The Trouble with Tom (29 page)

Committed to the Ground

Cobbett embodied so many contradictory opinions that it's hard to summarize him. Sometimes he wrote for Paine, sometimes against; he fought against child labor and for worker's rights, but was indifferent to slaves and hostile to Jews. There is no lack of venom and ignorance to be found in his work, and yet occasionally he soars far above his peers, as in this speech decrying claims that outlawing child labor would damage the economy:

Hitherto, we have been told that our navy was the glory of the country, and that our maritime commerce and extensive manufactures were the mainstays of the realm. We have also been told that the land has its share in our greatness, and should be justly considered as the pride and glory of England. The Bank, also, has put in its claim to share in this praise, and has stated that public credit is due to it; but now, a most surprising discovery has been made, namely, that our superiority over other nations is owing to 300,000 little girls in Lancashire.

Perhaps the best way to understand him is the way so many of his countrymen did, by reading Cobbett's
Political Register.
The British Library has a bound set, and those interested in the tale of Paine's bones will particularly want to read volume 35, which covers the period of 1819 to 1820. It's easy to find paperback reprints of his amiable
Rural Rides
(1830) and
The American Gardener
(1821); but perhaps the best sense of the man can come from editor William Reitzel's
The Autobiography
of
William Cobbett
(1947), which cleverly assembles fragments from Cobbett's voluminous writings into a very readable and entertaining "in his own words" autobiography. It goes along quite nicely with Laurence Vulliany's
William Cobbett's
Rural Rides Revisited
(1977), a photo essay which traces Cobbett's footsteps and finds power stations and modern bungalows where farmland once stood, but also finds a surprising number of old vistas still largely unchanged or gently decaying. I'm particularly fond of the photo of a haplessly bashed-up old cast-iron sign on one trailside, sternly warning:

PERSONS
THR NG
ST S
AT TH
TELEGRAPHS
ILL BE
PROSEC TED

It would appear that the sign made for excellent target practice.

References to Cobbett and the bones, though hostile and not to be overly trusted, can be found in the
Times
of London for November 18 and December 22, 1819, and July 13, 1820. For a sense of the graveyard chaos of the era, see Philip Neve's 1790 pamphlet A
Narrative of the Disinterment of Milton's Cofin in the
Parish Church
of st.
Giles, Cripplegate
(the New York Public Library has a copy); a letter to the April 17,1852, issue of the journal
Notes
and Queries
claims "I have handled one of Milton's ribs . . . One fell to the lot of an old and esteemed friend, and between forty and forty-five years ago, at his house, not many miles from London, I have often examined the said rib-bone." But for a particularly useful annotated firsthand account of medical grave-robbing, read James Blake Bailey's
The Dia
y
of
a Resurrectionist
(1896).

It would be an almost hopeless task to compile all the newspaper and pamphlet attacks made on Cobbett during his lifetime, but one of the prime examples, using the side-by-side format to damn Cobbett with his own conflicting opinions, is
Cobbett's Gridiron
(1822). Of the numerous pamphlets mocking Cobbett and the bones-bear in mind that Cobbett arrived in Liverpool on November 21, so these illustrated satirical pamphlets flooded out within a matter of weeks—two typical examples are
Sketches
of
the Life
of
Bi14 Cobb and Tommy Pain
(1819) and
The Real or
Constitutional House that Jack Built
(1819). The latter is itself one of many ripoffs of a very successful pamphlet published earlier that year by Cobbett's fellow radical William Hone,
The Political House That
Jack Built,
which cleverly used the structure of the children's rhyme to build up an argument against the suspension of habeas corpus and other injustices resulting from Peterloo.

To get a broad sense of the economic and social pressures building up in Britain prior to Cobbett's arrival with Paine's bones, it's still hard to beat R. J. White's classic study
Waterloo to Peterloo
(1957), as well as J. H. Plumb's
England in the Eighteenth Century
(1950); there have been many useful studies before and since, but these remain models of clarity. Paine's essays are available in numerous editions, but M. Beer's 1920 anthology
The Pioneers
of
Land Reform
is a particularly useful compilation, as it places
Agrarian Justice
(1796) in the context of William Ogilvie's
Essay
on the Right of Property
(1781) and William Spence's
The Real Rights
of Man
(1775 / 1793). These make it clear that Paine's thinking, while certainly striking, was part of a wider radical property-theory tradition. Spence, though not mentioned in this book, is a striking protosocialist figure from the era. He and Paine were commonly paired together in the discussions of reform; Conder tokens often show them together, and indeed sometimes hanging together at the gallows.

