. 124 For description of the site, see The Times, 13 June 1848, p.4. 125 Northern Star, 17 June 1848, p.4. 126 His translation of Cabet’s Journey to Icaria was advertised in Morning Star, 17 May 1845, issue 19, p.152. 127 ‘The Chartist demonstration’, Morning Chronicle, 13 June 1848, p.5. 128 For his agitation, see ‘The Chartist demonstration’, Morning Chronicle, 13 June 1848, p.5. 129 The CHARTIST’S Flare-up on Witsun-Monday, Bodleian Library, Firth c.16 (39). The police did use gutta percha staffs, as, ‘Jokes Absolutely Thrown Away’, Punch 14 (1848), noted, p.173. 130 ‘The Chartist demonstration’, Morning Chronicle, 13 June 1848, p.5 (and picked up by ‘Important Meteorological Discovery’, The Puppet-show, 1 July 1848, p.127), The Times; Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement, p.139. 131 The Times, 13 June 1848, p.8. 132 G. Hodder, Life and Character at the Police Court, Bow Street (London: Sherwood and Bower, 1845), p.iv. 133 Northern Star, 28 December 1844, p.8.

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134 For scholarship see Mike Sanders’ paper, ‘Platforms, Correspondences and Theatrical Metaphor’, at a symposium, ‘Politics, Performance and Popular Culture in Victorian England’, University of Birmingham, 19 April 2012, part of the AHRC-funded project, ‘Cultural History of English Pantomime’. See D. Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, 1806– 1836 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1969), which saw little dramatic political satire in the period; J. Davis, Victorian Pantomime: A Collection of Critical Essays (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); J.A. Sullivan, The Politics of the Pantomime: Regional Identity in the Theatre, 1860–1900 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire, 2011). Instances of metropolitan fund raising via theatricals include Northern Star, 24 March 1849, p.3: Royal Victoria Theatre, in aid of the Victim Fund. Northern Star, 3 November 1849, p.5, referred to ‘getting up theatrical benefits, concerts, soirees, &c.; the profits to be devoted to the fund for the Martyrs’ families’, Northern Star, 3 November 1849, p.5. Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature, is also sensitive to the presentation of the Chartists in 1848 as fools and comical, ‘a tomfool travesty of revolutionary agency’ (p.222) and ‘farcical performance’. 135 Northern Star, 3 February 1849, p.3. 136 ‘The Chartist National Convention’, John Bull, 29 April 1848, p.281: the paper referring to the actor Joseph Munden. The paper characterised the French National Convention as a farce and harlequin’s jacket stained with blood, see John Bull, 6 May 1848, p.293. 137 Reflections on the European Revolution of 1848, by a Superior Spirit, p.57. 138 Man in the Moon 4:21 (1848), p.142. 139 ‘Tom Thumb at the Old Bailey’, Tom Thumb (L–d R––l). ‘Rebellion’s dead, and now I’ll go–―to Breakfast.’ Punch, 21 October 1848, p.164; see also ‘Theatre Royal, Newgate’, p.159. 140 Joseph Fussell is also described in the anonymous verse, first printed in August 1848, A Modern Visit from the Devil (2nd edition, London: Effingham Wilson, 1849), p.11, thus: ‘A diminutive Chartist with Mammoth intentions sanguinary as a flea’s a kind of Bottom the weaver in the farce of Universal Suffrage’. See M. Sabin, ‘Inside the Shark’s Mouth. William Lovett’s Struggle for Political Language’, ch.11 in S. Anger, ed., Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), pp.245–246 for a response to P.A. Pickering, ‘Class without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, Past and Present 112 (August 1986), pp.144–162. 141 ‘Rebellion Burlesqued’, The Examiner, 5 August 1848, p.1, describing Smith O’Brien as Harlequin; ‘Vienna during the Late Insurrection’, Bentley’s Miscellany 24 (1848), p.628: ‘an Irish rebellion excites no more surprise and just as much ridicule as the burlesque of a successful tragedy’; ‘Reaction’, Aberdeen Journal, 15 November 1848, p.8. Nor is it contemporary commentary that does this, see for instance the description of the ‘pantomime farce of special constables, wearing armbands and carrying batons’ distinguishing English revolution from continental, in L. Mitchell, ‘Britain’s Reaction to the Revolutions’, ch.5 in R.J.W. Evans, H. Pogge Von Strandmann, The Revolutions in Europe, 1848–1849: From Reform to Reaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.83. Edward Kenealy, who was prisoner’s counsel in Cuffey’s trial, published his poetry as A Goethe: A New Pantomime in 1850. On the Convention as a burlesque on parliament, see Weekly Dispatch, 27 April 1851, p.7. 142 J. Davis, ‘Introduction: Victorian Pantomime’, in Davis ed., Victorian Pantomime, p.5. 143 S. Trussler, Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p.214. 144 ‘Theatres’, John Bull, 30 December 1848, p.840. 145 Northern Star, 8 January 1848, p.3. 146 Northern Star, 3 February 1849, p.4. 147 Theatrical Times, 10 February 1849, p.38. 148 Morning Chronicle, 25 April 1848, p.5. M. Brodie, ‘Free trade and cheap theatre: sources of politics for the nineteenth-century London poor’, Social History 28:3 (2003), pp.346–

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152

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THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS 361 [p.354], also cites this incident based on an unidentified newspaper clipping, mistakenly assuming that this was a Christmas pantomime, from W.G. Knight, A Major London ‘Minor’: The Surrey Theatre 1805–1865 (London: Society for Theatre Research, 1997). See also Theatrical Times, 29 April 1848, p.141. The Satirist, 29 April 1848, p.152. The Standard, 25 April 1848, p.4. Musical World, 13 May 1848, p.314. Theatrical Times, 13 May 1848, p.157, attributed this work to Angus Reach. Edited by Reach, Man in the Moon 4:19, pp.16–24, featured a ‘historical tragedy in five acts’ conflating the events of 10 April and 12 June, figuring the Cuffeys, Starchiana the guardian fairy of washerwomen, O’Connor, special constables, and the Artful Dodger. Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle, 7 May 1848, p.2. Later references to Chartism and agitation in burlesque include The Seven Champions of Christendom by Planché, for the Easter show at the Lyceum, see The Era, 15 April 1849, p.11 – the Chartist component was ignored in Northern Star, 14 April 1849, p.7. An intriguing representation of the venality of voters appears in Hugo Vamp’s Pollpractice; or, Secrets of the Suffrage, at the Marionette Theatre, reviewed in Northern Star, 6 March 1852, p.6. The Examiner, 30 December 1848, p.838; for more detail on the opening scene, see The Satirist, 30 December 1848, p.572; Musical World, 30 December 1848, p.842. The script (not consulted) exists in Islington Local History Centre, Sadler’s Wells Theatre archive, GB 1032 S/SWT/1/2/1/30. Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1849, pp.65–67. Manuscripts had to be approved in advance of performance by the Lord Chamberlain, including, after 1852, ‘scenes of the harlequinade in the Christmas pantomimes’, see ‘The New Censorship of the Stage’, Northern Star, 10 January 1852, p.3. ‘The Westminster Play’, London Standard, 15 December 1848, p.2. Punch, 10 June 1848, p.246. The comment is from J. Davis and V. Emeljanow, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001), p.194; see also V. Emeljanow, ‘The Events of June 1848: the “Monte Cristo” Riots and the Politics of Protest’, New Theatre Quarterly 19:1 (February 2003), pp.23–32. See ‘The Chartist Bombastes’, Puppet-Show, 22 April 1848, p.44, depicting O’Connor on stage, dismissing a brave army that included G.W.M. Reynolds. George Cruickhank had drawn a cartoon of the ‘Brave Army of Bombastes’. ‘A Great Demonstration’, Punch 14 (1848), p.261 depicts the mob orator addressing the magistrate in bombastic language as ‘myrmidon of the brutal Whigs’. On the Drury Lane riots, see Puppet-show, 24 June 1848, pp.115– 116, p.120. On the political theatre of London, see also Brodie, ‘Free trade and cheap theatre’, for the pantomime at the Victoria in December 1849, Wat Tyler; or, Jack Straw’s rebellion, and the Fairies of the Land of Flowers. The Strand in the same year figured a ‘popularity-hunting demagogue, one No Taxes’, see review in The Era, 30 December 1849, p.12, of ‘an entirely Original, Classical, Mythical, Musical, Satirical, Political, Comical, Gnomical, and Political-Economical Extravaganza, entitled DIOGENES AND HIS LANTERN; OR, HUE AND CRY AFTER HONESTY’. The French revolution became a farce at the Olympic, by Captain Addison, ‘Lost a Sovereign, Or Never Travel During a Revolution’, in April 1848, see Theatrical Times, p.126. ‘The Uproar at Drury Lane Theatre’, New Monthly Magazine 83: 331 (July 1848), p.393. ‘Green-Room Gossip’, The Satirist, 24 June 1848, p.248. Similar loyal gestures and relief at the subsidence of Chartist threat in London is reported in the Theatrical Times, 22 April 1848, p.135, for the Bristol Theatre Royal. Musical World, 15 April 1848, p.242. ‘British Freedom and Drury Lane Theatre’, Theatrical Times, 2 December 1848, p.464. The Rambler, 1848, p.379, made a parallel between plebian reform movements and Jullien when it noted that a large van had been used in Leicester Square, 25 April, ‘after

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167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177

178 179 180 181 182

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the model of those huge advertising machines by which new daily papers and M Jullien’s bal masques are proclaimed to the world’. See ‘How Mr Punch Spent Boxing Night’, Punch 18 (1850), p.8; Literary Gazette, 5 January 1850, p.20. The play was published by J. and D.A. Darling in 1849. Puppet-Show affected to see a plot approaching Chartism, in the Spanish Marriage by Maddox for the Princess’s Theatre, 10 June 1848, p.99. There was also a Chartist shoeblack Caliban in a burlesque of The Tempest according to The Athenaeum, 22 June 1850, p.668. ‘Eugene’, Reasoner 7:162 (11 July 1849), p.23. Thus Biddles at the Bower Saloon presented tableaux of the ‘Revolution in Paris’ and Frampton and Bird designed tableaux of the ‘recent French Revolution’ for the Standard Theatre, Theatrical Times 97 (11 March 1848), p.87. The phrase is from C. Mackay, ‘An Appeal to Paris – 1848’, Town Lyrics (London: Bogue, 1848), p.46. Louis Reybaud published Études sur les Réformateurs, ou Socialistes Modernes in 1844; Illustrated London News, 6 January 1849, p.441. See ‘Republican First-Fruits’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 64:398 (December 1848), pp.687–702; review of Jérome Paturot à la Recherche de la Meilleure des Republiques, in Westminster Review 50:1 (1849), pp.237–249; ‘The Socialist Party in France’, North British Review 10:20 (February 1849), pp.261–292 [p.292], for the vilification of socialist figures in Illustration, in the novel by Reybaud, continuing the career of his eponymous hero in Jérôme Paturot à la Recherche de la Meilleure des Républiques (Paris: 1848), satirised Icarians, Fourierists, Communists and socialists (another edition, in 1849, was illustrated by Tony Johannot); and the drama La Propriété c’est le vol. (Théâtre du Vaudeville, 28 November 1848, by Messieurs Clairville and J. Cordier). ‘The Socialist Party in France’, North British Review, p.281, noted, ‘Every needy fool that had relations with a printer started a newspaper, every landlord that had a large room to let originated a club. The French vocabulary was ransacked for names for these new organs of public opinion. Among the newspapers were The Duck, The Volcano, The Red Bullets, Mother Michel, and The Devil’s Eye Glass’. ‘Jérome Paturot’, Quarterly Review 83:166 (1848), pp.516–552 [p.536]. E.D. Champfleury, Les Exentriques (Paris: M. Levy, 1855), pp.191–211. The Divinearian, p.1. Northern Star, 1 July 1848, p.1, reporting a meeting 22 June. Goodway, London Chartism, p.86. Halfpenny London Journal. A Weekly Periodical of Literature, Science, and Art 1:15 (week ending 24 June 1848), pp.114–115. See C. Emsley and H. Shpayer-Makov, eds, Police Detectives in History, 1750–1950 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p.7; and L. Keller, Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), p.70. Gifford would become police superintendent in Devonport, then superintendent of the Sunderland and River Wear police. My thanks to Marc Partridge for this reference. Northern Star, 5 August 1848, p.2. Morning Post, 29 July 1848, p.7. In ‘Scottish Deer Forests’, a reviewer in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1848, horrified at events south of the border, declared, p.92, ‘No son of the mountains has ever yet given in his adhesion to the Charter – treason hath not stained the tartan, and no republican pins have ever been exposed beneath the checkered margin of the kilt.’ Morning Post, 29 July 1848, p.7. ‘Republican France’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 63:391 (May 1848), pp.573–586 [p.577]. ‘Jerome Paturot’, Quarterly Review 83 (1848), p.517. Illustrated London News, 29 April 1848, p.275. See R. Swift and S. Gilley, The Irish in the Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1985), pp.93–94.

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183 The Irish Catholic ‘Wapping boys’ and their predilection for alcohol, are mentioned in ‘Father Foley, or the priest of the Old School’, by the editor of the Catholic Dolman’s Magazine, November 1848, p.265. 184 Northern Star, 29 April 1848, p.5. 185 Reynolds’s Political Instructor, 26 January 1850. 186 The Standard, 29 July 1848, p.1. ‘O what a noble mind is here o’erthrown |The courtier’s soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword; | The expectancy and rose of the fair state |The glass of fashion and the mould of form |The observed of all observers! quite, quite down.’ 187 Goodway, London Chartism, p.80. 188 Northern Star, 15 July 1848, p.5. 189 ‘To the People’, Northern Star, 24 June 1848, p.3. 190 ‘Our Glorious Constitution’, Northern Star, 3 June 1848, p.4. 191 ‘A Word for Chartists and the Charter’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 30 April 1848, by ‘Radical’, p.5. 192 The Spectator, 5 August 1848, p.746. He was imprisoned for two years, see Goodway, London Chartism, p.90. 193 The Times, 19 June 1848, p.3, on Fleming. The Bradford Observer, 28 September 1848, p.5, reported the prosecution of John Parkinson for publishing the piece, without his name or abode, on ‘Brushy, The Bradford spy’, an active police detective, apparently. On Horkin, see Bradford Observer, 17 August 1848, p.6. On Eadie, see North British Daily Mail as reported in London Standard, 15 July 1848, p.4. 194 The Newspaper, 16 December 1848, p.408. 195 Ebenezer Elliott had penned a ‘British Marseillaise’, in 1844, see Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 21 December 1844, p.6. 196 Morning Post, 29 July 1848, p.7. 197 For instance, Cochrane at the National Convention, Lloyds’s Weekly London Newspaper, 23 April 1848, p.6. 198 At the trial of John James Bezer, Central Criminal Court, Morning Post, 29 August 1848, p.7. Bezer, on his release, lectured on, among other topics, the ‘conduct of the press of Great Britain towards the working classes’, see Northern Star, 25 January 1851, p.1. 199 F. Chamier, A Review of the French Revolution of 1848: from the 24th of February to the Election of the First President (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849), vol.2, p.346. 200 J.R. Chandler, ‘Reflections on Some of the Events of the Year 1848’, Graham’s American Monthly of Literature and Art (Philadelphia) 33:6 (December 1848), pp.318–324, [p.322]. 201 C.M. Kirkland, Holidays Abroad: or, Europe from the West (1849; 2 vols, New York: Scribner, 1854), p.72. 202 Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition, p.138. 203 Morning Chronicle, 29 July 1848, p.8; Morning Post, 29 July 1848, p.8. See also London Standard, 29 July 1848, p.1. 204 S. Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of England (7th edn; 4 vols, London: S. Lewis, 1848). Other Chartist prisoners were detained at the prison and there was talk of an attempt to rescue prisoners as they were moved from Newgate to the prison, see Goodway, London Chartism, p.90. 205 A reporter, journalist, and subsequently lawyer, son of John Merriman the printer. 206 Northern Star, 26 August 1848, p.1. Oakum picking at the House of Correction continued see Illustrated London News, 17 January 1874, p.63. 207 Reasoner, 24 October 1849, p.260. O’Connor paid 5s per week to have Jones spared oakum picking in 1849. On the oakum, clothing and other aspects of Ernest Jones’ incarceration, see the House of Commons paper, Accounts and Papers (1851) XLVI Correspondence Relating to the Treatment of E.C. Jones, 15 July 1851. 208 There was a collection of such poetry and poets, John Alfred Langford’s Prison Books and their Authors (London: Tegg, 1861), which included Thomas Cooper.

