This romantic image of an egalitarian Utopia constructed by thinking, working men inspired the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey’s schemes for ‘pantisocracy’(from pan and socratia, ‘all governing equally’). They planned to establish a community on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, made up initially of twelve couples who would provide £125 in capital each and live lives combining three hours of manual labour a day – based on Adam Smith’s calculation that only one-twentieth of workers’ time was actually spent in productive labour – with extensive intellectual contemplation. Goods (and also, Coleridge hoped, women) would be held in common. The aim was to create a community that would raise children unpolluted by the distorted values of contemporary society. Southey daydreamed to Coleridge in a letter of 3 September 1794 as he described life in their ideal society: ‘Past sorrows will be obliterated in anticipating future pleasure. When Coleridge and I are sawing down a tree we shall discuss metaphysics; criticise poetry while hunting a buffalo, and write sonnets whilst following the plough.’ The impoverished poets didn’t have the money for the journey, only getting as far as Bristol, where they fell out over women. In later life, both would repudiate their earlier flirtation with radical Utopianism, Southey describing Godwin’s mind as ‘like a close-stool pan, most often empty, and better empty than when full’.63
In many respects, Godwin’s language was similar to that of other late eighteenth-century radicals in its gender-loaded references to ‘manly’ labour and ‘unmanly’ poverty. However, his belief in the fundamental evil of inalienable private property led him to challenge directly the key institution of patriarchal society: marriage. Marriage was, after all, at this point essentially a form of property ownership in which the wife was the chattel of the husband. It was ‘an affair of property and the worst of all properties’.64 Consequently, marriage should be abolished. Men and women would continue to propagate the species as ‘reason and duty’ dictated, but they would no longer be corrupted by the vicissitudes of the marriage market (a conclusion markedly similar to Wollstonecraft’s).65
All of this was controversial enough, as too were Godwin’s comments on English justice (or the lack thereof), which will be discussed later. However, these elements of Political Justice were undercut by his core political philosophy. This uniquely rejected both the appeal to a history of English liberty (which, like Paine, Godwin believed was a fiction) and the natural rights-based arguments of Rights of Man. Instead, Godwin believed in the spirit of ‘universal benevolence’, a moral obligation incumbent on all men to use their wealth, resources and talents for the public good. To use these resources for other ends was simply pernicious. Equally, as men had no right to property either in men or, more pertinently, in women, no one had the right to exercise dominion over anyone else.
This vision of ‘universal benevolence’ was starkly utilitarian, allowing little room for sentiment. In a famous passage, Godwin rehearsed the example of a fire at the palace of the celebrated Archbishop of Cambrai, François Fénelon, author of the stinging attack on divine-right monarchy, The Adventures of Telemachus (1699). The good Archbishop and his chambermaid are trapped inside the burning building, but there is only time to save one of them. Few, Godwin believed, would disagree that the life of the Archbishop was more worthy of saving than that of a servant girl. But what if the chambermaid was ‘my wife, my mother or my benefactor’? This did not alter the case:
justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fénelon at the expense of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun ‘my’, to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth? My wife or my mother may be a fool or a prostitute, malicious, lying or dishonest. If they be, of what consequence is it that they are mine?66
This kind of cold rationalism, rejecting all emotional ties, later led Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822), to describe Godwin as ‘a ghoul, or a bloodless vampyre, or the monster created by Frankenstein’.67 Not without reason, either. Godwin was apparently partly inspired to write Political Justice by the example of the Houyhnhnms, the ultra-rational horse-like creatures depicted in the final book of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, describing the latter as ‘one of the most virtuous, liberal and enlightened examples of human genius that has yet been produced’. Godwin seems to have missed the point that Swift meant the Houyhnhnms, with their utter contempt for all other species, to be just as objectionable as the grotesque, human-like Yahoos.68
The most remarkable feature of this Utopian vision of slowly spreading ‘universal benevolence’ was Godwin’s musings on its end point, a world in which death itself had been conquered. In contrast to the theory of demographic catastrophe later outlined by Thomas Malthus, which essentially posited only natural disasters (war, plague, famine) and human ‘vices’ (in which he included the use of contraception and homosexuality) as possible checks on population outstripping global resources, Godwin believed that the exercise of ‘moral restraint’ would prevent such a disaster taking place: ‘The men … who exist when the earth shall refuse itself to a more extended population, will cease to propagate, for they will no longer have any motive, either of error or duty, to induce them’. His next words will cause modern readers to raise an eyebrow: ‘In addition to this they will perhaps be immortal. The whole will be a people of men, and not of children. Generation will not succeed generation, nor truth have in a certain degree to recommence her career at the end of every thirty years.’69 Once man (it was not clear whether women were implicitly included in this ultimate prospect of humanity) had acquired full control of his reasoning faculties, his mind would be powerful enough to control every aspect of his body, preventing what had seemed its inevitable degeneration. This interest in immortality was not a mere blip in Godwin’s intellectual career. He would return to the theme in St Leon, published in 1799, a historical fiction that traced the adventures of the titular French knight who had found the fabled philosopher’s stone.