For a charming old essay on the very deepest roots of British property laws, see Augustus Jessopp's
Studies
by
a Recluse
(1893). Jessopp was one of those eccentric country parsons that Britain once seems to have cornered the market on; a friend of Gothic writer M. R. James and the novelist Angela Thirkell, he wrote about antiquities like a ghost story writer, and ghost stories like an antiquities writer. Those looking for his fiction might want to try
Frivola
(1896); sadly, and rather like one of his own plots, he became a bit of a ghost in his old age, slowly descending into lonely madness.

Finally, mention of the notice against writing on skulls can be found in the fourth volume (i.e., Fourth Series) of Frank Buckland's wonderful
Curiosities
of
Natural History
(1879), in his essay "Ancestral Skulls." In this same essay he makes an extraordinary suggestion that seems prophetic of modern forensic reconstruction: "I feel convinced that sculptors would do well to practice restoring the features by means of modelling clay to skulls. The student might take a modern African skull, and on it mould the features of a negro; the same with a European or Mongolian specimen, & c."

The Bone Grubbers

There are three primary contemporary accounts of the travels of Thomas Paine's bones. Two are by active participants and possessors of Paine's remains. The first is
A
Brief History of the Remains of the
late Thomas Paine, From the Time of Their Disinterment in
1819
by
the Late William Cobbett M.P., Down
to
the Year
1846, which was published in 1847 by James Watson and almost certainly written by him as well—it includes, suitably enough, a substantial list in the back of Paine books published by Watson. Watson's pamphlet ends with the bones still in Tilly's possession; Watson had no inkling of the possible lifting of bones by John Chennell, or indeed of his own eventual ownership of the bones.

The second account is Moncure Conway's
The Adventures
of
Thomas Paine's Bones,
a handwritten manuscript in the archives of the Thomas Paine Historical Association. Conway published two excerpts from this article in
The Truth Seeker
in June 1902; these fell into obscurity and their existence is not even known to many Paine scholars. Rarer still is the original, more detailed manuscript, which was never seen in its entirety until Kenneth Burchell transcribed it for members of the Thomas Paine Historical Association in their
Journal
of March 2002. Conway also has a brief commentary on Paine's remains in volume 2 of his
Life
of
Thomas Paine
(1892), but this is largely superseded by
The Adventures of Thomas Paine's Bones.

Rather more mysteriously, in 1908 the anonymous booklet
Thomas Paine's Bones and Their Owners
appeared; in addition to recounting the facts of the previous pamphlets (and in some cases, reconfirming them by contacting participants who were still alive), it introduces a number of new details about Benjamin Tilly's final days, and reveals Watson's purchase of Paine's bones at Tilly's auction around 1853. The New York Public Library's copy of the booklet is of particular interest, as it apparently reveals the writer's real name Uabez Hunns, of Wood Green, London) and includes annotations in the author's own hand. Though they are largely in agreement anyway, when in doubt I have tended to favor the explanations in Conway and Watson over those by Hunns, since they are known and credible witnesses; nonetheless, Hunns does appear to have been in some position to know the people involved in tracking down Paine. This copy was given to the library by William Van Der Wyde in 1912, who at the time was the president of the Thomas Paine Historical Association. He knew Conway and probably knew Hunns too, since he came into possession of this personally annotated copy.

In addition to the articles noted for the previous chapter, references to Cobbett and Paine's bones can be found in the
Times
of London for 29 January 1821, 15 February 1822, 24 July 1822, 31 January 1823,ll October 1823,13 February 1826,28 March 1826,9 May 1826,4 May 1827,25 October 1828,26January 1836,14 June 1836, and 16 November 1836. The publishing activities on Bolt Court can also be glimpsed in the many publishers listed there during the nineteenth century, including the firms W. Tyler, Bensley & Son, Mills Jowett & Mills, and in Rupert Cannon's
The Bolt Court
Connection:
A
Histoy
of
the LCC School
of
Photoengraving and
Lithography: 1893-1949
(1985). The long publishing history of Paternoster Row and Queen's Head Passage can be seen in Samuel Leigh's
Leigh's New Picture of London
(1819) and
The London Book
Trades 1775-1800:
A
Topographical Guide to the Streets
(Exeter Working Papers in British Book Trade History, 1980), which is now available online at the Devon County Library's Web site.