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209 London Metropolitan Archives, Middlesex Sessions of the Peace, Court Bonds to Keep the Peace, MJ/R/P/027/098, August 1848. 210 On Baker, see The Jurist 11:2 (9 February 1848), p.33. George Haslem ‘of 82 Bethnal Green Road’, may rather be George Haslam of nos.182 and 183 Bethnal Green Road who was a confectioner aged 35 at the time of the 1851 Census, see HO 107 / 691 /12, and a debtor in the 1850s, no.82 was the location for a coffee room in 1846. 211 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 2 September 1848, p.1145; Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 9 September 1848, p.1177. 212 F.C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), quoting TNA, HO 45/2410, Metropolitan Police Memorandum, 3 July 1848. 213 Sarah Wise classes him among the ‘pistol-packing querulants’, see Inconvenient People. Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England (London: Bodley Head, 2012), p.89: his brushes with the courts may be traced in the newspapers, see ‘Police Intelligence’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 28 July 1850, p.4. 214 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 November 1848, p.1466. Perhaps the Spitalfields location indicates that these were the weavers who, as one New Gazetteer; or Topographical Dictionary of the British Isles (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1852) noted, p.618, ‘sent so many thin and hungry looking recruits to the Chartist meeting at Kennington 10 April 1848’. 215 S.H. Myerly, British Military Spectacle: From the Napoleonic Wars through the Crimea (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.137; Atlantis 1:22 (Dessau, 1853), p.364, ‘Am zahlreichsten sind die Guys im ostlichen Theile der Stadt, in Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green s.s.w.’ 216 Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, p.338. 217 For his Australian career, see J. Belchem, ‘The Spy-System in 1848: Chartist and Informers – An Australian Connection’, Labour History [Australia], 39 (1980), pp.15–27; ‘The Nemesis of Thomas Powell’, Labour History 43 (1982), pp.83–89. 218 William Burke and John Tawell were infamous killers. 219 Morning Chronicle, 9 March 1848, p.7. 220 Robert Burns’s poem, ‘For a’ that, and a’ that.’ Burns was described as ‘a republican, a democrat; and in principle and practice, an honest Chartist’, in ‘Literary Sketches. Robert Burns’, Chartist Circular, 20 February 1841, pp.309–310 [p.310]. The phrase ‘blood money’ echoed the accusation in ‘The Chartist Trials’, Puppet-Show 2 (1848), p.44. 221 ‘First Report of the Council of the People’s Charter Union’, 10 October 1848, in The Republican, 1848, referred to ‘the league between the Minister of the Crown and the disciple of Judas Iscariot’, p.40. Powell was reported to have declared he would have taken Iscariot’s place against Christ, see The Tax Payer’s Catechism: Or Dialogue between Mentor and Telemachus on the Causes of Chartism (Liverpool: Shepherd, 1848). 222 Northern Star, 26 August 1848, p.4. 223 Goodway, London Chartism, p.79. 224 The allusion is to the wise-cracking character created by the Canadian writer Thomas Chandler Haliburton, in sketches acclaimed in North America and Britain, 1836–1840. His ‘comic manner’ is referred to in a subsequent police court appearance, reported in ‘Guildhall – Obstructing the Footpath’, Northern Star, 14 December 1850, p.8. 225 See Morning Post, 19 August 1848, p.6, a detailed report which yet describes him (from the writer’s notes) as William Bezer, although Bezer thought it a ‘fair report. I would rather be reported by you than by a policeman in plain clothes.’ 226 ‘Central Criminal Court’, Morning Post, 29 August 1848, p.7. 227 ‘L’Ami du Peuple’, Northern Star, 8 December 1849, p.5, and the article that follows, ‘The Chartists in Newgate’. 228 See Northern Star, 8 June 1850, p.4: ‘VILE DOINGS IN NEWGATE. MR. BEZER (Lately liberated from the Gaol of Newgate for so-called seditious speaking), Will

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THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS deliver a course of FOUR LECTURES ON NEWGATE FAVOURITISM! At the Hall of Science, City Road, near Old Street, Being extracts from his journal, impounded by the magistrates as unfit to meet the public eye. SYLLABUS. Lecture 1st, Monday, June 10th. The Sentence – the Condemned Cell – the Classification – the Parish Doctor refuses to attend my sick child – ‘Go to the Chartists and let them physic him’ – The murdered innocent is sent to his heavenly parish – Alderman Gibbs’ unaccountable investigation – the Governor’s kindness – Shaw on crutches, his brutal treatment, and his manly conduct. Lecture 2nd, Monday, June 17th. Illness – narrow escape from death in the night – Dr. Wright, WRONG – the privileges – the crucifixion – lying reports of the press – Treatment of Monroe, Wynn, Morris, &c., and the Lecturer – Comparisons are odious – Cope’s kindness again – the Ghosts … At the commencement of each Lecture, the Marseillaise will be sung by a talented Company, in the English, German, and Polish Languages, and at the close Mr. Bezer will sing several patriotic songs, composed by him during his confinement.’ ‘Epistle to Davie, a Brother Poet’. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). From Robert Burns’ ‘Jolly Beggars’, with its first line beginning ‘I am a son of Mars’. Daily News, 5 December 1849, p.5. See David Shaw’s essay published at http://gerald-massey.org.uk/bezer/index.htm [accessed 3 November 2012]. Walter Cooper had visited Ham Common community, according to the recollection of J.M. Ludlow; see Reynolds’s Political Instructor, 16 March 1850, for life and portrait. Punch, 10 June 1848, p.246. The poem appeared on the same page as an article against Alexandre Dumas’ Monte Cristo at Drury Lane. A parody of the verse by Charles Mackay entitled ‘Wait a Little Longer’, the first stanza, published in the Daily News, 22 January 1846, p.4, which went thus: There’s a good time coming, boys, A good time coming: We may not live to see the day, But earth shall glisten in the ray Of the good time coming. Cannon balls may aid the truth, But thought’s a weapon stronger; We’ll win our battle by its aid; ― Wait a little longer. Punch was having fun, in this period, with the ‘Invisible Poet of Cremorne’ – operating from c.June 1846, who extempore versified visitors’ names for a fee, in the recently established and popular pleasure gardens in Chelsea, placing the results for collection in a box, and linked this figure to the Irish Repealers, in noting their deficiency in poetry, see ‘The Repeal Poetry’, Punch, 22 April 1848, p.172, suggesting they should employ him to ‘rub up their reputation for lyrical talent’. On the Invisible Poet, see also ‘The Poet of Cremorne’, in the series – parodying William Howitt’s collection of that name, ‘Homes and Haunts of the British Poets’, Punch, 21 August 1847, p.62: ‘To say that he is altogether invisible, is a fiction; for though he is unseen by the vulgar crowd, the searching glance of sympathy, looking upwards through the letter-box, will get a glimpse of the Bard with his dome like forehead enveloped in a fourpenny Glengarry; his flashing eye, flashing none the less brightly for the spectacles, that add to its force without impairing its lustre. Yes! we saw the Poet of Cremorne enveloped in the summer blouse so well adapted to the perpetual sunshine of his imagination while ever and anon he dipped his pen into a wine glass half filled with cerulean ink’; ‘The Gardens of England. III. Cremorne Gardens’, Puppet-Show. The Satirist, 27 September

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238

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1846, p.310, spoke of the Poet improvising ‘by the yard … occasionally his yarns lack quantity in a poetical sense.’ At the time of the Chartist revival of 1848, and as Duncan was becoming a public figure, the Invisible Poet’s antics also attracted attention. Puppet-Show, alluding to the differing views of what a placard bearing the legend ‘the 29th of May’ had meant – some thought this meant a Chartist meeting in Clerkenwell Green and others advertising for Cremorne Gardens (‘in the present depression of the rebellion market, a row on Clerkenwell Green is just about as important, as an emeute in Cremorne Gardens,’ 10 June 1848, p.97). The Weekly Chronicle, 11 June 1848; and The Times, 10 June 1848, p.7, reported one incarnation of the Invisible Poet appearing before a magistrate, Middlesex Sessions, 9 June 1848, for disorderly conduct, J. Reid Adam [Maxwell], 42, who was dismissed when his ‘poetical effusions had been of so degenerate a character as to give offence to the visitors’. He also seemed to be mentally afflicted, ‘He considered that he was the first and the last man … He remembered that the comet which had appeared in the year 1811 had bowed to and smiled at him as it had traversed the Heavens … he could see the soul leave the human body after death.’ The judge ordered him to be sent to a lunatic asylum, with the hope he would recover his reason. C. Reilly, Mid-Victorian Poetry. An Annotated Biobibliography (London: Continuum, 2000), p.308, identifies him as John Reid Adam Maxwell, 1806–1866, born Renfrewshire, a soldier who, after purchasing his discharge, was admitted to Glasgow Asylum in 1838 and discharged 1845: as Iram he had published All sorts: Containing Compositions in Verse, Including the Heroic, Sentimental, and Comic (Edinburgh: Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1864): after 1849 he was in Royal Edinburgh Asylum. ‘J.O.’ in Notes and Queries 9 (18 February 1854), p.145, wrote: ‘A poor man by name J.R. Adam, meeting with reverses, enlisted, and after serving abroad for a period returned but to exchange the barrack-room for the Glasgow Lunatic Asylum. Possessing a poetical vein, he indulged it here in soothing his own and his companions’ misery, by circulating his verses on detached scraps, printed by himself. These on his enlargement he collected together, and gave to the world in 1845, under the title of the Gartnavel Minstrel, a neat little square volume of 104 pages, exceedingly well executed and bearing the imprint “Glasgow, composed, printed, and published by J.R. Adam;” under any circumstances a most creditable specimen, but under those I have described “a rara avis in literature and art.” See The Gartnavel Minstrel: Consisting of Original Pieces in Rhyme, both Comic and Sentimental, with Notes, and a Brief Biographical Sketch of the Author (Glasgow: Composed, Printed and Published by J.R. Adam, 1845). H. Dixon, The London Prisons: With an Account of the More Distinguished Persons Who Have Been Confined in Them: to Which is Added, a Description of the Chief Provincial Prisons (London: Jackson and Walford, 1850), p.224. See I. Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature: Print, Politics, and the People, 1790– 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), ch.9, ‘Acts of oblivion: 1848 and after’, p.222. Goodway, London Chartism, notes Cuffay’s role in the middle-class Punch as a ‘figure of derision’, p.94 – something Cuffay was aware of, and commented on at his trial. See Reynolds’s Political Instructor, no.23, 1850, p.178, for biography and portrait of this ‘scion of Afric’s oppressed race’. Cuffay’s wife is referred to in a letter by Jane Carlyle to Lady Ashburton, 11 June 1848, see The Carlyle Letters 23, pp.44–46, DOI: 10.215/lt18480611-JWC-LA-01. On Fussell, see Figure 22 in this book, ‘A Family Man’, Punch, 10 June 1848, p.240, the associated article suggests his family should exhibit themselves as British savages; and the critique of the ‘press-gang’ coverage which a fair trial made impossible in the view of Northern Star, 8 July 1848, p.4: ‘caricatures and pointless attempts at burlesque … got up for the purpose of exciting odium against Fussell.’ The Divinearian, p.3.

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239 The Era, 17 December 1848, p.14; The Standard, 12 December 1848, p.4; Northern Star, 16 December 1848, p.1. 240 Daily News, 12 December 1848, p.4; London Standard, 12 December 1848, p.4; Morning Chronicle, 13 December 1848, p.8; The Era, 17 December 1848, p.14. 241 Northern Star, 16 December 1848, p.1. 242 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 16 December 1848, p.1624. 243 Reasoner, 3 January 1849, p.9. 244 ‘Revival of the Chartist Agitation’, Lady’s Newspaper, 20 January 1849, p.34. 245 Bradford Observer, 9 January 1868, p.5; and obituary in Bradford Observer, 26 December 1874, p.8. 246 Twelve poems are listed as pe-ans at a half penny each from Kerton, in Blood Money. 247 The Divinearian, December 1849, p.7. 248 Reasoner 12 April 1848, p.276. Reasoner, ‘Utilitarian Record’, records receiving from Duncan, 7 June 1848, p.32; and 5 July 1848, p.96. 249 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 20 May 1848, p.654. 250 See entry in L. Brake and M. Demoor, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), p.177. Jerrold’s paper had, like many papers, copied The Times, 13 June 1848, on Duncan’s plucky behaviour, see 17 June 1848, p.792. 251 H. Harrison, ‘Living Made Easy’, People’s Press 2:16 (March 1848), pp.58–60 [p.58]. 252 Harrison, ‘Living Made Easy’, p.59. 253 ‘Congress of the Social Reform League and Friends’, Northern Star, 18 May 1850, p.1. 254 Northern Star, 16 March 1850, p.3, reviewing no.2. 255 Truth-Tester, notice circa p.34 to a ‘J. Duncan’ who wrote saying an issue was missing. 256 Vegetarian Advocate, vol.1, 1849. 257 See J. Stevens, Man-midwifery Exposed, or the Danger and Immorality of Employing Men (London: Horsell, 1849), for the details that this work was published by Horsell at the ‘Vegetarian Press, 190, High Holborn’. For the depiction of the long-haired Horsell, with his wife Elizabeth Horsell, see G.M. Viner, Aunt Eliza’s Garret, or Scenes in the Life of a Needlewoman (London: Elliott, 1854). 258 For the albumen print by Maull and Polyblank, c.1857 in the Museum of the History of Science collection, University of Oxford, see www.mhs.ox.ac.uk. 259 Advertisement in The Hydropathic Almanac for 1851 (London: W. Horsell, 1851), p.33, which also listed Duncan’s Flowers and Fruits (without his name) as 1s, and 1s 6d, p.35. 260 Vegetarian Advocate, 1 February 1850, p.81. 261 The Times, 25 December 1850, p.4. 262 Incidentally, Duncombe was described as like a ‘licensed jester’ in his grievance mongering, see The Anglo-American 7 (26 September 1846), p.532. 263 W. Howard Russell, ‘A Day in Genoa’, Bentley’s Miscellany 33 (1853), pp.111–120 [p.116]. 264 C. Fourier, The Passions of the Human Soul and their Influence on Society and Civilization (2 vols; London: Bailliere, 1851), vol.1, p.203; C.F. Wittke, The Utopian Communist A Biography of Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1950); G. Barmby, ‘Universal Language and Phonography’, Howitt’s Journal 1:7 (13 February 1847), pp.96–98 [p.96]; The Divinearian, December 1849, p.1. See also ‘English Spelling Reform’, Westminster Review 51:100 (April 1849), pp.34–50. 265 ‘Universal Language and Phonography’, p.98; see A. Cooper, ‘Dictionary Words and Living Language: Radical Challenges to Language Theory in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 2 (2007), pp.5–6. Barmby published ‘An Essay Towards Philanthropic Philology: or, Ideas on Language, in Reference to the Future of Transition and Community’ in New Moral World 9 (2:14, 3rd series), 3 April 1841, pp.205–206. New Age, 1 August 1844, p.272, thought ‘The idea of a universal language is one that much occupies every philanthropic and benevolent mind, and, if realized, will be a powerful condition towards a higher Spirit development than now