Godwin’s belief in the ‘perfectibility’ of man is a reminder that though many leading radical intellectuals had rejected Christianity and organised religion in general, radicalism continued to have a deep ideological taproot in Protestant nonconformity. Godwin’s education in Norwich had been undertaken by the Sandemanian tutor Samuel Newton. Sandemanianism, an ultra-Calvinist offshoot of Presbyterianism, held that grace was achieved neither through good works nor through faith but ‘only by the rational perception of divine truth’.70 This was a creed (also followed by the scientist Michael Faraday) that Godwin later ridiculed as ‘after Calvin had damned ninety-nine in a hundred of mankind … a scheme for damning ninety-nine in a hundred of the followers of Calvin’.
By the time he came to write Political Justice, like Paine and Wollstonecraft he had moved towards deism. But just as Paine still remained indebted to his Quaker upbringing, so Godwin’s belief in human perfectibility and reason spoke of the legacy of his Sandemanian past. His remarks about immortality also remind us that as much as being an ‘Age of Reason’, the 1790s, like the 1640s, were an era of religious expectation. This visionary element to radical activity was no better displayed than in William Blake’s poems, ‘A Song of Liberty’ (1790) and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Blake had had some connections with the radical Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church in 1789, but by the time that political agitation for reform was at its peak, he had already abandoned this brief dalliance. Like other, now largely forgotten figures such as the millenarian prophet Richard Brothers, Blake continued, nonetheless, to place his politically engaged poems within an apocalyptic framework.71
Most importantly, as far as the government reaction to Political Justice was concerned, Godwin did not believe this rational Utopia to be imminent: indeed, it would best be achieved by a very gradual process of enlightenment. Looking back on the English civil war, of which he would later write a sympathetic, pro
-republican history, Godwin stated that, admitting ‘these objects [the overturning of monarchy] to have been in the utmost degree excellent, they ought not, for the purpose of obtaining them, to have precipitated the question to the extremity of a civil war’.72 He rejected not only the use of violence to achieve political ends – as did most other English radicals – but also collective action as a whole. Political associations such as those formed by the Yorkshire reformer Charles Wyvill were ineffective, if not dangerous: ‘revolutions’, Godwin pompously declared, ‘less originate in the energies of the people at large, than in the conceptions of persons of some degree of study and reflection’.73 Associations had to be treated with great care, for the ‘conviviality of a feast may lead to the depredations of a riot … There is nothing more barbarous, cruel and blood-thirsty than the triumph of a mob.’74 Only ‘a few favoured minds’ were perceptive enough not just to conceive of an alternative structure for human society but also to grasp the means by which this change could be brought about:
When these advantages have been unfolded by superior penetration, they cannot yet for some time be expected to be understood by the multitude. Time, reading and conversation are necessary to render them familiar. They must descend in regular gradation from the most thoughtful to the most unobservant. He, that begins with an appeal to the people, may be suspected to understand little of the true character of mind. A sinister design may gain by precipitation; but true wisdom is best adapted to a slow, unvarying, incessant progress.75
Elsewhere in Political Justice, Godwin indirectly criticised Paine for the intemperate haste with which he had denounced injustice and oppression.76 Though Godwin would personally intervene to help defend members of the LCS when they found themselves on trial for treason in 1794, this was motivated by his anger at the injustice of the prosecution and the barbarity of the possible punishments (hanging, drawing and quartering). It did not represent an approval of the corresponding societies’ methods. As the LCS began to organise mass meetings and demonstrations in the mid-1790s to press for electoral reform, Godwin became more and more outspoken in his criticism. Regarding the use of these tactics, he remarked that the radical lecturer John Thelwall’s remonstrations to members against the use of violence were like ‘Lord George Gordon preaching peace to the rioters in Westminster Hall’ or ‘Iago adjuring Othello not to dishonour him by giving harbour to a thought of jealousy’. Godwin later bluntly stated, in an apparent endorsement of government surveillance and suppression of radical activity, that the LCS was ‘a formidable machine; the system of political lecturing is a hot-bed, perhaps too well adapted to ripen men for purposes, more or less similar to those of the Jacobin Society of Paris. Both branches of the situation are well deserving of the attention of the members of the government of Great Britain.’77
10
THE REIGN OF TERROR
While Godwin’s rejection of collective action was unquestionably an extension of his core political philosophy, it may well also have been in part a reaction to the immediate circumstances in which Political Justice was written. Radical and reformist activity was already coming under increasing popular pressure. In July 1791, over two and a half days, ‘Church and King’ rioters in Birmingham had attacked Dissenting meeting houses and the properties of leading nonconformists, including that of Joseph Priestley, scientist, founder of modern Unitarianism and a leading figure in the movement for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which banned Catholics and Dissenters from holding public office. The atmosphere in the city was already heated, with both ultra-radical and reactionary handbills circulating and hostile graffiti daubed on walls calling for the destruction of ‘Presbyterians’.
