A Radical History Of Britain

by Edward Vallance

  To enlighten the people, to show the people the reason, the ground of all their complaints and sufferings; when a man works hard for thirteen or fourteen hours of the day, the week through, and is not able to maintain his family; that is what I understand of it; to show the people the ground of this; why they were not able.27

  The difference in emphasis between the publications of the LCS and those of Paine grew wider with the printing of the second part of Rights of Man on 16 February 1792. The original title planned for the work, ‘Kingship’, gave a clearer indication of Paine’s current preoccupations. Influenced by events in France – most notably the flight of the royal family to Varennes on 20–1 June 1791, which turned the popular tide against the monarchy of Louis XVI – this latest was a far more starkly republican pamphlet than part one.

  In part two, Paine described ‘the history of all monarchical governments’ as ‘but a disgustful picture of human wretchedness, and the accidental respite of a few years’ repose’.28 Nature herself, he railed, appeared to disown hereditary government, seeing ‘that the mental characters of successors, in all countries, are below the average human understanding; that one is a tyrant, another an idiot, a third insane, and some all three together, it is impossible to attach confidence to it, when reason in man has power to act’.29 While it required some talent to be ‘a common mechanic … to be a king, requires only the animal figure of a man – a sort of breathing automaton’.30 Monarchy, as it existed in eighteenth-century Europe, was a mere sham or fraud, put upon the public: ‘monachy is all a bubble, a mere court artifice to procure money’.31 Rather than maintaining order, it had been this monarchical system that had caused the ‘riots and tumults’ of recent years (here Paine singled out the violent anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of the 1780s as a particular example). It was the monarchical state that left society divided, depriving it of its ‘natural cohesion’.32 Instead of leading to anarchy, the dissolution of this government would only bring society closer together, as demonstrated by the example of those voluntary associations that men made for trade or other concerns without the interference of government. For, he continued, government was ‘nothing more than a national association acting on the principles of society’.33 This faith in national conventions was clear evidence of the debt owed in Paine’s thought to his American experience. While it was England that gave him a connection with the labouring poor, it was the United States that convinced him of the potential of mass political action.

  The frankness of this attack on monarchy contrasted with the LCS’s publications, which continued to speak of ‘preserving the people’s love’ for the King.34 More importantly, the corresponding societies as a whole had restricted their demands to the vote and more regular parliaments. Though he continued to attack the inequality of the current system of representation (without, again, saying anything specific about the franchise), Paine’s arguments in the second part of Rights of Man went much further. Reflecting on the state of the poor in England, his comments were not unlike those of other middle-class radicals such as Mary Wollstonecraft. ‘Why is it’, he asked, ‘that scarcely any are executed but the poor? The fact is a proof, among other things, of a wretchedness in their condition. Bred up without morals, and cast upon the world without a prospect, they are the exposed sacrifice of vice and legal barbarity.’35 Here, though, followed an important difference. Whereas other radicals, in a vein not dissimilar to their loyalist opponents, continued to stress moral reformation via education as the remedy for the ‘barbarity’ of the poor, Paine argued that the way to put an end to the criminality of the English underclass was to end poverty itself.

  He pointed to the unequal distribution of the tax burden. The value of the revenue from taxes on land had declined markedly in relative terms when compared with that raised from taxes on commodities – taxes that all were forced to pay, irrespective of income. A case in point was the excise tax on beer, which the landed wealthy could avoid paying as their estates were large enough to contain their own breweries, and which now, Paine claimed, exceeded the entire revenue from taxes on land.36 To remedy this inequality, he proposed a sliding scale of inheritance tax, which would be imposed on landed estates worth £13,000 or more. This was in fact a very limited proposal for redistributive taxation, given that the estates subject to the tax were only the very wealthiest in the country; and Paine did not propose taxing wealth generated from industry or commerce as it ‘would be impolitic to set bounds to property acquired by industry, and therefore it is right to place the prohibition beyond the probable acquisition to which industry can extend’.37

  Nonetheless, combined with the ‘peace dividend’ that he argued would result from ending the war with France (which would allow for a significant cut in the general level of taxation), he believed that this tax on land would raise sufficient funds to pay for a system of old-age pensions and child-support payments for poorer families.38 Children would be provided with free schooling and lump sums would be paid to families on births and deaths – this as a means of doing away with the grotesque dragging of the poor ‘from place to place to breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish’.39 For the large population of migrant workers who came to London seeking their fortunes, public hostels would be built to provide food and shelter until they could find paid employment, for hunger ‘is not among the postponable wants, and a day, even a few hours, in such a condition, is often the crisis of a life of ruin’.40