NOTES

266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278

279

280

281 282 283 284 285 286

287

287

exists, and we shall therefore feel it a duty to bring it into prominent notice in our educative arrangements. In another portion of the New Age will be found a paper on Phonography, written by a member of the corresponding society who is a candidate residing among us and who has shown himself well qualified to teach this science by the progress which classes have already made under him.’ Vegetarian Advocate, 15 February 1849, p.82. ‘The Fonetic Solution for Hard Names’, Punch, 24 February 1849, p.84. Fonetic Nuz, 6 January 1849, p.2. ‘The Spell-Bound Enthusiasts’, Punch, 9 December 1848, p.250. ‘Phonetics’, Fraser’s Magazine 40: 238 (October 1849), pp.416–428 [p.416]. ‘It wood knott sel, so doun it phel’; see also Man in the Moon, 1849, p.123. New Moral World, 23 November 1844, p.176. He is not listed as a member of the Phonographic Corresponding Society in Phonotypic Journal, 1843. Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, footnote 49, wrongly identifies him as a phrenologist on this basis. Phonotypic Journal 3 (1844), p.293, p.7, 16 Little Hill Street, Tower Hill. The Phonographic Corresponding Society is reviewed in New Age, 1 November, p.314 New Age, 1 November, p.315. See New Moral World 12 (5:9, 3rd series), 26 August 1843, p.70, p.72: Branch 12, 23 John Street, Tottenham Court Road, 28 August. Cited in I. Pitman, Reporter’s Companion, an Adaptation of Phonography, (as developed in the eighth edition of the ‘Manual’ of the System,) to Verbatim Reporting (London: F. Pitman, 1849), p.10. ‘Phrenotypics, or Brain Printing’, Punch, 1842, p.21; ‘Major Beniowsky’s New Art of Memory’, Punch, 9 October 1841, p.149; The Satirist, 22 January 1843, p.27. Beniowksi was accused by Urquhart of being a spy in the pay of the tsar, fomenting the Chartists, in a pamphlet, see The Standard, 4 March 1847 [p.1] for account; The Spectator, 10 April 1847, p.338. Urquhart’s correspondence on this subject was republished in Free Press Serials no. XIII. The Chartist Correspondence (1854), e.g., p.4 and p.9. See B. Beniowski, The Handbook of Phrenotypics for Teachers and Students. Part 1 (London, for the Author, 8 Bow Street, 1842). He had studied mathematics, medicine, literature and science at Vilna for seven years, and then studied military studies at the École d’État Major in Paris, see Anti-Absurd, p.81. New Moral World 12 (5:4, 3rd series), 22 July 1843, p.32; Northern Star, 15 July 1843, p.1; advertisement for classes, Morning Post, 7 April 1846; A Course of Six Lectures (London: J. Spurgeon, 1846). The lectures ‘proved very interesting, and have rendered many persons desirous of acquiring the principles of the art of memory, discovered by the Major and for which he shows such a wonderful aptitude in remembering events.’ Beniowksi later devised reformed printing type for compound letters and short words cast in one. The Handbook of Phrenotypics, p.39. ‘Commercial Directory’, Post Office Directory, p.98. The Anti-Absurd or phrenotypic alphabet and orthography for the English language (London: The Author, 1844), p.46, p.49. The Anti-Absurd, p.66. H. Buss, Eighty Years Experience of Life (London: T. Danks, 1893), p.69. Kydd was the anonymous author, as ‘Alfred’, of the History of the Factory Movement. On Dipple, see ‘Life in London’, The Mirror 1:6 (7 February 1846), pp.81–82 [p.82]. On the theatre, see E. Sherson, London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (London: Lane, 1925), p.39; on preparations for anticipated Chartist activity here, see Goodway, London Chartism, p.89. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854, p.341; Northern Star, 21 October 1848, p.4.

288

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288 On reporters in London in this period, see the account in The London Literary and Musical Observer (London: G. Purkess, 1848), by James Irwin [probably Irvine] Scott. 289 A Course of Six Lectures, p.64. 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

Chapter 5. Apostle of the Messiahdom

See A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! The Divinearian, or, Apostle of the Messiahdom, No.3, December 1849 (published by William Horsell). This survives as a single copy in the Seligman collection, University of Columbia. This was consulted by Professor G. Claeys, and the author is grateful to him for providing information on its location, and to Mr Richard Ellenbogen, of the Rare Books and Manuscript Library, University of Columbia for providing a photocopy. ‘Community of Goods and Persons’, The Promethean. No.1, in The Literary Gazette, 21 May 1842, pp.342–343. The 1848 journal was reviewed in Sheffield Independent, 5 August 1848, p.2, and Northern Star, 12 August 1848, p.3. See The Athenaeum, 17 November 1855, p.1329; ‘Republican France’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, May 1848, p.578. Land reform tied to political enfranchisement had been organised by radicals opposed to aristocratic power, such as Cobden, since the summer of 1849, in a National Freehold Land Association. See M. Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and NineteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p.210. Reasoner 62 (4 August 1847), p.426; see also ‘W.N.’, ‘Equitable Banks of Exchange’, Reasoner, 1847, pp.303–310. People’s and Howitt’s Journal 3 (6 February 1847), p.82. See Joseph Hume’s letter to Lord John Russell, published as ‘Italian Refugees; Malta – Correspondence’, Reasoner, 1849, p.347. The Divinearian, p.3. Reasoner 6:24 (13 June 1849), p.383. The Divinearian, p.2; see Law Journal, n.s., vol. 19, pp.82–94, on the relay system. The Divinearian, p.3, ‘the moving power of the universe,’ he wrote, elsewhere. The Divinearian, p.2. The Divinearian, p.3. See R. Barwell, Asiatic Cholera: its Symptoms, Pathology and Treatment (London: J. Churchill, 1853), p.61. The Divinearian, p.2. For the underchin beard, see cover of Robert Owen and his Legacy, a watercolour dated c.1850. R. Owen, The Revolution in the Mind and Practice of The Human Race; or, The Coming Change from Irrationality to Rationality (London: E. Wilson, 1849). See the passage, entitled in the header, ‘The Duchess her infant’s nurse’, in ‘A Lady’, Anecdotes, Personal Traits, and Characteristic Sketches of Victoria the First (London: W. Bennett, 1840), p.13. On Victoria’s attitude to breast-feeding, see H. Rappaport, Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-Clio, 2003), p.339. Their execution had already been used by the secularists to berate the Church, see Reasoner, n.s., 21 (21 November 1849), p.322. The Divinearian, pp.3–4. The Divinearian, p.4. The Divinearian, p.3. The Divinearian, p.3; Parliamentary Debates, 98, House of Commons, 23 May 1848, col.1312. Joseph Barker, in ‘The English Revolution and the National Debt’, The Reformer’s Almanac, and Companion to the Almanacs for 1848 (Wortley: Barker, 1848), p.184, similarly

NOTES

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

39 40 41

42 43 44

45

289

argued about ‘the revolution’ leading to a monarch, if there was a queen still, as ‘simply a servant of the people’. ‘The House of Commons from the Strangers’ Gallery’, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, August 1853, p.491. Reynolds’s Political Instructor, 8 December 1849, p.33. The Divinearian, p.7. In New Moral World 13 (27 July 1844), p.40, Fox’s voice is described as the ‘poetry of diction’ – Ebenezer Elliott having described Fox as an ‘Orator Bard’. For Travers, see ‘F.G’, Reasoner 7:184 (5 December 1849), p.363–364. Travers was reported in Leader, 27 December 1851, p.1229, on account of a lecture in 1851 at the Whittington Club on Celts and Saxons, opposing ethnologists’ views on racial conflict. M.D. Conway, Centenary History of the South Place Chapel (London: Williams and Norgate, 1894), pp.94–95. For Travers’ financial struggles thereafter, see J. Chapple and A. Shelston, eds, Further Letters of Mrs Gaskell (2000; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p.60. The Divinearian, p.2. J. Grant, Sketches of London, vol.2, p.205. The Divinearian, p.3. Flowers and Fruits, p.36. ‘Thomas Cooper’s Orations’, Reasoner 3:71 (6 October 1847), p.546. See T. Larsen, Contested Christianity: The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2004), ch.8. ‘Literature. The Communist Chronicle; or, Promethean Magazine. No.10’, Penny Satirist, 31 August 1844, p.3. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 13 October 1844, p.6. The reference is to the female messiah Joanna Southcott, a farmer’s daughter from Devon whose phantom pregnancy in 1814 had not delivered Shiloh to the world. For Barmby’s call for her writings to be opened, see The Movement 2 (19 February 1845), p.64. See ‘Defence of Communism, on religion, family, country, property, and government: in answer to Joseph Mazzini. By Goodwyn Barmby’, The People’s Journal, 1847, p.283. Mazzini replied, ‘A Last Word upon Fourierism and Communism, in reply to Messrs. Doherty and Barmby’, The People’s Journal, 1847, pp.345–348 [p.346], that Barmby’s was ‘a gentle inoffensive, rose kind of Communism, the theory of which consists in being eminently and primarily religious, in combating selfishness in the family, in organising union amongst the nations, in feeding and tending the blind and lame, the sick and aged; a Communism which, in effect, puts nothing in common, but seeks only to distribute and associate.’ Flowers and Fruits, p.8. The Divinearian, p.1. On Francis Foster Barham’s ‘Alistic Association for the Advancement of Divinity’, see A, an Odd Medley of Literary Curiosities, p.16: ‘Alism was the best designation yet discovered for the prothetic and transcendental Divinity which is perfectly orthodox catholic and universal.’ The Spectator, 16 June 1849, p.550. Morning Star, 14 June 1845, issue 23, p.178. W.C. Taylor, ‘The Moral Economy of Large Towns. Juvenile Delinquency’, Bentley’s Miscellany 7 (1840), pp.470–478 [p.475]. On the appreciation of theatre and music in Owenite communities, see Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, p.158; see New Moral World 13, 24 August 1844, p.72 for advocacy of the Social Hymn Book for all Socialists. ‘Musical Education for the People’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 1843, p.36; see Illustrated London Life, 11 March 1843, p.6, for article and illustrations, on the ‘genii of discord’ of Mainzer and Hullah singing classes. See also J. Mainzer, Singing for the Million: A Practical Course of Musical Instruction, adapted, from its pleasing simplicity and rapid effect, to render Musical Reading and Singing familiar to all ages, capacities, and conditions (6th edn,

290

46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS London: Simpkin, Marshall), pp.76–83. On Chartist hymnody, see M. Sanders, ‘God is our guide! Our cause is just!’ The National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian Hymnody’, Victorian Studies 54:4 (Summer 2012), pp.679–705. Barmby’s poem, ‘Ode to Joseph Mainzer, Founder of the Plan for Popular and Gratuitous Instruction in Singing, for the Working Classes,’ with its lines ‘Oh, thou incarnate Lyre above a sod!’ appeared in the Monthly Magazine and was republished in New Moral World 10 (3rd series), 27 July 1841, pp.21–22. New Moral World 10 (3:5, 3rd series), 31 July 1841, p.37. See also letter from ‘H.H.’ ‘Music in Social Institutions’, New Moral World 10 (3:33, 3rd series), 12 February 1842, p.262. New Moral World, 10 (3:19, 3rd series), 6 November 1841, p.148, address of the Central Board; New Moral World 10 (3:19, 3rd series), 6 November 1841, p.150 (Mainzer before Branch A1); New Moral World 10 (3:21, 3rd series), 20 November 1841, p.163 (review of Wilhelm’s Method of Singing). W. Lovett and J. Collins, Chartism. A New Organization of the People (London: J. Watson, 1840), p.52. Apropos of Henry Russell’s music at the Strand Theatre, Mirror. Monthly Magazine, pp.135–136 [p.136]. For instance, ‘Utilitarian Record’, Reasoner 2:40 (1847), p.28. W. Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Poets Delivered at the Surrey Institution (London: Taylor and Hessey, 1818), Lecture 1. Introductory – On Poetry in General. New Moral World 12 (27 January 1844), p.243. A. Wallbridge, Torrington Hall being an account of two days, in the autumn of the year 1844, passed at that magnificent and philosophically conducted establishment for the insane (London: Jeremiah How, 1845). Beyond the ‘mountain daisy’ of Burns, perhaps Duncan had in mind the English poet Dr John Mason Good’s verse The Daisy, whose first stanza was: ‘Not worlds on worlds in phalanx deep, | Need we to prove a God is here | The Daisy fresh from Winter’s sleep | Tells of his hand in lines as clear.’ The public and collective nature of Chartist poetry is discussed in Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p.29. Or rather he writes, Divinearian, p.5, as in ‘“Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” with the new spirit!’ The Divinearian, p.4. See Cruikshank’s etchings, ‘A Sheet of Parliament’, and ‘As it ought to be, or – the ladies trying a contemptible scoundrel for a “Breach of Promise”,’ and the illustrated article, ‘Frightful State of Things, if Female Agitation is Allowed Only for a Minute’, Comic Almanack (1849). Morning Star, 1845, issue 4, pp.27–28. Flowers and Fruits, p.8. ‘Pickings from Unfinished Poems. No.1 – Description of a Naiad’, Flowers and Fruits, p.49. ‘Friendship’s Offering’, in Flowers and Fruits, pp.17–18. ‘Love’s Offering’, Flowers and Fruits, p.19. ‘The Little Sportsman, or Cupid’s Tent’, in Flowers and Fruit, p.14. Flowers and Fruits, p.45. The Divinearian, p.3. The Divinearian, p.7. The 1854 Post Office Directory lists him at 34 Broad Street as hatter, and spells his name Edwin Scarce Wilkinson. See Sanders, Poetry of Chartism, p.169, for the judgement. Established as a ‘vulgar’ proverbialism by the 1830s, although it was debated whether this was the result of corruption of etymology from the Germanic ‘natter’ for adder, see

NOTES

70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89

90 91 92

291

Notes and Queries (4th series: 3), 16 January 1869, p.64. Modern commentary links it to the ‘hatter’s shakes’ of mercury salts used for finishing of hats. Reading Mercury, 10 July 1847 [p.2]. Reading Mercury, 8 November 1845, p.3, ‘Edwin S. Wilkinson, hatter, of Broad-street, charging him with having unlawfully trespassed upon lands belonging to Mr. Shackel’; Reading Mercury, 5 November 1846, p.3, ‘Edwin S. Wilkinson, hatter, Broad-street, was taken before W. Blandy Esq., charged with trespassing on land at Shinfield, on the 3rd of November’; Reading Mercury, 14 December 1850, p.3. See opening article of Chartist Circular 17 (18 January 1840); and verse by J.A. Wood, ‘Thou art a self-degraded slave’, Friend of the People, 29 March 1851, p.127. Philip Hewson in Clough’s The Bothie, included the Game Laws among his hates. Fifteenth Report of the Inspectors appointed, under the Provisions of the Act 5 & 6 Will. IV. c. 38, to visit the different prisons of Great Britain. I. – Home district (parliamentary session 1851, paper 1384), p.x, citing ‘General Statistics of Crime, 1849’. ‘Berkshire Assizes’, Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 17 July 1847. The description is a quotation from As You Like It. Reading Mercury, 7 August 1852, p.3. Berkshire Chronicle, 1 December 1866, p.6; Reading Mercury, 13 June 1874, p.5. See A Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! for ‘353 Commerce Strand, Redmead commonly known as Wapping’. Northern Star, 5 May 1849, p.1. ‘Thomas Paine’, Northern Star, 27 January 1849, p.3; ‘Public Festivals in Honour of the Natal Day of the Immortal Thomas Paine’, Northern Star, 3 February 1849, p.7. ‘The Anti-Puppet Show Movement’, Puppet-Show 2:32 (14 October 1848), p.66 described the infidel journal Reasoner as a ‘twopenny atheistical disputant … rattling Tom Paine’s bones about every week to attract the mob’. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 72 (November 1852), p.528; see Poems of William Edmonstoune Aytoun (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp.287–288. The Era, 29 July 1849, p.7. ‘Peace and War Agitators’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, November 1849, p.598, confused Duncan with a Scottish agitator, John Duncan, who had been before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh in 1843. For this moment in radical metropolitan activity, see M.C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.100. The Times, 15 January 1850, p.3. ‘Trial of the Chartist Leaders’, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 9 July 1848, p.3. Bristol Mercury, 19 January 1850, p.2. The Times, 15 January 1850, p.3. Household Narrative of Current Events, (for the Year 1850,), Being a Monthly Supplement to Household Words (London: Household Words, 1850), January 1850, p.7. ‘The Chartist revival’, Derby Mercury, 23 January 1850, p.1. ‘Politics of the Outward Man!’ Punch, 30 October 1841, p.185. On the significance of red hair, see R.D. Altick, The Presence of the Present. Topics of the Day in Victorian Novels (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991), pp.315–329; ‘Red Hair’, by the author of ‘The Pipe of Repose’ [Robert Ferguson], Bentley’s Miscellany 29 (1851), pp.532–537. Tom Sharp, of Chartist principles, has red hair in F. Francis, Newton Dogvane, a Story of English Country Life (3 vols; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1859), vol.1, p.133; James Payn’s The Foster Brothers, Being a History of the School and College Life of Two Young Men (London: A. Hall, 1859), also figures a red-haired Chartist (Ernest Jones), 1859, p.222. O’Connor is described as foxy-red haired. Liverpool Mercury, 18 January 1850, p.8. The Era, 3 February 1850, p.6; Morning Post, 30 January 1850, p.8. Daily News, 30 January 1850, p.7.