The pretext for the riot itself was a dinner celebrating the second anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, to be held at Thomas Dadley’s hotel in Temple Row. As the diners arrived for the event, which had been advertised in the Birmingham press, they were jeered by a crowd of seventy or so people. Although these hecklers soon dispersed, by the time the dinner was nearly over at eight o’clock a mob several hundred strong had gathered outside. As the diners left the hotel, the rioters pelted them with stones and then set about sacking the hotel. Next, they turned their attention to the New Meeting House, where Priestley was minister, reducing the building to a burnt-out shell, then setting alight another Dissenting chapel, the Old Meeting House, before moving on to Priestley’s own home, Fairhill. Priestley, who had wisely heeded warnings to stay away from the dinner, fled his house before the mob could seize him, but he was able to watch the first part of the attack from a distance. Anticipating that the dinner might be the catalyst for mob violence, he and his son had removed all flammable materials from their home, leaving the mob so bereft of means to spark the conflagration that they reportedly tried to use, with little success, one of Priestley’s ‘electrical machines’. Priestley’s precautions, however, proved only a temporary obstacle to the rioters, who looted his home before razing it to the ground. His pioneering laboratory, library and papers were all lost.
The rioters’ activities met with notably little official response. Unsatiated by the demolition of Fairhill and unfettered by police or military action, they continued on to the homes of leading Birmingham Dissenters, destroying Bakerville House, the home of John Rylands, and draining its substantial wine cellar dry. William Hutton, the Dissenting historian, who had actually declined an invitation to the dinner and was viewed by Priestley as politically and religiously conservative, attempted to buy off the rioters with beer. He was dragged to the Fountain tavern, where he was presented with the bill for the 329 gallons consumed. This display of enforced largesse didn’t save his home, which was first looted and then burnt. It took two years for Hutton to receive compensation and, even then, it only partially covered his losses. Despite their attack on this moderate nonconformist, the crowd’s actions were not indiscriminate: when they arrived at the home of John Taylor, they carefully removed to safety the furniture and possessions of its current occupant, the Dowager Lady Carhampton, a minor royal, before destroying the house.
In all, the rioters destroyed twenty-seven homes and four nonconformist meeting houses. The scale of the destruction – contemporary engravings show once grand dwellings reduced to shattered husks – was almost certainly exacerbated by the actions of local magistrates, who actively encouraged and directed the mayhem. Two leading figures, Dr Benjamin Spencer, Vicar of Aston, and Joseph Carles, a JP, were among the hostile crowd baying outside Dadley’s hotel. When a nonconformist did manage to apprehend one of the rioters and bring him to the gaol, he was informed by the keeper that the gaol was under orders not to take any prisoners that night.1 If Pitt’s government did not directly orchestrate the riot, it and the Crown nonetheless took considerable pleasure in its outcome. George III expressed his satisfaction: ‘I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light.’2 The compensation paid to those who had lost their property in the riots was less than generous and slow in coming. The vast majority of the rioters also got off scot-free.
When the trial finally got under way in August 1791, only twelve men were arraigned. The jurors were hand-picked by John Brooke, Under-Sheriff of Warwickshire and, along with Carles and Spencer, another likely orchestrator of the riots. Unsurprisingly, the jury acquitted most of the prisoners. Of the four who were convicted, one was pardoned. The remaining three, who were ultimately executed, were all notorious local criminals and it was strongly suspected that the trial had simply provided the authorities with a convenient way of getting rid of them on minimal evidence. As William Hutton bitterly remarked: ‘The world will be apt to draw this conclusion, None were executed for the Riots.’3
Official repression followed locally coordinated intimidation. By the time Political Justice was published in January 1793, the government of Pitt the Younger had already begun to take stringent measures against both indi
vidual radicals and the London Corresponding Society. On 21 May 1792, the government had issued a royal proclamation urging magistrates to prosecute printers and booksellers found to be producing or distributing seditious material, and warned the public to be on their guard against seditious writings. When this failed to check radical activity, a second proclamation was issued that December, which increased the pressure on local officials to take action against any such writings. The meetings of the LCS itself were increasingly surveilled by government spies and the minutes of the Society became (with good reason) more and more paranoid about loyalist infiltration and eavesdropping.
An orchestrated loyalist campaign came to fruition under the direction of John Reeves, a one-time commissioner for bankruptcy, barrister and legal writer. Reeves’s role as clerk to the Board of Trade provided him with government connections and he had already contributed to the framing of new police legislation for Ireland and England. Alarmed by the radical activity he saw going on in London, on 20 November 1792 at the Crown and Anchor pub in the Strand he formed the first Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers. His initiative was excellent news for Pitt’s administration. It provided the veneer of spontaneity to the exercise, while the government could surreptitiously bankroll and coordinate the new associations. Their popularity – some two thousand had been formed by the time Reeves wound up his activities in July 1793 – should not obscure the fact that these societies were not meant to encourage popular political participation. Reeves’s own committee advised
that the business of such Societies should be conducted by a Committee, and that the Committee should be small, as better adapted for the dispatch of business; for it should be remembered, that these are not open Societies for talk and debate, but for private consultation and real business. The societies at large need not meet more than once a month, or once in two or three months, to audit the accounts, and to see to the application of money.
A Radical History Of Britain Page 26