  Paradoxically, it was the essence of Paine’s success as a writer – his ability to appeal to ordinary people – that also prepared the way for his downfall and that of the movement for radical reform as a whole. In the second part of Rights of Man he had shifted his focus from attacking the British ancien régime and advocating democratic change to calling for greater social equality. The so-called ‘social chapter’ of the second part of Rights of Man provided his opponents in the loyalist press with the opportunity to smear him and his fellow radicals with the label ‘Levellers’. Reform, the loyalists argued, would not be satisfied until it had not only gained the vote for all working men but also appropriated the property of their social betters. The threat of social revolution helped drive a wedge between middle-class and working-class reformers, leading the former essentially to abandon agitation ‘out-of-doors’ while leaving the latter, in frustration, to turn to increasingly desperate measures to achieve their goals.

  Shortly after the publication of the second part of Rights of Man there appeared another work whose arguments were clearly at odds with those of the corresponding societies, though for rather different reasons. The members of the LCS grounded their demands on their masculine birthright: ‘Are we Men, and shall we not speak?’41 There was little discussion here of extending the franchise to women. Indeed, in general, most radical and reformist discourse was grounded in values and faculties that were deemed to be almost exclusively masculine, the veneration of ‘reason’ being the most obvious.

  Into this largely male-dominated debate came Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Its title was somewhat misleading. Wollstonecraft’s work was neither a reply to Paine’s (her targets were the French philosophes Talleyrand and Rousseau) nor a call for women’s political emancipation (though her work has since been appropriated by modern feminists). Indeed, her interest was not in demanding the same natural and civil rights for women as Painite reformers claimed pertained to men but in suggesting ways in which women could be brought to exercise masculine ‘public virtue’ – the classical notion of virtue as the pursuit of the public good.42 Wollstonecraft’s incipient republicanism is on show from the start:

  Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the caprice of a weak fellow creature, whose very station sinks him necessarily below the meanest of his subjects! But one power should not be thrown down to exalt another – for all power inebriates a weak man; and its abuse proves that the more equality there is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reig
n in society.43

  She also touched, albeit briefly, on the issue of women’s right to vote:

  I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government. But as the whole system of representation is now, in this country, only a convenient handle for despotism, [women] need not complain, for they are as well represented as a numerous class of hard working mechanics, who pay for the support of royalty when they can scarcely stop their children’s mouths with bread.44

  But the main body of her work was directed at the upbringing of women, focusing mainly on the education, or lack of it, given to gentlewomen. Wollstonecraft frankly admitted that her book was addressed to the ‘middle class’, and the list of women that she admired was also distinctly posh, including Catharine Macaulay and the Empress of Russia.45 As she saw it, at present, the daughters of the gentry were raised only for the marriage market. This infantilised them, thereby making them, paradoxically, wholly unsuited for their future role as wives and mothers:

  strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves, – the only way women can rise in the world, – by marriage. And this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act: – they dress; they paint, and nickname God’s creatures. – Surely these weak beings are only fit for a seraglio! – Can they be expected to govern a family with judgment, or take care of the poor babes whom they bring into the world?46

  She compared the attitudes of men and women to travel. While a man would set out with an objective, a clear end in view, a woman would have her mind fixed only on incidentals, especially ‘the impression she may make on her fellow-travellers’. The only question in women’s heads, she said, was: will I ‘make a sensation’? ‘Can dignity of mind,’ Wollstonecraft sternly asked, ‘exist with such cares?’*47 The only way to deal with the insipidity of most middle-class women, she said, was through education. She proposed national co-educational day schools that would include ‘the rich and poor’. Her work reveals that she felt that class, as much as gender distinctions, was an impediment to the exercise of virtue. Consequently, children within these schools, to ‘prevent any of the distinctions of vanity … should be dressed alike, and all obliged to submit to the same discipline’. However, this attentiveness to the distorting power of the social hierarchy did not lead her to advocate a truly egalitarian education system:

  At the age of nine, girls and boys, intended for domestic employments, or mechanical trades, ought to be removed to other schools, and receive instruction, in some measure appropriated to the destination of each individual, the two sexes being still together in the morning; but in the afternoon, the girls should attend a school, where plain-work, mantua-making, millinery, &c. would be their employment

  The young people of superior abilities, or fortune, might now be taught, in another school, the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and continue the study of history and politics on a more extensive scale, which would not exclude polite literature.48

  Wollstonecraft’s attitude to class can at best be described as ambivalent. She spoke of finding most ‘virtue’ in ‘low life’, among those women who supported their families through the sweat of their brows, but, almost in the same breath, she reiterated the orthodox piety that in order for the poor to be rendered ‘virtuous’ ‘they must be employed’. She suggested that middle-class women could prevent the poor from falling into a vicious indolence by employing them as servants.49

  Nonetheless, despite these obvious debts to the values of the day, A Vindication remains a remarkably bold statement in favour of the fundamental equality of the sexes:

  A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it though it may excite a horse-laugh. – I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman.