292 93 94

95 96 97 98 99 100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110

111 112 113 114 115

116 117 118

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS London Standard, 30 January 1850, p.4. For additional reporting, see The Times, 30 January 1850, p.7. London Standard, 30 January 1850, p.4. On Waller’s presence at Bonner’s Field, see the Central Criminal Court. Sessions’ Paper. Ninth session, Held July 3rd, 1848. Minutes of Evidence (London: Hebert, 1848), p.391, 17 June 1848, trial of Alexander Sharpe, accessed via: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 8 October 2013), July 1848, trial of Alexander Sharpe (t18480703-1712). London Standard, 30 January 1850, p.4. London Standard, 30 January 1850, p.4; Morning Post, 30 January 1850, p.8. Morning Post, 1 February 1850, p.8. The Era, 3 February 1850, p.6. Morning Post, 30 January 1850, p.8. See The Times, 1 February 1850, p.7, for Duncan asserting ‘he would not pay any fine, he would go to prison’; also Daily News, 2 February 1850, p.7. The Marriages Affinity Bill of 1850 concerned the question of marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, a question of some anxiety to Victorians. See N.F. Anderson, ‘The “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill” Controversy: Incest Anxiety and the Defense of Family Purity in Victorian England’, Journal of British Studies 21:2 (Spring 1982), pp.67–86. A Marriage Law Reform Association was established a year after. Morning Post, 17 May 1850, p.7. Morning Post, 17 May 1850, p.7. The Standard, 17 May 1850, p.7. Morning Post, 17 May 1850, p.7. See J. Grant, Sketches in London (London: W.S. Orr, 1838), p.199. Thus the ‘young man, who, being able to read, has idled away his time declaiming the Chartist newspaper in the village ale-house’, Reverend J.P. Hastings, ‘The Difficulties in Promoting Rural Education’, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 1857 (London: J.W. Parker, 1858), p.178. The Standard, 7 May 1850 [p.4]. The Standard, 7 May 1850 [p.4]. Duncan was diagnosed as suffering from epilepsy. It is difficult to know what weight is to be given to this, given shifting understanding of what this term encompassed, in the last two centuries. Modern experts identify outbursts of temper and overeating as associated with epilepsy, e.g., the genetic disorder ‘Prader-Willi syndrome’ distinguished by obesity, see S.C. Schachter, G.L. Holmes, D.K-N Trenité, Behavioural Aspects of Epilepsy: Principles and Practice (New York: Demos Medical Publishing, 2008), p.359. The Times, 10 July 1850, p.7. Duncan would probably have read the article in Cooper’s Journal 17:1 (27 April 1850), on ‘Arguments and Purposes of the Sunday Sabbatarians’. Morning Chronicle, 9 July 1850, p.3. Morning Post, 9 July 1850, p.3. He was ordered to find sureties amounting to £40, according to this account. Northern Star edited out Duncan’s role, in its report, 13 July 1850, p.6. S. Neil, Public Meetings and How to Conduct Them (London: Houlston and Wright, 1868), p.17. For the strategy of disruption, see W.H. Fraser, Scottish Popular Politics: From Radicalism to Labour (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p.60; on Chartist disruption of London meetings, see A. Taylor, ‘Post-Chartism: Metropolitan Perspectives on the Chartist Movement in Decline 1848–80’, in M. Cragoe and A. Taylor, eds, London Politics, 1760–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p.85. The Divinearian, p.2. The Divinearian, p.2. Reasoner, n.s., 14 (October 1849), p.215. Possibly this was Isaac Sparkhall, silk and felt hat maker, see E. Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement,

NOTES

119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129

130 131

132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144

293

1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), p.193, but could also be an ‘E. Sparkhall’, who was presumably the man advertising ‘A Friendly Challenge to materialists and Infidels’, Reasoner, 10 June 1846, p.32; Brindley was presumably the Christian apologist and anti-Owenite, John Brindley. Mrs Elizabeth Fairlight Vaughan was a follower of Joanna Southcott, see G.J.R. Balleine, Past Finding Out: the Tragic Story of Joanna Southcott and her Successors (London: Macmillan, 1956). ‘Christian’ Smith was presumably Shepherd Smith, who became the editor of the Family Herald. So news of Duncan, reprinted in the Elgin Courant and Morayshire Advertiser, 24 May 1850, appeared. The Spectator 24 (1 November 1851), p.1044. Star of Freedom, 6 November 1852, p.201. W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (2 vols; London: Hutchinson, 1903), vol.2, p.314. The Divinearian, p.2. The Divinearian, p.2. The Divinearian, p.2; see The Examiner, 22 September 1849, p.605. The Examiner, 22 September 1849, p.605. ‘Internment of the Late Political Martyr Alexander Sharp [sic]’, Northern Star, 29 September 1849, p.8. Northern Star, 22 April 1848, p.5. On the politics of the ‘Chartist martyrs’ memorial, see P.A Pickering and A. Tyrrell, Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memory and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp.113–114. Sharpe had been arrested for sedition, presence at an unlawful assembly, and rioting, at Bonner’s Field, 4 June, government reporters having taken a verbatim report his provocative language, see The Spectator, 8 July 1848, p.651. The Divinearian, p.2. The newspaper report which mentions Lovett’s speech excludes reference to Duncan while noting a ‘scene of great confusion ensued’, see ‘Public Meeting of the People’s League’, The Examiner, 27 May 1848, p.347. D.W. Bartlett, ‘A reform meeting’, from New England Washingtonian, reprinted in The Spirit of the Age, New York, 1850, p.22. On Barmby’s impression of Burritt, see ‘Albert the Artizan; one of the French Provisional Government,’ Howitt’s Journal 3:67 (8 April 1848), pp.235–236. ‘The London Tavern’, Northern Star, 27 May 1848, p.8. Weekly Telegraph, 27 May 1848, p.43. D.W. Bartlett, The Spirit of the Age, New York, 1850, p.22. Bartlett published What I saw in London: or, Men and Things in The Great Metropolis (New York: Saxton, 1860). British Banner, 31 May 1848, p.9. Blackburn Standard, 2 August 1848 [p.2]. Morning Chronicle, 25 May 1848, p.2; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 28 May 1848, p.9. For criticism of Jones and O’Connorites, and allegations of forged tickets for admissions, see J.D. Collet’s letter, Reasoner 105 (31 May 1848), p.13. The Divinearian, p.2. Life and Struggles of William Lovett, vol.2, p.349. The Divinearian, p.5. ‘Praise to the Heroes’ appeared as ‘Poetry of Progress’ in the Reasoner, 20 August 1846, p.19, and also in Hymns and Anthems (London: C. Fox, 1845). ‘Sunday Balls’, Punch 14, 1848, p.33; Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement, p.59. Wellington’s private letter of 9 January 1847 was published in The Times, 5 January 1848, p.5. ‘National Defences’, The Standard, 20 January 1848, p.4. See also Daily News, 20 January 1848, p.2. The meeting took place on Wednesday 19 January 1848. For coverage of national defences in Northern Star, see 22 January 1848, p.3. The Divinearian, p.4. Stamford Mercury, 28 September 1849, p.4; Daily News, 21 September 1849, p.6; Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, p.3. A meeting at John Street Institution, 25 September 1849,

294

145 146 147 148 149 150 151

152

153 154 155 156 157 158

159 160 161 162 163 164

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS attended by Holyoake, O’Connor, Lloyd Jones and others, intended to memorialise the Queen for an amnesty on political prisoners. For instance Morning Star, 8 March 1845, issue 9, p.72. The Star was the last periodical Hetherington published. The Divinearian, p.2: Garrison; p.7: Hetherington. The Divinearian, p.7. See ‘The Life of Henry Hetherington. Abridged from the Éloge’, in G.J. Holyoake, ed., The Life and Character of Henry Hetherington (London: Watson, 1849). A biography and portrait appear in Reynolds’s Political Instructor, 2 February 1850. The Divinearian, p.7. On the funeral, see Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854, p.349. See Anon., A Short History and Description of the Ojibbeway Indians now on a Visit to England (London: 1844), from Pictorial Times, on a visit to Thames Tunnel: ‘The appearance of feathered heads, painted faces, bear-skin garments, and mocassined legs, in the classic locality of “Wapping Old Stairs,” created a general hubbub. Shops were deserted, tools and needles were thrown down, and a general rush attested that curiosity was in nowise wanting amongst the amphibious denizens of this aquatic neighbourhood.’ The Ojibway visited the Literary and Scientific Institution in March 1848, dancing for a paying audience, see ‘Utilitarian Record’, Reasoner, 1 March 1848, p.28. The speech quoted in Morning Post, 29 October 1850, p.3; see also John Bull, 2 November 1850 (describing Copway’s costume), p.700; Reynolds’s Weekly News, 3 November 1850, p.10 (where he is described as the ‘well-known poet’). For a report ignoring Duncan’s intervention, Bell’s Life in London, 3 November 1850, p.3; and downplaying his intervention, Daily News, 29 October 1850, p.3. The Journal of the American Temperance Union, 1 December 1850, ‘Great Temperance Demonstration at Drury Lane Theatre,’ p.181, also ignores the interlude. ‘Traits of a Temperance Demonstration’, The Spectator, 2 November 1850, pp.1045– 1046 [p.1046]. Hogg’s Weekly Instructor, 28 June 1845, p.288. See ‘Interior of the Thames Police Court – the magistrates administering relief to the poor of the district,’ Illustrated Times, 26 January 1861, for a later depiction. For the social control by Metropolitan Police of ‘all loose, idle and disorderly Persons’, and removal of street-located nuisances, see Goodway, London Chartism, pp.103–105. Morning Post, 30 January 1851, p.7. ‘J.W.’, ‘How I became a Chartist’, Bentley’s Miscellany 24 (1848) pp.101–106 [p.103]. For a rebuttal of the charge that the Chartists were the idle and most ignorant portion of the working class, see Joseph Barker’s reply to a letter by Thomas Colfox, in The Reformer’s Almanac (Wortley, 1848), pp.298–306. Morning Post, 15 February 1851, p.8. See P. Stanley, For Fear of Pain: British Surgery, 1790–1850 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), p.241; on penny-a-liner interest in fires, see G.A. Sala, Twice Round the Clock; or the Hours of the Day and Night in London (London: Houlston and Wright, 1859), p.353. Northern Star, 25 August 1849, p.6. See for instance, ‘The New Model Lodging Houses for Families’, People’s Press 2:27 (December 1848), pp.218–219. See J. Davis, ‘A Poor Man’s System of Justice’, p.331, on the relationship between magistrate and working-class clientele, in domestic disputes. In the evidence of S.G. Bucknall, 16 May 1851, before the Select Committee on Newspaper Stamps, it was asserted, ‘If the Committee were to look at the Weekly Dispatch 20 years ago its general character was very much worse than it is now then it was a so called radical almost a blasphemous scurrilous and contemptible paper but with an enormous circulation,’ see Weekly Dispatch, 15 June 1851, p.3.

NOTES

295

165 See Puppet-Show, 16 December 1848, p.154: ‘THE HIDDIOTIC NUZ. A seelex komppany of hasses is brynging out the Hiddiotic Nuz whych wyl maike Hengland spelle wrong in six lessons! Thys is gode nuz to ye poore! Subbskrypshons to bee sent to Jon Songeares, Hobscure Court.’ 166 Northern Star, 31 May 1851, p.3. 167 The United States Democratic Review 13:65, November 1843, p.458. The idea of the ‘crystal palace’ in poetry was not new in 1851. 168 ‘Helix’, ‘Art IV. Official Catalogue of the Industrial Exhibition. Spicer and Co., 29, New Bridge-street, Blackfriars’, Westminster Review, July 1851, pp.346–394 [p.375]. 169 Official Catalogue of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations (London: Spicer Brothers, 1851), pp.47, 49, 109; Guide to the Great Exhibition with a Plan of the Crystal Palace (London: G. Routledge, 1851), p.190. 170 ‘No-Popery Lectures’, The Examiner, 30 November 1850, p.770. His chapel provided a haven for locals offended by their Puseyite clergyman, see Western Times, 6 March 1852, p.6. 171 ‘Police’, The Standard, 17 May 1850, p.4. 172 The phrase ‘shabby-genteel,’ current from the 1750s, was applied to characters in Charles Dickens’ Sketches by ‘Boz,’ illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People (London: Macrone, 1836), e.g., Monthly Review 1:3 (March 1836), pp.350–357 [p.356]. 173 HO 107/1550, fol.30, p.15. 174 Morning Post, 13 June 1851, p.7, Morning Post, 31 May 1851, p.7. 175 Morning Post, 31 May 1851, p.7. 176 C. Smart, The Works of Horace, Translated Literally into English Prose: for the use of Those who are Desirous of Acquiring or Recovering a Competent Knowledge of the Latin Language. (Philadelphia: Hunt, 1850), p.356. ‘Aut insanit homo, aut versus facit,’ Horace had written: either the man is mad or he has turned into a poet. Barmby quotes this in The Madhouse, p.20. 177 Morning Post, 13 June 1851, p.7. The incident was reported in The Era (headline, ‘A Chartist in trouble’), The Standard, and provincial papers such as the Liverpool Mercury. In Leamington Spa Courier, 13 July 1850, p.1, it appeared as ‘Another Chartist in Trouble.— Duncan, the bearded Chartist poet’. 178 Lady’s Newspaper, 11 May 1850, p.266. 179 The Standard, 13 June 1851, p.1. 180 Morning Post, 13 June 1851, p.7. 181 Morning Post, 13 June 1851, p.7. 182 On the role of the poor law system, see E. Murphy, ‘The New Poor Law Guardians and the Administration of Insanity in East London, 1834–1844’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77:1 (Spring 2003), pp.45–74. 183 See Suzuki, Madness at Home.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Chapter 6. On Revolutions and Insanity

‘Songs for the Times. No.III. ‘Just, Let Well Alone, Boys.’ John Bull, 15 April 1848, p.246. Medical Times 20 (7 July to 29 December 1849), p.389. J. Janin, Balzac, et al, Pictures of the French: A Series of Literary and Graphic Delineations of French Character (London: W.S. Orr, 1840), p.13. Morning Post, 20 January 1853, p.8. London Standard, 20 January 1853, p.4. For example, Leeds Times, 29 January 1853, p.7; Bradford Observer, 27 January 1853, p.5, Derby Mercury, 26 January 1853, p.4. E. Royle, Revolutionary Britannia: Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp.131–132.

