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More than this, the notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure.
After having had their bread and cheese and porter for supper, as usual, and their pipes afterwards, with some conversation on the hardness of the times and the dearness of all the necessaries of life … the business for which they had met was brought forward—Parliamentary Reform—an important subject to be deliberated upon and dealt with by such a class of men.
The living soul and the creating spirit are not one, but divided, the one looking after a kingdom without him, the other drawing him to look and wait for a kingdom within him, which moth and rust doth not corrupt and thieves cannot break through and steal. This is a kingdom that will abide, the outward kingdom must be taken from you.
An understanding of this withdrawal—and of what was preserved despite the withdrawal—is crucial to an understanding of the 18th century
Within one year of his arrival in America (November 1774) he had published Common Sense and the Crisis articles which contain all the assumptions of Rights of Man. “I have an aversion to monarchy, as being too debasing to the dignity of man,” he wrote. “But I never troubled others with my notions till very lately, nor ever published a syllable in England in my life.”
What had changed was not Paine, but the context in which he wrote. The seed of Rights of Man was English: but only the hope brought by the American and French Revolutions enabled it to strike.
Wesley wished the Methodists to be a “peculiar people”; to abstain from marriage outside the societies; to be distinguished by their dress and by the gravity of their speech and manners; to avoid the company even of relatives who were still in “Satan’s kingdom”.
the cult of “Love” was brought to a point of poise between the affirmations of a “social religion” and the pathological aberrations of frustrated social and sexual impulses.
In the Garden were “tomb-stones where flowers should be”: And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds, And binding with briars my joys & desires.
It is as though units of paranoia hitherto diffused through the population suddenly coalesce to form a new entity: a collective paranoiac fanaticism.
Throughout the Industrial Revolution we can see this tension between the “kingdom without” and the “kingdom within” in the Dissent of the poor, with chiliasm at one pole, and quietism at the other.
The history of Methodism suggests that the morbid deformities of “sublimation” are the most common aberrations of the poor in periods of social reaction; while paranoiac fantasies belong more to periods when revolutionary enthusiasms are released.
Image and reality again became confused. Chiliasm touched Blake with its breath: it walked abroad, not only among the Jacobins and Dissenters of artisan London, but in the mining and weaving villages of the Midlands and the north and the villages of the south-west.
And many, like Blake, felt themselves torn between a rational Deism and the spiritual values nurtured for a century in the “kingdom within”. When Paine’s Age of Reason was published in the years of repression, many must have felt with Blake when he annotated the final page of the Bishop of Llandaff’s Apology for the Bible (written in reply to Paine):
Their attachment to civil and religious liberty went hand in hand with their attachment to the dogmas of free trade.
But what of the denizens of “Satan’s strongholds”, the “harlots and publicans and thieves” whose souls the evangelists wrestled for?
To be more accurate, most men and women of property felt the necessity for putting the houses of the poor in order. The remedies proposed might differ; but the impulse behind Colquhoun, with his advocacy of more effective police, Hannah More, with her halfpenny tracts and Sunday Schools, the Methodists with their renewed emphasis upon order and submissiveness, Bishop Barrington’s more humane Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, and William Wilberforce and Dr. John Bowdler, with their Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion,
Each wanton judge new penal statutes draw, Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.…
To see these vagabonds catching the lumps, shouting, swearing, fighting, and blackguarding in every possible way, women as well as men, all the vile wretches from the courts and alleys in St. Giles and Westminster, the Porridge Islands, and other miserable places; to see these people representing, as it was said, the electors of Westminster, was certainly the lowest possible step of degradation.…
This defensive ideology nourished, of course, far larger claims to positive rights. Wilkes had known well how to strike this chord—the champion defending his individual rights passed imperceptibly into the free-born citizen challenging King and Ministers and claiming rights for which there was no precedent.
In 1776 Wilkes went so far as to plead in the House of Commons for the political rights of “the meanest mechanic, the poorest peasant and day labourer”, who— has important rights respecting his personal liberty, that of his wife and children, his property however inconsiderable, his wages …
stale, forbidding ways/Of custom, law, and statute” into the shadows.
The science of constructing a commonwealth … is not to be taught a priori.… The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.… The rights of men in governments are … often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.…
By the operation of this plan, the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture, will be superceded.… The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last, as a reprisal of parish upon parish. Widows will have a maintenance for their children … and children will no longer be considered as encreasing the distresses of their parents.… The number of petty crimes, the offspring of distress and poverty, will be lessened. The poor, as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of Government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease. Ye who
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Volney’s Ruins was published in cheap pocketbook form and remained in the libraries of many artisans in the 19th century. Its fifteenth chapter, the vision of a “New Age”, was frequently circulated as a tract. In this the narrator sees a civilised nation determined to divide itself into two groups: those who “by useful labours contribute to the support and maintenance of society”, on the one hand, and their enemies, on the other.
By bringing the nation into the question, he was bound to set in motion forces which he could neither control nor foresee. That is what democracy is about.
That the government of England is as great, if not the greatest, perfection of fraud and corruption that ever took place since governments began,
In Ipswich the magistrates dispersed a “Disputing Club” in an ale-house, “consisting of very Inferior People”: in Wiltshire a schoolmaster was sacked for “traitorous expressions”: in Northamptonshire villages a house-to-house loyalty canvass took place. Agents were appointed in various districts to visit bookshops and prosecute any found selling Rights of Man: at least one illiterate bill-sticker was imprisoned for posting bills in favour of reform.
In particular, professional men with access to printing-press, bookshop, pulpit or rostrum, who associated with plebeian reformers, were the subject of intimidation.
All nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of Babylon’s fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.…