The main account of Carlile for most scholars remains Joel Wiener's
Radicalism and Free thought in Nineteenth Century Britain:
The Life of Richard Carlile
(1983); there's also a very useful account in Theophilia Carlile Campbell's
The Batde of the Press, as Told in a
Story of the Life of Richard Carlile, by His Daughter
(1899)—this can be hard to find, but the New York Public Library has one. See also the chapter on the War of the Shopmen in David Nash's
Blasphemy
in Modem Britain:
1789
to
Present
(1999), and in T.
A.
Jackson's
Trials
of
British Freedom
(1968). For an interesting if scattershot account of Carlile, see Guy Aldred's
Richard Carlile, Agitator: His
Life and Times
(1941);
Richard Carlile: His Battle
. . . (1917), and Aldred's edition of Carlile's
Jail Joumak Prison Thoughts and Other
Writings
(1942); it's a wartime book, and by a socialist publisher at that, so it's all rather slapped together and chaotic. Nonetheless, it's worth picking up.

The trials of Carlile and his assistant made up quite a body of literature in the 1820s, much of it published by Carlile himself. Some representative examples can be seen in the
Report of the
Trial
of Mrs. Susannah Wright
(1822), and many others are compiled in
The Trials with the Defences at Large of Mrs. Jane Carlile, Mary-Anne
Carlile, William Holmes, John Barkley, Humphrey Boyle, Joseph Modes,
Mrs. Wright, William Tunbridge, James Watson, Willam Campion,
Thomas Jeferies, Richard Hassell, Willam Haley, John Clarke, William
Cochrane, and Thomas Riley Perry, being the Persons who were
Prosecuted for selling the publication of Richard Carlile in various
Shops
(1825). The tale of the ingenious "puss and mew'' gin-vending machine can be found in Jessica Warner's
Craze: Gin and Debauchery
in an Age of Reason
(2002). John Stuart Mill's account in the July 1824 issue of the
Westminster Review
was reprinted in 1883—this time, in the wake of the prosecution of freethinker
G.
W. Foote—under the title
J.
S.
Mil On Blasphemy.

Carlile's medical crusades are best understood through the pages of his own newspaper
The Republican,
but there's also an interesting (if slightly incoherent) assemblage of his and Thomas Wakley's battles in Charles Wortham Brooks's
Carlile and the Surgeons
(1943). It is quite difficult to find old copies of Richard Carlile's
Every Woman's Book
(1826)—not surprisingly, since they were kept well hidden, and were probably read to pieces—but fortunately M. L. Bush's fascinating
What Is Love?: Richard Carlile's Philosophy
of
Sex
(1998) includes both the full text of
Every Woman's Book
and extensive commentary on its history.

S. Squire Sprigge's
The Life and Times of Thomas Wakley
(1899) provides not only a history of the early
Lancet
editorial meetings, but also some fascinating accounts of Wakley's work as a consumer advocate tangling in the 1850s with London food vendors. When the magazine investigated cocoa powders, "of fiftysix samples examined, many of which were warranted pure and possessing all sorts and kinds of charming qualities, eight only were found to be genuine." And whiie imported American nutmeg was found entirely genuine, "of twenty-one curry powders nineteen contained ground-rice, flour, salt, and colouring matter—red lead, for example—in varying proportions."

W. J. Linton's brief biography
James Watson:
A
Memoir
(1880) gives a rare glimpse into his friend's home life, and into his spartan life behind the counter. For information on the movements of Cobbett and George West, many thanks are due to the Normandy Historians group and their transcription of that town's parish tax records. Some curious legal history of posthumous debt collection can be found in a series of letters in
Notes and Queries
on "Arresting A Dead Body For Debt" for March 28, May 2, and July 18,1896, as well as in John Timbs's
Popular Errors Illustrated and Explained
(1856)—which also helpfully notes among other errors that hedgehogs do not suck cows dry, and that cats do not suck the breath out of sleeping infants.