296 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19

20 21

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS Morning Post, 20 January 1853, p.8. For the letting of rooms, see London Standard, 20 January 1853, p.4. For middle-class horror of the asylum, see E. Showalter, The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (1985; London: Virago, 1987), p.27, citing Andrew Wynter, ‘Lunatic Asylums’, Quarterly Review 101 (April 1857), pp.353–393. Statistics from C. Knight, Pictorial Half-hours of London Topography (London: C. Knight, 1851), p.95. See R. Hunter and I. Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor: 1851 Colney Hatch Asylum – Friern Hospital 1973 (London: Dawsons, 1974), p.26. See, as introduction, P. Bartlett, The Poor Law of Lunacy (London: Leicester University Press, 1999). Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology, vol.2 (1849), p.490. The Critic, 1 June 1852, p.298. See the account of the new asylum, in Daily News, 3 July 1851, p.6. The contrast with New Bedlam is in Hunter and I. Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor. Wynter, ‘Lunatic Asylums’, p.367. D.E.B. Weiner, ‘The erasure of history: from Victorian asylum to “Princess Park Manor”’, chapter 9 in D. Arnold and A. Ballantyne, Architecture as Experience: Radical Change in Spatial Practice (London: Routledge, 2004), pp.195–196; see also Hunter and I. Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, pp.31–33, which also notes the faulty sewerage. Showalter, The Female Malady, p.28; A.R. Scull, ‘The Domestication of Madness’, Medical History 27 (1983), pp.233–248. Showalter, The Female Malady, p.24; Hunter and Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, p.195, citing W.C. Hood, First Medical Report of the Male Side (Colney Hatch Asylum, 1852). For the inmate who believed himself to be the Palace, see Andrew Smith Flintoff’s case, reported in The Examiner, 12 June 1852, p.380. ‘Lunatic Asylums’, The Supplement to the Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol.1 (London: C. Knight, 1846), p.234. The Half-yearly Abstracts, of the Medical Sciences: Being a Digest of British and Continental Medicine, and of the Progress of Medicine and the Collateral Sciences (London: J. Churchill, 1853), p.290. The London Metropolitan Archive includes the asylum’s admissions registers from 1851, and burial registers – unfortunately the register for Duncan’s period does not survive. There are no case books from the period before 1915. See quotation from Owen’s ‘Address to the Disciples of the Rational Society’, no.32, New Moral World, 11 June 1842, p.401. ‘Equality and Communism versus Inequality and Competition’, New Moral World, 24 July 1841, p.29. New Moral World, 9 March 1844, p.293. J. Melling, ‘Accommodating Madness. New Research in the social history of insanity and institutions’, in B. Forsythe and J. Melling, eds, Insanity, Institutions and Society, 1800– 1914 (1999; Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p.12. Daily News, 3 July 1851, p.6. W. Kidd, ‘A Home of Clouds and Sunshine; or, notes of a recent visit to Colney Hatch’, National Magazine 1:5 (March 1857), pp.351–352. See also, ‘Christmas at Colney Hatch,’ Leisure Hour, 11 December 1856, pp.798–799. ‘A Visit to the Fancy Fair at Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum’, Eliza Cook’s Journal 14 October 1854, pp.390–392, [p.390] (of a visit 22 July 1854, i.e., after Duncan’s death). The Lancet, 29 March 1845, p.353; quoting from Earle, ‘The Poetry of Insanity’, The American Journal of Insanity, vol.1, January 1845, pp.193–224 [p.197]. ‘Lunatic Life and Literature’, Leisure Hour 247, 18 September 1856, pp.598–600 [p.599]; ‘Review of W.R. Wilde, The Closing Years of Dean Swift’s Life’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 7, 1 July 1849, pp.349–372 [p.367]. See B. Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

NOTES 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49

297

‘Crazy or Lovesick’, The Opal. A Monthly Periodical of the State Lunatic Asylum 4 (Utica: New York, 1854), pp.333–334. The following journals were produced in British lunatic asylums, and listed in ‘Treatment of the Insane’, Scottish Review, July 1855, pp.249–261: The New Moon or Crichton Royal Institution Literary Register (Dumfries: Crichton Press); The Morningside Mirror and The Gartnavel Gazette or a Word from the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum (Edinburgh: Royal Asylum Press); Songs in the Night composed in the Crichton Royal Institution and printed at the Crichton Press (1854); Crichton Institution Biographies; Or, Memoirs of Mad Poets, Mad Philosophers, Mad Kings, & Mad Churls; ‘Leaves from an Autobiography’, Hogg’s Instructor, a series of papers published in the beginning of 1851, reprinted as Scenes from the Life of a Sufferer being the Narrative of a Residence in Morningside Asylum; All Sorts containing compositions in verse including the heroic sentimental and comic (Edinburgh: Royal Edinburgh Asylum, 1855). See also ‘What Lunatic Asylums Really Are’, Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, 25 October 1856, pp.262–263. ‘Fifteenth Annual Report of the Crichton Royal Institution for Lunatics, Dumfries’, Glasgow Medical Journal 3:2 (1856), p.377. On the pathology of the early nineteenth-century social reformer and thinker of the Bentham, Saint-Simon, Comte and Fourier class, see W. Stark, ‘The Psychology of Social Messianism’, Social Research 25:1 (January 1958), pp.145–157. In ‘Hints for the Hustings’, Blackwood’s Magazine 48:299 (September 1840), pp.289–315, reviewing the work, summarised Carlyle’s view as ‘oppression makes wise men mad’ (a quotation from the Book of Ecclesiastes), see p.313. ‘The Heart of Man is Burning’, The Divinearian, p.5. J. Cumming, Lectures delivered before the Young Men’s Christian Association, 1845–1846– 1864–1865 (London: James Nisbet, 1864), p.70. W. Gresley, Clement Walton: or, The English Citizen (London: J. Burns, 1840), p.61. ‘Commission of Lunacy Extraordinary’, Punch, 22 April 1848, p.169. See C.M. Burnett, Insanity Tested by Science: and Shown to be a Disease Rarely Connected with Permanent Organic Lesion of the Brain. And on that Account far more Susceptible of Cure than has Hitherto Been Supposed (London: S. Highley, 1848), p.1. The Lancet, 31 August 1839, p.848. ‘Criminal Jurisprudence in Relation to Mental Organization’, The Spectator, 7 November 1840, p.1075. R. Poole, Memoranda regarding the Royal Lunatic Asylum, Infirmary, and Dispensary, of Montrose (Montrose: J.D. Nichol, 1841), p.184. R. Druitt, ‘Original Communications. Clinical Notes of The Varieties of Imperfect Speech Produced by Brain Disease’, Medical Times and Gazette, 21 January 1871, pp.66– 67 [p.66], reporting a case from 30 March 1849. But during McNaughten’s trial at the Central Criminal Court in March 1843, Alexander Cockburn, QC for the prisoner, argued McNaughten had strongly condemned radicals and Chartists: London Standard, 4 March 1843, p.3; Morning Chronicle, 6 March 1843, p.3. See also Richard Moran, ‘Daniel McNaughtan, (1802/3–1865)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, January 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/39433, accessed 20 November 2013], for the suggestion via recent evidence, that McNaughten was politically inspired (perhaps even paid to attempt the assassination of Peel) and was feigning insanity. ‘Insanity’, Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 11 (London: C. Knight, 1838), p.486. J.M. Pagan, The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (London: Ball, Arnold, 1840) p.42; see also pp.50–51, ‘we have seen the whole community in a state of excitement, on account of political events’. W.F. Cumming, Notes on Lunatic Asylums in Germany: and other Parts of Europe (London: J. Churchill, 1852), p.22.

298 50 51

52 53 54

55

56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS London Medical Gazette or Journal of Practical Medicine, 24 May 1850, p.916, also reproduced in Atlas, 18 May 1850. C. Caldwell, Thoughts on Physical Education, and The True Mode of Improving the Condition of Man, by Charles Caldwell, M.D., with a Recommendatory Preface by George Combe (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, 1844), the second British edition, edited by Robert Knox. See New Moral World, 18 May 1844, p.375. J.C. Bucknill, and D.H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine: Containing the History, Nosology, Description, Statistics, Diagnosis, Pathology, and Treatment of Insanity. With an Appendix of Cases (Philadelphia: Richard and Lea, 1858), pp.258–259. Kidd’s Own Journal, 23 October 1852, p.260; London Journal of Medicine, March 1851, p.273. Hunter and Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, p.192; a point disputed by M.A. Shepherd, Labour History Review 34 (1977), pp.61–68 [p.65], ‘Asylum doctors logged “Socialist” in the box for “religious affiliation” from time to time; but never, in any of the records I have seen, as a cause for insanity. The nearest approach to that position was in 1849 when the Paris Academy of Medicine reflecting on the influx of new patients in 1848, agreed that “revolutionary excitement” was “a powerful cause of insanity”.’ For William Wilberforce as mad, see C. Petley, ‘“Devoted Islands” and “That Madman Wilberforce”: British Proslavery Patriotism during the Age of Abolition’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 39:3 (2011), pp.393–415 [p.402]. During the first French Revolution the pioneering psychiatrist Philippe Pinel linked revolution to mental illness; in the United States Dr Benjamin Rush diagnosed a ‘revolutiona’, B. Reiss, Theaters of Madness, pp.162–163, citing Medical Inquiries and Observations, Upon the Diseases of the Mind (1812). Lamartine commented on the madness of M.J. Châlier in The History of the Girondists, translated and reprinted in Reynolds’s Miscellany, 17 May 1851, p.267. For treatment of the psychological dimension and the language of mental illness in relation to revolution, J-C. Sournia, ‘The French revolution and mental troubles, 1789–1799’, Vesalius 3:2 (December 1997), pp.67–72 (not consulted in this study); R. Spang, ‘Paradigms and Paranoia: How Modern Is the French Revolution?’ American Historical Review 108 (2003), pp.119–147 [pp.127–128]; but also see B.M. Shapiro, Traumatic Politics: The Deputies and the King in the Early French Revolution (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), p.79, note 16. J.E. Esquirol, Mental Maladies: a Treatise on Insanity. Translated from the French, with Additions, by E.K. Hunt, M.D. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845), p.45. His tabulation of 169 mental cases traced 33 to political excitement, the highest category, see The Medico-chirurgical Review and Journal of Practical Medicine (New York), 1 October 1839, p.552. Esquirol, Mental Maladies, p.44. Anon., Familiar Views of Lunacy and Lunatic Life (London: Parker, 1850), p.129. See review of L. Rollin, De la Décadence de l’Angleterre, in Dublin Review 29:58 (December 1850), pp.271–287. See Plotz, The Crowd: British Literature and Public Politics, pp.50–54. ‘The Year of Reaction’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 67:411 (January 1850), p.1. See ‘The Revival of the Chartist Agitation’, Morning Post, 17 January 1849, p.4. ‘Notices of recent Publications’, English Review 9, March 1848, p.195. H. Colman, European Life and Manners; in Familiar Letters to Friends (2nd edn, 2 vols; Boston: Little, London: Petherham, 1849), vol.1, p.354. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism, p.169. Northern Star, 22 December 1849, p.4; see also ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’; Northern Star, 7 July 1849, p.7. The Republican (London: J. Watson, 1848), p.86.

NOTES 68

69 70 71

72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

299

See for instance the comment in the novel Hidden Fire, by Frances Brough, set in a Welsh colliery and with a Chartist sub-plot (London: Tinsley, 1867), vol.1, p.118; on the Cuffey poem, see the anonymous illustrated verse sold for half a guinea, The Political Life of Cornelius Cuffey Esq, Patriot &c, &c (London: Reeve and Co., 1848) reprinted in M. Wood, ed., The Poetry of Slavery: An Anglo-American Anthology 1764–1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p.348. Reasoner 3:188 (2 January 1850), p.419 noted (from C. Dent), ‘Were the Chartist body ever made aware of the fact that their enthusiastic associate, Cuffey, became the hero and subject of a mock-heroic poem, with six or eight coloured plates and printed in 4to. (sometime subsequent to the 10th of April)? This book, I believe, was privately sold at a guinea a copy: and I will not take upon me to say that a copy handsomely got up was not presented to an ‘illustrious personage,’ for her entertainment. Not more, I think than a hundred copies were printed.’ C.L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) wrote ‘Cuffey, the Chartist’, in his Rectory Umbrella, see R. Reichertz, Making of the Alice Books: Lewis Carroll’s Uses of Earlier Children’s Literature (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), p.29. Kingsley, Alton Locke (New York: Macmillan, 1887), p.47. See Westmorland Gazette, 29 April 1848, p.1. ‘Art.IV. Politics and Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology 3:9, 1850, 1 January 1850, pp.31–40. The essay was ‘Influence des événements et des commotions politiques sur le developpement de la folie’, the extract is from p.33. See also Dr Brierre de Boismont’s ‘On the influence of the Revolution of February and the Insurrection of June 1848 on developing Insanity in Paris’, which was translated into English and published in the Lancet, 5 August 1848, pp.157–158, see p.158: ‘It has long been maintained, that madness often bears the imprint of pride. I declare that I never saw this fact forcibly borne out as with the patients whom the revolution of February drove mad; particularly those who, imbued with socialist, communist, and regenerating ideas, believed themselves destined to play a conspicuous part in the world.’ This extract was reprinted in an essay on ‘The French Republic’, Westminster Review 50:1 (October 1848), pp.188–236 [p.232]. ‘Art. IV. Politics and Insanity’, Journal of Psychological Medicine, p.34. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854, p.404. Parliamentary Papers 1841 (339) V, Sixth Report of the Inspectors appointed under the provisions of the Acts 5 & 6 Will.IV.c.38, to visit the different prisons of Great Britain. II. Northern and Eastern District, 24 April 1840 (Preston County House of Correction), p.56. J.D. Burns, The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (1855; London: Tweedie, 1856), p.137. ‘Wandsworth.– A Mad Chartist’, Morning Post, 2 September 1850. The case of Joseph Foster, reported in Bradford Observer, 21 December 1848, p.6. ‘A Mad Chartist’, The Hull Packet and East Riding Times, 12 July 1850, p.7; ‘Guildhall, The Mad Chartist’, The Era, 14 July 1850, p.14; John Bull, 15 July 1850, p.447. At least Steve Poole thinks he was evidently insane, see The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects, p.199. The Newspaper, 24 June 1848, p.208; ‘Sketches about Town. No.8’, Dundee Courier, 21 November 1849 [p.2]. ‘Persecution’, Morning Post, 2 March 1850, p.3. Anon, ‘The Six Ps’, Dublin University Magazine 27:162 (June 1846), pp.665–674 [p.671]. See M. Chase, Chartism: A New History. See ‘Arrest of Mr Feargus O’Connor’, Northern Star, 14 February 1852, p.3, reporting his arrest for disturbance in Lyceum Theatre, beating a tattoo and jumping to the time of the band, and assaulting a police sergeant. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854, p.390. Leicester Chronicle, 12 June 1852, p.2. Daily News, 13 April 1853, p.6. Morning Post, 13 April 1853, p.4; reported in journals such as Huddersfield Chronicle, 16 April 1853, p.7.