  When we read passages like these, it is not so hard to see why Wollstonecraft was designated by later writers a pioneering feminist. In her own time, too, she was lauded for A Vindication, especially by other women writers. The poet Anne Seward called it a ‘wonderful book’ while a woman reader from Glasgow complained that the text was in such high demand that it was difficult to get a look at it.50 It received glowing reviews from most of the reformist press and may have sold as many as three thousand copies in its first five years in print.

  Not all reviewers were so enthusiastic, however. Hannah More, the bluestocking philanthropist, writer and abolitionist, described the title alone as ‘fantastic and absurd’ and refused to read it.51 More was opposed to teaching poor children to read as this would only make them dissatisfied with their lot. In contrast to Wollstonecraft’s emphasis on fostering independence, she preferred to promote Sunday schools, intended to inculcate obedience and deference in children – institutions which Wollstonecraft’s future husband, William Godwin, accurately satirised as teaching only ‘a superstitious veneration for the church of England, and how to bow to every man in a handsome coat’.52

  If Paine’s work was the popular publishing success of the 1790s, William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in February 1793, was the radical work that gathered most praise from the reform-minded intelligentsia. William Hazlitt famously wrote that, in contrast to Godwin, in literary circles ‘Tom Paine was considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him, [William] Paley an old woman, Edmund Burke a flashy sophist’.53 By this point Godwin, who, like his father, had trained to be a schoolteacher and nonconformist minister, had turned his back on those vocations and was well established as a writer on historical subjects for George Robinson’s New Annual Register. Political Justice was a long and expensive book – necessarily so, perhaps, since his publisher Robinson, for this work too, had paid him a considerable advance for it – a fact that was rumoured to have saved Godwin from prosecution for sedition. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, was reported to have said that a book costing three guineas was unlikely to be of interest to radical artisans, who could barely find three shillings.54 All the same, demand for the work appears to have been high, with Robinson having to purchase pirated copies printed in Dublin to sell in London in order to keep up with demand.55 But as we shall see below ( p. 252), there were other, more substantive, reasons as to why Godwin evaded prosecution while Paine was found guilty of seditious libel in absentia in September 1792.

  Political Justice unquestionably contained strong criticism of the existing political, legal and religious structures of late eighteenth-century England. The preface to the work explicitly stated Godwin’s republican credentials: ‘monarchy was as a species of government unavoidably corrupt’.56 The education of a prince made him profoundly unfit to rule: ‘Above all, simple, unqualified truth is a stranger to his ear. It either never approaches; or if so unexpected a guest should once appear, it meets with so cold a reception, as to afford little encouragement to a second visit.’57 This was in no small part, Godwin went on, because monarchy was such a fragile sham that its workings had to be hidden from public view as far as possible: ‘The most fatal opinion that could lay hold upon the mind of their subjects is that kings are but men. Accordingly they are carefully withdrawn from the profaneness of vulgar inspection; and, when they are exhibited, it is with every artifice that may dazzle our sense and mislead our judgment’.58 They were not, then, as the members of the Revolution Society suggested, the servants of the people, because, rationally, the people could never have chosen freely such poor trustees to exercise their power: ‘A king of England therefore holds his crown independently, or, as it has been energetically expressed, “in contempt” of the choice of the people’ – this last referring to Edmund Burke’s comment in his Reflections that George III ‘holds his crown in contempt of the choice
of the Revolution Society, who have not a single vote for a king amongst them’.59

  As far as private property was concerned, Godwin was a greater ‘Leveller’ than Paine. Godwin viewed all ownership as essentially fiduciary: property was held in trust, exclusively for the purpose of serving the public good. Man had no right to dispose of even a shilling of his wealth at his mere caprice. Those ‘philanthropists’ (perhaps Godwin was speaking with Hannah More and her ilk in mind), ‘[so] far from being entitled to well earned applause’ for their efforts, were, in fact, in the eye of justice delinquents if they withhold ‘any portion from that service’.60 One benefit of the eventual equalisation of property, he said, would be the end of the indolent and bloated rich. All, in this Utopia, would need to take part in some manual labour in order to sustain themselves: ‘The mathematician, the poet and the philosopher will derive a new stock of chearfulness and energy from the recurring labour that makes them feel they are men.’61 It is somewhat ironic that these comments concerning the moral benefits of physical activity should come from Godwin, an author whose temperament was so delicate that he could write for only three hours a day before he had dizzy spells.62