300 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

105

106

1 2

3

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS For Smith O’Brien as ‘a poet among rebels and rebel among poets’, see ‘Smith O’Brien’s poetry’, Puppet-Show, 1848, p.55. J. McCarthy, The Story of the People of England in the Nineteenth Century, Part II. 1832–1898 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1899), p.100. E.D. Jones, ‘Chartism: A Chapter in English Industrial History’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 12:2 (1899), pp.509–529 [p.528]. D. Vincent, ed., The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy. James Dawson Burns (London: Europa, 1978), p.23. D.J.V. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London: Allen Lane, 1975), p.22. Northern Star, 6 December 1851, p.1 (which omits this passage). Holyoake wished it inserted in Reynolds’s Newspaper and Notes for the People too – it was reprinted in full as letter ‘to the localities’ in The Leader, 6 December, p.1167. Indeed G.J. Holyoake, in Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1892), vol.1, p.227, remembered this as ‘the last public dinner to Feargus O’Connor at Highbury Barns on the night when O’Connor first displayed a failure of intellect’. Ernest Jones’ Notes to the People, p.955, published Lloyd Jones’ critique of Ernest Jones, apropos of the St Martin’s Hall Financial Reform Conference, from the Glasgow Sentinel, for disturbing public meetings, ‘they whistle, or sing, or shout … they must have fuss, noise, and riot’ and giving ammunition to the anti-reformers. The Era, 3 February 1850, p.6. Kidd, ‘A Home of Clouds and Sunshine,’ p.351. Morning Star, 1 March 1845, issue 8, p.60. Wise, Inconvenient People, p.89. ‘Lunatics Bill’, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, vol.122, HL, 17 June 1852, col.831. Parliamentary Debates, HL, 17 June 1852, col.832. The Patriot, 11 July 1850, p.437. The Patriot, 15 July 1850, p.444. Morning Post, 12 July 1850, p.5. Pate figures in a recent study of attempts on Queen Victoria’s life, P.T. Murphy, Shooting Victoria: Madness, Mayhem and the Modernisation of the Monarchy (London: Head of Zeus, 2013). The report on Pate in John Bull, 6 July 1850 is immediately followed by an item on a ‘Mad Chartist’. In ‘England versus Popery,’ Dublin University Magazine 14:83 (November 1839), pp.559– 576 [p.575] the author notes the public prints launching out against Chartists as a pack of mad dogs. The image of the mad dog appeared in ‘Moral Force Chartism – No.II. re-enter Chartist and Whig’, Politics for the People 11, 1 July 1848, p.179 in the dialogue between Whig and Chartist, where popular pressure in Paris and elsewhere was equated with trying to smother government like one would a mad dog. Pugin wrote of his desire to shoot Chartists like rats or mad dogs, see P. Atterbury, ed., A.W.N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p.55. Weisser, April 10, p.37, citing Weekly Dispatch, 11 June 1848, p.281. William Jones was told of the public response to the cry of ‘mad dog’ by Baron Gurney, at his trial for sedition, in Leicester, see Spectator, 1 April 1843, p.295.

Conclusion

J.C. Pritchard, Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1835). Hunter and Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, p.195, citing W.C. Hood, First Medical Report of the Male Side (Colney Hatch Asylum, 1852), has ‘erroneous views in religion’ listed under ‘moral’ with 3 cases. Epilepsy was identified in 14 of the physical cases, the third after congenital deficiency (16) and intemperance and debauchery (57). Medical Times, 10 August 1850, p.162.

NOTES 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20

301

J.T. Arlidge, On the State of Lunacy and the Legal Provision for the Insane (London: J. Churchill, 1859), p.59. See G.E. Berrios, ‘Epilepsy and Insanity During the Early 19th Century. A Conceptual History’, Archives of Neurology 41 (September 1984), pp.978–981. The Lancet 1:6 (New York edition, June 1852), p.468, reporting discussion by the Medical Society of London, 3 April 1852. Davey, formerly of the Ceylon Civil (medical) Service, published On the Nature, and Proximate Cause, of Insanity (London: Churchill, 1853). He left the Asylum in 1853. J. Shew, The Hydropathic Family Physician (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1857), p.196, based on J.M. Good, Study of Medicine (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy: 1822). Hunter and Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, p.206, p.217. See The Builder 9, 5 July 1851, p.416. Hunter and Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, p.42. ‘Lunatic Asylums’, Quarterly Review 101:202 (April 1857), pp.353–393 [p.367]. London Metropolitan Archives, H12/CH/B13/1, Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum Colney Hatch, Casebook, Male Side, No.1, entry numbered 140 (corrected from 240); Hunter and Macalpine, Psychiatry for the Poor, p.200, and p.238, which notes the autopsy findings were printed extensively, for the first dozen years, in Annual Reports of the Committee of Visitors of the County Lunatic Asylum at Colney Hatch, produced for the magistrates of Middlesex at the January quarter session e.g., The Second Annual Report of the Committee of Visitors, of the County Lunatic Asylum, at Colney Hatch. January Quarter Session, 1853 (London: J.T. Norris, 1853). Tyerman came to believe, as Hunter and Macalpine quote, following his numerous autopsies, that insanity was the ‘mental expression of cerebral disease’, p.243. One presumes Duncan’s autopsy was carried out with the permission of his relatives. W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, vol.2, p.310. Alexander Boyd Duncan is listed in the census as a scholar at Robert Gordon’s Hospital in Aberdeen; another son is probably the Charles Duncan listed as a lithographer, born in England about 1834, living with his mother Ann Duncan, an ‘annuitant’, at 30 Belmont Street, Aberdeen in 1851, and who joined the Phonetic Society in 1852 (Phonetic Journal, 10 January 1852). Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861, RG 9/271, fol.3, p.2. Morning Chronicle, 11 February 1857, p.8; The Times, 11 February 1857, p.12. The Times carried an advertisement for the valuable freehold wharf, dwelling houses, shops and premises, from Norton, Hoggart and Trist, from 332 to 335. J. McCabe, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake (2 vols; London: Watts, 1908), vol.1, p.113. Review in Morning Post, 4 December 1843, p.14. See W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p.331, citing D.M. Moir, Sketches of the Poetical Literature of the Past Half-Century (1851) p.161: ‘Each beardless bardling, whether baker’s, butcher’s, or barber’s apprentice had his hair cut and his shirt-collar turned down à la Byron.’ Moir observed of the Childe Harold phenomenon, ‘It was up with the crescent and down with the cross and in as far as scribbling at least went every poet was a detester of port and pork and a renegade from all things Christian.’ See also, citing St Clair, D. Felluga, The Perversity of Poetry: Romantic Ideology and the Popular Male Poet of Genius (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). A story in Oddfellows Magazine (1841), p.233, imagines an apprentice apothecary published in the local press as a poet, similarly garbed. ‘Letters from the Continent. By a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge’, Museum of Foreign Literature, Science and Art (Philadelphia: E. Littell, 1841) n.s., 13 (January–April 1841), pp.63–72 [p.66], in March 1839. The shirts made à la Hamlet with open collar and breast, and uncut hair, were adopted by Jean Paul Richter, see the review of Jean Paul

302

21 22

23

24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS Friederich Richter. Ein Biographischer Commentar zu dessen Werken in Dublin Review 17, August 1840, pp.156–189 [p.166]. Punch, 19 May 1849, p.219. Punch, 11 March 1854, p.97; J. Wilson, Noctes Ambrosianae (4 vols; Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1855), vol.2, 22 (December 1829) p.277. See also, for another suggestion of prissy or girlish manners, the tailor’s apprentice Francis Adolphus Walker, before the Police Court, Marlborough Street, in Morning Chronicle, 30 June 1834. ‘The soi-disant Sir William Courtenay’, Liverpool Mercury, 8 June 1838. George Dawson, pro-Chartist, is identified as a man with centre-parted hair in ‘Our pen-and-ink portrait gallery’, Star of Freedom, 5 June 1852, p.3. See Cantaburiensis, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Sir William Courtenay: Knight of Malta, Alias John Nichols Tom, Formerly Spirit Merchant and Maltster, of Truro in Cornwall: Being a Correct Detail of All the Incidents of His Extraordinary Life, from His Infancy to the Dreadful Battle at Bossenden Wood ... Concluding with an Accurate Account of the Trial of the Rioters at the Maidstone Assize (Canterbury: J. Hunt, 1838). [E.L. Linton] ‘Sentiment and Action’, Household Words 35 (1855), ch.3, p.94. See C.E. Sears, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), p.19. See the penny tract Rejected Address from the Concordists Society at Ham Common to the London Peace Society, presented at their Convention, June 24, 1843, at the Freemason’s Tavern. And Temper and Diet (Extracted from the New Age, July 1, 1843), printed by the Concordium Press and published by Robert Buchanan, 3, Holywell Street. See Blood Money; and The Divinearian, p.8. A cheap edition of Shelley’s Essays and Letters was published by Moxon at 5s, a single edition of his Poems, Essays and Letters from Abroad was published at 15s in 1849. A single edition Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared in 1847; James Watson published an edition of Queen Mab in 1850. See D. Duff, Romance and Revolution: Shelley and the Politics of a Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), ch.2, ‘Romance and revolution in Queen Mab’. On the description of Queen Mab in relation to Owenites, see C.S. Middleton, Shelley and His Writings (2 vols; London: T.C. Newby, 1858), vol.1, p.257. For the later use of Shelley, see ‘Shelley among the Socialists’ in E. Miller, Slow Print: Literary Radicalism and Late Victorian Print Culture (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2013), p.149. Thus Punch, recounting in verse the ‘Nelson Column Émeute’, 12 April 1848, p.110. A Scourge for a Gag and The Murdered Chartist, which noted this phrase appeared in The Times and Chronicle, ‘in common with the newspapers generally’. G.J. Holyoake, ‘A Dead Movement which learned to Live Again’, The Contemporary Review, August 1876, pp.444–461. Stoll, The Great Delusion, quoting a letter from Stollmeyer to Samuel Schaeffer Rex, 1853: Rex had been Etzler’s agent. Of the promoters of Etzlerism, only Stollmeyer is immortalised in portraiture. See also: http://www.culture.gov.tt/rememberwheninstitute/uploads/file/books/Selections%2 0from%20the%20diary%20of%20Charles%20Stollmeyer.pdf, The Diary of Charles Conrad Stollmeyer, pp.1–2. In the 1850s Stollmeyer was Lord Dundonald’s agent, exploiting the peer’s land on which the lake was situated, see N.S. Manross, ‘Notice of the Pitch Lake of Trinidad’, American Journal of Science and Arts n.s., 10:59 (September 1855), pp.153–160. Dietetic Reformer, 1870, pp.41–42. Peace Society, reprinted in the Royal Cornwall Gazette, 4 September 1890, p.3. M. Curti, Peace or War. The American Struggle 1636–1936 (New York: Norton, 1936), p.138. Herald of Peace (London) 1889, p.324; The Peacemaker and the Court of Arbitration (Philadelphia) 8 (1889), pp.191–193 (p.193), which also reproduced a portrait of Stollmeyer; his obituary is in The Peacemaker 25:2 (February 1906), pp.25–26. The Standard, 5 August 1892, p.2. See also A. De Verteuil, The Germans in Trinidad (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Litho Press, 1994).

NOTES 38 39 40 41

42 43

44

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53

54 55

303

As an aside, the Stollmeyer estate at Santa Cruz on the island provided a location for John Logie Baird’s experimentation in television. King, Bliss not Riches, p.4. Journal of Society of Arts and Sciences, 1 February 1856, pp.163–178 [p.176]; see also Farmer’s Magazine, March 1856, p.255; The Engineer, 8 February 1856, pp.63–64. See summaries of letters in the Robert Owen Collection in the National Co-operative Archive, Manchester, from James Rigby to Robert Owen, GB 1499 ROC/17/17/67, 15 July 1855. The assessment of Atkins as promoter of science and progress is in Alexander Campbell’s letter to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/32 25 February 1855. J. Shaw, A Ramble Through the United States, Canada, and the West Indies (London: Hope, 1856), p.273. ‘Panorama of Creation’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 8 July 1855. See summaries of letters in the Robert Owen Collection in the National Co-operative Archive, from Thomas Atkins to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/1/44/3, GB 1499 ROC/1/44/4, and Frederick Atkins to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/1/44/2. On the panorama, see Alexander Campbell to Atkins, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/19, 30 December 1854. On the village, Campbell to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/23, 26 October 1854; on the poem, see GB 1499 ROC/26/26/1, 11 February 1852. On Atkins as a provincial apostle, see Campbell to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/34, 13 March 1855. See Robert Owen’s Great Preliminary Meeting 3rd edn, p.xi, as cited in W.L. Sargant, Robert Owen, and His Social Philosophy (London: Smith, Elder, 1860), p.363, ‘For the side-scenes, Mr. Atkins had painted eight columns, “to exhibit an epitome of the creation of the world from its commencement, step by step, through all its gradations to the present time, … showing with how much ease, by adopting Mr. Owen’s and Mr. Pemberton’s principles of education from birth by the eye and ear, all useful and real knowledge may be now given to all who shall be placed within these new rational conditions.”’ London Investigator, February 1855, p.163. On Atkins’ model town, see T.A. Markus, Buildings and Power: Freedom and Control in the Origin of Modern Building Types (1993; London: Routledge, 2013), p.292. Illustrated London News, 6 January 1855, p.10. See R. Pemberton, The Science of Mind-formation, and the Process of the Reproduction of Genius Elaborated (1858), p.79. R.D. Altick, refers to the panorama in The Shows of London (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1978), p.489. As reported in Reasoner and London Tribune, 1 July 1855, p.111. London Investigator, September 1855, p.95. On his lecturing style, see ‘Panorama of Creation’, Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 8 July 1855. See Era, 8 July 1855, p.11; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 8 July 1855, p.8; Daily News, 29 June 1855, p.1, Oxford Journal, 19 May 1855, p.5, and 4 August 1855, p.5; Herts Guardian, 26 June 1855 [p.3]; Birmingham Gazette, 1 October 1855 [p.3]; Campbell to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/45, 11 November 1855; James Rigby to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/17/17/76, 23 September 1855. See Campbell to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/36, 2 April 1855; and draft letter to Palmerston from Owen, GB 1499 ROC/19/7/10, 14 September 1855. On Palmerston’s response to the Panorama (and close description of the exhibition and the lack of press interest), see Shaw, A Ramble, p.273. Summary of letter in the Robert Owen Collection in the National Co-operative Archive, from Thomas Atkins to Owen, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/51, 7 February 1856. The Socialist and former Concordist Campbell was briefly employed by Atkins, see GB 1499 ROC/3/5/59, 19 July 1856, Campbell to Owen. ‘Fourier and the Phalansterians’, Christian Remembrancer, p.33. For Doherty’s letter to Robert Owen from Paris, see the summary of correspondence with Mrs Wheeler, in the Robert Owen Collection, GB 1499 ROC/4/28/1, 7 May 1848; on his subsequent work, see Westminster Review 55:2 (April 1879), p.541.

304 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63

64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS See Reasoner 7:184 (1849; no.23, new series), pp.364–365; for his French, see A.V. Kirwan, Modern France: Its Journalism, Literature and Society (London: Jackson, Walford and Hodder, 1863), p.78; Spectator, 4 April 1868, p.410. Revue Spiritualiste 2, 1859, p.435; M. Conway, Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1882), p.272 (recollections of Barmby), and Conway’s comments as London correspondent of New York Tribune, reprinted as ‘An Interesting Gathering of Friends of Progress’, The Leader, 29 December 1866, p.372. Doherty was known to American reformers such as Emerson and Margaret Fuller, through The Phalanx: he was correspondent for the New York Tribune and contributed to La Démocratie Pacifique with the American Fourierist Albert Brisbane. On Wallscourt, see J. Cunningham, ‘Lord Wallscourt’, Journal of Galway Archaeological and Historical Society 57 (2005), pp.90–112. M. Howitt, An Autobiography (2 vols; London: Isbister, 1889), vol.2, p.66. Western Times, 11 June 1853, p.8. For continued links with radicals, see W.J. Linton being offered the use of his pulpit: Linton, Memories, p.172. He was chairman of a Lancaster Anti-Capital Punishment Society, see Kendal Mercury, 6 February 1858, p.5. The description of his county appears in ‘Love Lane’, in Howitt’s Journal 1 (1847), p.279. Holyoake, History of Co-operation, vol.1, p.237. On the League, see G. Claeys, Citizens and Saints, p.267. Advertisement, reproduced in The Handbook for Advertisers and Guide to Advertising: Containing Hints & Warnings to Advertisers, Rules for Advertising, Instructions for Drawing Advertisements and Classified Lists of the London and Provincial Journals, with the Character and Amount of their Circulations, Charges for Advertising, &c., and a List of Magazines Admitting Advertisement (London: E. Wilson, 1854), p.15. The Athenaeum, 31 March 1866, p.433. Notes and Queries, 9 August 1856, p.104. On Lotsky, see The Carlyle Letters Online, ed., B.E. Kinser (Duke University Press, 2007), Thomas Carlyle to John Forster, 28 July 1842; DOI: 10.1215/lt-18420728-TC-JF-01 [accessed 22 October 2013] (and The Collected Letters, Duke University Press, vol.14: pp.242–244). Home Links (London: Andreas Gottschling), no.1, February 1898. I am grateful to Robert Patten for this suggestion. I owe this detail to research by Arthur Cunningham on books acquired at auction in Yorkshire. Some of the works in the lot were stamped with the legend ‘Reresby Sitwell | Renishaw Hall | Taken from | Montegufoni 1973’. ‘Man made to rejoice. Conclusion’, Flowers and Fruits, p.9. It may be charged that I underplay Duncan’s status as an Owenite-inspired poet, given his association with socialism, but the press, and his own publications, made his poetic association with Chartism. For Owenite poetry, see Kalim, The Social Orpheus, ch.6. Puppet-Show, ‘Almanack’ for 1849. ‘A Serious Lecture on Broad Grins. Respectfully Addressed to the House of Commons’, Punch, 22 April 1848, p.165. Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature, p.225. Cheltenham Free Press, 8 April 1843, p.110; Flowers and Fruits, p.58. The ocean as emblem of eternity was not a new idea, with seventeenth century instances – see The Whole Works of the Reverend John Flavel (2 vols; London: Midwinter, 1740), vol.2, p.318. It is possible that Duncan was familiar with the essay by the American writer, Francis W.P. Greenwood, ‘Religion of the Sea,’ which was mentioned in a review, The Miscellaneous Writings of F.W.P. Greenwood, DD (Boston: Little and Brown, 1846), in the Unitarian Christian Reformer, p.172. Possibly too, he recalled Shelley’s 10-line ‘Time’, in which waves are years and Time is an Ocean, although Duncan’s verse was rather more upbeat than Shelley’s, which emphasised woe, and inhospitable or terrible circumstances.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Archives The National Archives, Kew Metropolitan Police, MEPO 2/64 Return of the number, age and name of prisoners apprehended for riotous conduct etc., in Trafalgar Square (A Division 9 March 1848). Metropolitan Police, MEPO 2/66 Statements relating to Chartist disturbances at Clerkenwell Green, 1848. Home Office, HO 45 /1609 Material relating to emigration to Venezuela. London Metropolitan Archives All Hallows London Wall, Registers of Baptism. Draft minutes of the Visiting Justices of the House of Correction, Cold Bath Fields, MA/G/CBF/018, 14 January 1848–9 November 1849. Middlesex Sessions of the Peace, Court Bonds to Keep the Peace, MJ/R/P/027/098, August 1848. H12/CH/B13/1, Middlesex County Lunatic Asylum Colney Hatch, Casebook, Male Side, No.1, entry numbered 140 (corrected from 240). Index of Wills and Administrations, National Probate Calendar. Census Returns of England and Wales, 1851 Census Returns of England and Wales, 1861 Primary material published online

Databases of digitised nineteenth-century material Ballads Online (University of Oxford) ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk

306

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British Historic Newspapers http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/‎ Central Criminal Court. Sessions’ Paper. Ninth session, Held July 3 rd, 1848. Minutes of Evidence (London: Hebert, 1848), p.391, 17 June 1848, trial of Alexander Sharpe, accessed via: Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.0, 08 October 2013), July 1848, trial of Alexander Sharpe (t18480703-1712). 19th Century British Library Newspapers http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/ 19th Century UK Periodicals. Series I. New Readerships (Gale) Economist Historical Archive, 1843 – 2003 http://www.tlemea.com/economist/home.asp Illustrated London News Historical Archive 1842 – 2003 (Gale) Making of the Modern World: The Goldsmiths’-Kress Library of Economic Literature, 14501850 (Gale) Nineteenth Century Collections Online: British Politics and Society (Gale) Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition http://www.ncse.ac.uk/index.html NewspaperArchive.Com http://newspaperarchive.com/advancedsearch ProQuest British Periodicals http://search.proquest.com/britishperiodicals ProQuest Historical Newspapers ProQuestPeriodicals Archive Online The Times Digital Archive (Gale)

Other primary material accessed via copies or summaries published online

Jane Carlyle to Lady Ashburton, 11 June 1848, ‘The Carlyle Letters Online’ (The Carlyle Letters 23, pp.44-46), DOI: 10.215/lt-18480611-JWC-LA-01. ‘The Diary of Charles Conrad Stollmeyer’, published at: http://www.culture.gov.tt/rememberwheninstitute/uploads/file/books/Selection s%20from%20the%20diary%20of%20Charles%20Stollmeyer.pdf Journal für Buchdruckerkunst, Schriftgiesserei und die verwandte Facher, Berlin 1843, published at: http://www.sciencephoto.com/media/362888/view Museum of the History of Science collection, University of Oxford, Albumen print of William Horsell by Maull and Polyblank, c.1857, digitised and accessible via: http: //www.mhs.ox.ac.uk National Co-operative Archive, Manchester Robert Owen Collection Summary of content of correspondence from Thomas Atkins to Robert Owen, GB 1499 ROC/1/44/3; GB 1499 ROC/1/44/4; GB 1499 ROC/3/5/51, 7 February 1856; Frederick Atkins to Robert Owen, GB 1499 ROC/1/44/2; Alexander Campbell to Thomas Atkins, GB 1499 ROC/3/5/19, 30 December

BIBLIOGRAPHY

307

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――The Anti-Absurd or phrenotypic alphabet and orthography for the English language (1844). BÉRANGER, P-J, One Hundred Songs, translated by W. Young (London: Chapman and Hall, 1847). BESSEMER, H., Sir Henry Bessemer, FRS: an Autobiography (London: Offices of Engineering, 1905). BOOTH, A.J., Robert Owen, the Founder of Socialism in England (London: Trübner, 1869). BUCHANAN, R., The Past, The Present, and the Future. A Poem by Robert Buchanan (Manchester: A. Heywood, n.d.). BUCKNILL, J.C., and D.H. Tuke, A Manual of Psychological Medicine: containing the history, nosology, description, statistics, diagnosis, pathology, and treatment of insanity. With an Appendix of Cases (Philadelphia: Richard and Lea, 1858). BURN, J.D., The Autobiography of a Beggar Boy (1855; London: Tweedie, 1856). BURNETT, C.M., Insanity Tested by Science: and Shown to be a Disease Rarely Connected with Permanent Organic Lesion of the Brain. And on that Account far more Susceptible of Cure than has Hitherto Been Supposed (London: S. Highley, 1848). CALDWELL, C., Thoughts on Physical Education, and The True Mode of Improving the Condition of Man, by Charles Caldwell, M.D., with a Recommendatory Preface by George Combe (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, 1844). CALL, W.M.W., Reverberations (London: Chapman, 1849). CAMPBELL, A., ed., Letters and Extracts from the Ms. Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves (2 vols; Ham Common: Concordium; London: J. Chapman, 1843–5), vol.1. ‘CANTABURIENSIS’, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Sir William Courtenay: Knight of Malta, Alias John Nichols Tom, Formerly Spirit Merchant and Maltster, of Truro in Cornwall: Being a Correct Detail of All the Incidents of His Extraordinary Life, from His Infancy to the Dreadful Battle at Bossenden Wood ... Concluding with an Accurate Account of the Trial of the Rioters at the Maidstone Assize (Canterbury: J. Hunt, 1838). CHAMIER, F., A Review of the French Revolution of 1848: from the 24 th of February to the Election of the First President (London: Reeve, Benham, and Reeve, 1849), vol.2. CHAMPFLEURY, E.D., Les exentriques (Paris: M. Levy, 1855). CLOUGH, A.H., The Bothie of Toper-na-fuosich: a Long Vacation Pastoral (Oxford: Macpherson, 1848). COLES, L.B., Philosophy of Health: Natural Principles of Health and Cure, or Health and Cure without Drugs (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1851). COLMAN, H., European Life and Manners; in Familiar Letters to Friends (2nd edn, 2 vols; Boston: Little, London: Petherham, 1849), vol.1. CONSTABLE, M., Songs and Poems (Dublin: McGlashan, 1848). CONWAY, M.D., Emerson at Home and Abroad (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889). ―― Centenary History of the South Place Chapel (London: Williams and Norgate, 1894). COOK, E., The Poetical Works of Eliza Cook. Complete Edition (London: F. Warne, 1870). COOPER, T., The Life of Thomas Cooper, with an introduction by John Saville (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1971).

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CUMMING, J., Lectures delivered before the Young Men’s Christian Association, 1845-1846-1864-1865 (London: James Nisbet, 1864). CUMMING, W.F., Notes on Lunatic Asylums in Germany: and other Parts of Europe (London: J. Churchill, 1852). DAVIS, J.M., The White Chief’s Urn (London: Spencer, 1850). DAY, C.W., Five Years’ Residence in the West Indies (2 vols; London: Colburn, 1852), vol.2. DE ANGUERA, J., Anguera’s Collection of Popular Ballads Composed and Arranged for the Guitar and dedicated to His Pupils (Boston: S.W. Marsh, 1849). DENDY, W.C., The Philosophy of Mystery (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1841). DIXON, W.H., The London Prisons: with an Account of the More Distinguished Persons who have been Confined in Them: to which is Added, a Description of the Chief Provincial Prisons (London: Jackson and Walford, 1850). ELLIOTT, R., The Gretna Green Memoirs by Robert Elliott, with an Introduction and Appendix by the Rev. Caleb Brown (London: Elliott, 1842). EATON, C.A., Rome in the Nineteenth Century (3 vols; Edinburgh: Constable, 1820), vol.3. ESPINASSE, F., Literary Recollections and Sketches (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1893). ESQUIROL, J.E., Mental Maladies: a Treatise on Insanity. Translated from the French, with Additions, by E.K. Hunt, M.D. (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845). ETZLER, J.A., Emigration to the Tropical World (Ham Common, Surrey: Concordium: 1844). ―― Two Visions of J.A. Etzler (Author of the Paradise within the Reach of All Men, By Powers of Nature and Machinery, and Other Writings Connected Therewith.) A Revelation of Futurity (Ham Common, Surrey: Concordium, 1844). FLAVEL, J., The Whole Works of the Reverend John Flavel (London: Midwinter, 1740), vol.2. FRANCIS, F., Newton Dogvane, a Story of English Country Life (3 vols; London: Hurst and Blackett, 1859), vol.1. FRISWELL, J.H., About in the World, Essays by the Author of ‘The Gentle Life’ (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1864). ‘FRITZ AND LIOLETT’ Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Triumph of Truth, and other Poems (London: Sherwood, 1849). FROST, T., Forty Years’ Recollections. Literary and Political (London: Sampson Low, Marsh, Searle and Rivington, 1880). ―― Reminiscences of a Country Journalist (London: Ward and Downey, 1886). FYLER, J.C., Stanley; or, The Infidel Reclaimed, and other Poems (London: Rivington, 1838). GARWOOD, J., The Force of Circumstance: A Poem (Birmingham: J. Guest, 1838). GASPEY, W., Physiology of ‘Muffs’ (London: Willoughby, 1848). GILBERT, J., Art, its Scope and Purpose; or, a Brief Exposition of its Principles: A Lecture Delivered at a Mechanics’ Institution (with subsequent additions) (London: Jackson and Walford, 1858). GOOD, J.M., Study of Medicine (London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy: 1822). GRANT, J., Sketches in London (London: W.S. Orr, 1838).

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INDEX

References to illustrations appear as italicised numbers. Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire 15, 17, 22–23, 30, 78–79 Adams, W.E. 195, 229 Aerial steam transit 66–67 Agapemone 177 Alcott House and Concordium 27–29, 40, 49, 51, 57–58, 60, 101, 160–161, 163, 230–231 Alton Locke: Tailor and Poet 7, 9– 10, 153, 219 Anti-Corn Law League and corn laws 42, 81, 89, 100, 114, 169, 193–194, 216 Arnott, John 196 Assassination, and threats of 40, 116, 135, 171, 174, 214 Atheism 2, 39, 139, 177–178, 231 Atkins, Thomas 13, 58, 67, 233–235 Ball, Mary 173 Ballads 6, 9, 11, 110–111, 116, 121, 133, 145, 153, 158, 237 Ballantine, William 142, 145, 147–148, 189 Ballater 30–31

Balzac, Honoré de 119, 209 Bankruptcy 17, 23, 76, 183, 205, 236 Barmby, Catherine 84, 86 Barmby, John Goodwyn 13, 28, 30, 68, 81–88, 102, 109, 168, 170, 177–179, 197, 205, 215, 231, 236 Baume, Pierre Henri 232 Beard movement 40 Beard wearing 29, 39–43, 86– 87, 124, 152, 162, 172, 184, 187, 191, 194, 210, 230–231 Belhomme, Dr Jacques Étienne 219 Beniowski, Major Bartołomiej 165–166 Béranger, Pierre-Jean de 108, 119 Bessemer, Henry 13, 72 Bezer, Joseph Irenaeus John 152–156 Blood Money to Pay Powell the Spy! 148, 150–152, 158, 167 Bredell, John 95 Brisbane, Albert 57 Bryson, James Maxwell 143

INDEX

Buchanan, Robert 65–66, 88– 89, 92, 236 Burns, Robert 19, 30–32, 35, 112, 119, 150, 153, 180, 185 Burritt, Elihu 130, 196–198 Byron, Lord and the Byronic 31, 35, 41, 84, 86, 202, 230–231 Cacoethes scribendi 29, 53, 214 Calcraft, William 149, 173 Campbell, Alexander 30, 77, 89, 161 Capital punishment 149, 163, 170, 172, 198, 231 Carden, Robert 191 Carlile, Richard 117 Carlyle, Thomas 57, 65, 76, 79, 88, 101, 215, 218, 237 Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 5, 16, 19, 42, 106–107, 172, 182 Chartism ‘mad Chartist’ 220–224 moral force 196, 198 physical force 126, 132, 136, 137, 142, 152, 197, 222 Chase, Malcolm 63, 107 Chatterton, Dan 2 Cheltenham Free Press 30–31, 49, 62, 74 Cholera 20–23, 49, 172, 199, 235 Christmas Carol Warbled in Newgate! 116–117, 153, 161 Church (Church of England) 23, 174–175, 205 Claeys, Gregory 2, 63, 99 Cleave, John 51, 59, 64, 70, 73 Clerkenwell Green 122–124, 125, 142, 157, 181, 195 Coal heavers and coal-whippers 118 Cobden, Richard 100, 112, 160, 174, 186, 198–199

329

Coffee houses 63, 181, 190 Colney Hatch 209–210, 211, 212, 213, 214, 226–229, 239 Communism 2–3, 12, 81–86, 88, 109, 116, 143, 163, 172, 177, 179, 188 Concordium at Ham Common, see Alcott House Cook, Eliza 19, 78, 172 Cooper, Thomas 1, 3, 112, 116, 147, 155, 169, 177, 186, 195, 220 Cooper, Walter 112, 152–153, 156 Copway, Reverend George (Kah-ge-gag-gah-bowh) 200 Cowen, George Sherman 93 Cruikshank, George 3, 46–47, 200, 237 Crystal Palace, see Great Exhibition Cuffey, William 122, 148, 157, 199, 219 Currency reform 170 Davey, James George 227 Day, Charles William 96 Defence of a Vegetable Diet 49, see also Vegetable Diet for the Million! Dickens, Charles 4, 23–24, 76– 77, 161, 170, 187, 218 Divinearian Apollonica 11, 168, 180 Divinearian, or, Apostle of the Messiahdom 168–186, 206 Doherty, Hugh 13, 72–73, 92, 163, 235 Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper 147–148, 158, 160 Duncan, George 229–230 Duncan, James 15–18, 20–21, 23–24, 27, 49–50, 75, 185,

330

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS

191–192, 202–203, 205, 207– 211, 229 Duncan, James Elmslie (his literary works appear separately) accent 15 birth 15 bravery 128, 134, 181 buffoon 159, 223 ‘Chartist poet’, JED’s view of label 109, 171, 191 Chartist poet, status as (for contemporaries) 1, 147, 158, 162, 168, 171, 188, 191, 196–197, 206, 210 critical reception of literary work 50–52, 102–103, 145, 160–161, 226, 230 death 229 Divinarian reform programme 170, 180 education 10–11, 18–19, 48 egotism 3–4, 148, 180–181, 196, 239 feminine ideal 43–44, 173, 182 histrionic, as 127, 135, 158– 159 hydropathy 49 imprisoned 145–148, 191 infidelity, reputation for 181, 226 institutionalised on grounds of insanity 208–211, 226–229 literary abilities (a modern assessment) 1–2 lunacy, perceived by contemporaries 14, 188– 189, 226 middle-class identity 10, 15, 191, 198, 205

mother 18 nationalism 141 Northern Star, in 102, 109, 129, 142, 145–146, 180, 186, 222 optimism 35, 56–57, 90, 104, 110, 118, 178 patriotism 103–105 persecution by press, sense of 207 (but see confidence in press, 191) physical appearance 3, 14, 43, 128, 140, 158, 184, 187–188, 190, 203, 206 posthumous coverage 2, 9, 28, 101, 237 Punch, reference to, in 156 Reading, at 184–185 relationship with father 207–211 Scottish identity 15, 141 Scottish verse 30, 33, 36– 37, 51, 78–79 shorthand expert 141, 164– 166 siblings 17–18, 229–230 socialism 142 stealing 207 teetotalism 46, 126–127, 203 visits William Thom 79 vegetarianism 47–48 Economic recession 31, 91, 100, 118 Edward Noble 18, 37, 38, 39–40, 98, 116, 134, 160–161, 163, 182 Eliza Cook’s Journal 19, 41, 113, 182 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 82 Emigration 31, 63–64, 90, 94, 96–98, 100, 161, 171, 185, 233

INDEX

Engels, Friedrich 35, 88, 125 Épicier 16 Epilepsy 9, 226–227, 229 Esquirol, Jean Étienne 217, 227 Etzler, John Adolphus 2–3, 12, 57, 58, 59–67, 69–76, 81, 89– 90, 92–99, 102–103, 116, 160, 181, 204, 215, 232–233, 235 Fawkes, Guy, effigies of 148–149 Financial reform 188 Finsbury Unitarian Chapel, South Place 174–176, 191, 194 Firearms (and Chartist right to bear arms) 140, 143, 147–148 Fires 202–203 Fleming, Thomas 143 Floating island 65, 73–74 Flowers and Fruits, or Poetry, Philosophy and Science 4–5, 8, 33, 34, 35–37, 38, 39, 43–47, 49–52, 70, 76, 81, 85, 93, 98, 100, 102, 110, 144, 162, 168, 172, 175–176, 178, 181–182, 230, 237–239 Fourier, Charles 3, 12, 60, 65, 68, 72–73, 82, 90, 163, 179, 215 Fourierists 13, 57, 60, 64–65, 71–72, 92, 163, 235 Fox, William Johnson 13, 77– 78, 84, 116, 160, 174, 175, 176, 194, 198, 204 French revolution of 1848 107, 111, 141, 144, 209, 219 Frost, Thomas 8, 29, 81, 230– 231 Fuller, Margaret 78, 88 Fussell, John 135, 157 Game Laws 183–184 Gardes mobiles 141, 142

331

Garrison, William Lloyd 199 Gender 181–182 Gilpin, Charles 196, 198 Goodway, David 2, 15, 121, 126, 142 Graham, Sylvester 49 Great Exhibition 22, 199, 204, 212, 232 Greaves, James Pierrepont 28, 30, 45, 46, 50, 77, 88, 116, 160, 163, 178, 215 Hair long 40–41, 124, 152, 157, 162, 230 parted in middle 17, 87, 230– 231 red 187 Hangman’s Hymn 148–149 Hansard, Luke James 73, 196 Hanshard (or Hanshaw), Thomas 129, 160, 195–196 Hanwell Communitorium 28, 85 Hanwell Lunatic Asylum 85, 211, 213–214, 217 Harney, George Julian 102, 109, 112, 143, 187, 196 Harrison, Henry Lestar 161 Haydon, Benjamin 76, 134 Haywood, Ian 238 Healthian diet 47–48 Hermitage Bridge 20–21, 185 Herwegh, Georg 107–108 Hetherington, Henry 13, 49, 59, 103, 112, 160, 199 Hillary, George 58–59 Holyoake, George Jacob 2, 28, 64, 81, 83, 94, 101–102, 117, 146, 159, 169, 171, 176–177, 182, 194, 222–223, 230, 232, 236, 238

332

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS

Honey, Laura 36–37, 52, 182 Hood, William Charles 227 Horsell, William 43, 161–162, 168, 172 Howitt, William (and Mary Howitt) 77 Hugo, Victor 19, 91 Imperialism 32, 63, 171, 233 Ingham, James Taylor 190, 203, 206–208 ‘Invisible Poet’ 10, 284 n. 234 Ireland 114, 141, 147, 150, 170– 171 Irish Democratic Confederation 153 Ironside, Isaac 41, 71 Insanity and metropolitan commissions of lunacy 13–14 moral 226–227 and revolution 209, 215–220 and syphilis 222 Jay, stuffed 183 Jerrold, Douglas 161, 192 Jones, Ernest 1, 3, 85, 111, 122, 146, 187, 197–198, 204, 218 Jones, Lloyd 89, 230 Kennington Common (and 10 April 1848) 7, 13, 47, 122, 123, 137, 139, 141, 143, 219 King, Edward 13, 67–69, 96, 233 Kingsley, Charles 41 Kydd, Samuel 166, 187 Lamartine, Alphonse de 108, 109, 126 Lamp-posts 4, 124–126, 128, 156

Land reform 3, 63, 163, 170, 183 Lane, Charles 28 Lind, Jenny 182–183 Linton, William James 1, 101, 169, 186 Literary and Scientific Institute, John Street, Tottenham Court Road 40, 100, 122–123, 140–141, 160, 171, 177, 180, 186, 195 Lofft, Capel 82 ‘Long range’ (Captain Warner’s) 69 Lotsky, Johann 237 Lovett, William 3, 179, 196–198, 230 Lunn, William Arthur Brown, writing as ‘Arthur Wallbridge’ (see also ‘sequential system of musical notation’) 180 Machinery (see also ‘Aerial steam transit’; ‘Satellite’; ‘Naval Automaton’) 57–59, 64–66, 69, 71–73, 92, 99, 171, 232 Mad dogs 218, 225 Madhouse, The 85 Mainzer, Joseph 179 Malthus, Thomas 19, 36, 77, 90, 182 Mannings (Maria Manning and Frederick Manning) 173 Mantle, George Joseph 143–144 Marriages Affinity Bill 191 ‘Marseillaise’ 113, 122, 125, 139, 144, 180 ‘Mary and the Mossy Stile’ 53– 54, 182 Massey, Gerald 1, 18, 117, 169 Mathew, Father Theobald 46, 47, 98, 160, 233

INDEX

Maxwell, John Reid Adam, see ‘Invisible Poet’ McDouall, Peter 133, 141 M’Grath, Philip 122, 187 M’Naghten, Daniel 216 Milton, John and Miltonic verse 2, 19, 52, 62, 82, 150, 178 Mitchel, John 124–125, 143, 215 Model lodging houses 203 Morgan, John Minter 3 Morning Star, or Herald of Progression 12, 18, 28, 55–57, 61–62, 65, 69–70, 74–78, 80–82, 88–89, 91–93, 95, 98, 100, 102–104, 110–111, 164, 179, 181, 199, 223, 232, 236, 239 Morrison, Richard James 74 Mundell, Frederick 148 Music 11, 35, 51, 53, 74, 112, 123, 139, 167–168, 179–180 National Charter Association 119, 122, 186, 196 National Reformer 99, 103 Naval Automaton 71–72, 73, 235 New Age 28, 51, 57, 88 Northern Star, and poetry 102 O’Brien, James Bronterre 103, 185 O’Connor, Feargus 3, 40, 62, 113, 116, 123, 146, 174, 187, 195, 197–198, 220, 221, 222– 224 Oldstone–Moore, Christopher 39–40, 42 Orange Tree conspiracy 145, 148, 152, 157 Owen, Robert 3, 30, 35, 48, 57– 58, 67–68, 82, 90, 99, 116, 160, 170, 172, 195, 213, 234

333

Owenism (and Owenites and socialism) 40, 58–59, 63–67, 70, 72, 77, 83, 86, 88, 91, 93, 95, 97–98, 112, 123, 143, 161, 165, 170, 176, 179, 213, 231– 232, 234, 236, 238 Pacifism 198, 233 Paine, Thomas 19, 117, 180, 186 Pantomime 134–139 Papal Aggression 205 Paturot, Jérôme 139 Peck, Richard 201 Peel, Sir Robert 40, 42, 77, 92, 114, 119, 133, 174, 216, 220 Penny Satirist 28–29, 177 People’s Charter 3, 7, 30, 40, 82, 84, 102, 119, 122, 124, 130–131, 134, 143, 154–155, 160, 166, 170–171, 174, 180, 183, 187, 189–190, 198, 210, 215 Phonetic reform 15, 163, 164, 165, 167, 170, 172, 204 Phrenotypics 164–166 Pianotype machine 62, 70 Plain Speaker 116–117, 169 Ploughing 32–33 Poet, role of 7, 11, 82–83 Poetry of anti-revolution 107 defining bad 1–2, 11–12 and Chartism 1, 6–9, 106, 110–111, 117 and commerce 9–10 and Etzlerism 61–62 and madness 8–9, 206 and Owenism (including hymns) 35, 88–89, 95, 179, 238 and politics 6–8, 13, 107– 111, 117–118, 144–145

334

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS

Police 119–122, 126–127, 129– 131, 133, 140, 143, 156–159, 188–193, 224 Police Courts 1, 4–5, 86, 130– 131, 134, 143, 188, 193, 201, 203–204, 206–208, 222, 239 Powell, Thomas (‘The Spy’) 145, 148–152 Powell, Thomas (secretary of TES) 61, 93–94, 99 Pritchard, James Cowles 227 Public meetings 181, 186, 194–195 Punch 4, 10, 14, 19, 40–41, 106, 108, 113, 121, 132, 135, 136, 137, 138–139, 156–157, 163, 164, 165, 171, 187, 198, 215, 231, 238 Puppet-Show 4, 14, 107, 120, 136, 238 Quakers, see White Quakers Queen Mab (Shelley) 47, 50, 98, 231 Red republicanism 40, 112, 138–139, 152, 160, 172, 187 Reporters 4–6, 14, 107, 123, 143–144, 148, 184, 187, 190– 191, 193, 207 Republicanism 75, 138, 172– 173, 231 Reynolds, G.W.M. 120, 131, 136, 141, 186–188, 222–223 Ridicule (see also pantomime) 13, 144–145, 238 Riots, at Drury Lane (Monte Cristo Riots) 138 Riots, Gordon and Lord George Gordon 15, 140, 218

Russell, Lord John 114, 116, 136, 137, 148, 150–151, 165, 170, 174, 220 ‘Satellite’ (or ‘Iron Slave’) 67, 69, 70–71, 81, 96, 233 Scott, William Bell 86 Scottish in London 15–16, 18 Scourge for a Gag 114, 115, 116– 118, 158–159, 238 Sequential system of musical notation 180 Shaftesbury, Lord 192, 203, 223–224 Sharpe, Alexander 160, 196, 199 Shelley, Percy Bysshe (see also Queen Mab) 5, 8, 19, 24, 35, 47, 49–51, 82–84, 98, 162, 231 Skelton, John 112–113 Smith, James E. 70 Smock Frock and the Fustian Coat 127, 130 Southcott, Joanna and Southcottism 164, 177, 216 Southwell, Charles 194 Sperry, Samuel 30 Spies (see also Thomas Powell) 128, 140, 148–152, 165, 232 Spiritualism 235 Stoll, Steven 62, 232 Stollmeyer, Conrad F. 13, 58– 60, 61, 63, 66, 69, 71–73, 76, 81, 92, 94, 97–98, 232–233 Steam power 56, 67, 71–72, 91, 99, 233–234 Strange, William 49, 59, 97, 180 Streets, policing of 201–202 St Simonians 3, 90 Sugar 81 Sunbeam (and Sun Beam) 93, 97– 99, 165 Sutton, Henry Septimus 101

INDEX

Suzuki, Akihito 13–14 Swedenborg, Emmanuel and Swedenborgians 190, 235 Taylor, Dr John 41, 220 Taylor, Samuel 201 Teetotalism 23, 30, 46–47, 98, 126, 161–162, 183, 190, 201, 230, 233 ‘Temple of Free Enquiry’ 158, 195 Thames Police Court 143, 147, 188, 201, 207 Thom, John Nichols (aka Sir William Courtenay) 231 Thom, William 13, 31, 36, 51, 62, 75, 77–79, 80, 81, 88, 111– 112, 130, 140, 160 Thompson, George 188–189, 198 ‘Tichborne Claimant’ (Arthur Orton) 24 Times, The 14, 19–21, 81, 97, 100, 124, 126, 130–132, 134, 143–144, 162, 171–172, 187, 193, 207 Tocsin ’gainst tyranny 112, 119, 122, 132, 144, 160, 178 Trafalgar Square (Trafalgar Square Revolution) 13, 119–121, 132, 136, 149, 220 Travers, Newnham 175 Trinidad 93, 96–97, 99, 103, 233 Trinidad Great Eastern and Great Western Railway 97 Tropical Emigration Society 12, 59, 62–63, 66–67, 69, 75–76, 79, 93–95, 97–99, 103, 233 Tytherley (aka Harmony Hall), Owenite community 58, 63, 91, 98, 213, 233

335

Vaughan, Percy C. 5, 85 Vegetable Diet for the Million! 47– 49, 51, 127, see also Defence of a Vegetable Diet Vegetarian Advocate 161–163, 172 Vegetarianism 10, 34–35, 41, 47–51, 81, 101, 116–117, 126– 127, 134, 139, 161–163, 165, 170, 175, 194, 199, 201, 226– 227, 230–232, 237 Venezuela 3, 55, 59, 63, 67, 70, 76, 81, 93, 96–97, 99 Victoria, Queen 31, 40, 111, 118, 134, 148, 150, 172–173, 188, 216, 224 Violence 117–118, 120, 124, 127, 129, 132–133, 139–140, 174, 188, 191, 193, 196–198, 203, 218, 228–229 Waller, John Cass 189 Wallscourt, Lord (Joseph Blake) 60, 235 Wapping 1, 10–11, 15–27, 40, 46, 118, 124, 127, 141, 172, 185, 202, 205–206, 209, 229 ‘Wapping Old Stairs’ 20, 113, 185 Wat Tyler 133 ‘Wat Tyler’, aka Isaac Jefferson 160, 210 Weitling, Wilhelm 88, 163 Weston, Henry Ensell 220 Whigs (see also Lord John Russell) 114, 116, 148, 151, 173–174, 218 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill 22, 24, 25, 26 ‘Whit Monday’ (12 June 1848) 132–133 White Quakers 29, 41, 84, 86

336

THE POETRY AND THE POLITICS

Whittier, John Greenleaf 59, 76 Wilkinson, Edwin Scrace 183–185 Williams, Joseph 124–125, 195 Winter Warblings of the Bird in Bars 154–156

Yardley, Edward 18, 147, 189–190, 201–202, 210 Young, Arthur 72 Young, James 62, 70 ‘Young England’ 92