"THE NEW PUBLIC SPACE": SCIENCE, POLITICS, AND RADICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLAND OF THE LATE- 18th AND EARLY - 1 9th CENTURIES

by John Robert Michael Ames B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1998

THESIS SUBMImD IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

in the Department of ENGLISH

Q JOHN RM AMES 2000 SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY December 2000

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Cana! This thesis illustrates how reform publishing, scientific ideas (materialist ones), and radical politics intersected during the later part of the eighteenth-century aud helped to give rise to a new public space. Many people, including those whom 1 shall discuss in this study, moved in these publishimg, scientifïc, literary, and politicai worlds. This study traces some of the ways in which the popularization of materialist science altered public opinion and the political world in late eighteenth-century England through the publications and ensuing debates spurred by the period's most prolific reform Iiterature publisher, Joseph Johnson. Joseph Johnson's publishing efforts assisted writers like Erasmus Darwin and John Thelwall (authors directiy and indirectly associated with Johnson's circle of wnters). These authors typified an emergent intersection between radical materialism and radical politics. Their works, like that of many others who wrote about materidist science and politics during the period, illustrate some of the effects scientific ideas (especiaiiy fiom taxonomy, evolution, chemistry, and electricity) had in shaping public opinion. The intersection of this type of literature with the circurnstances and conditioiis of the day helped to radicalize politicai agitation for reform in Britain during the seventeen-nineties. In showing the comection between materialist science and the agitation for social reform, my focus will be on the many fomof dissent seen both in urban and rural areas of Britain. The spread of this dissent-exemplified by mass meetings, publications in the British radical tradition, speeches and pamphlets containing secular ideas, plebeian educational lectures, and through a number of leaders in the London Correspondhg Society and Society for Constitutiond informatioa-captured the interests and minds of the common people. This interest and spread of political education+hmugh polemical works such as Mary WollstonecratYs hdication of the Righfs of Mm and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revofutim in France-was facilitateci by a profusion of relatively cheap and readily accessible publications made avaihble by publishm like Joseph Johnson. Such publications were cesponsible for helping to educate political auto-didacts like Thomas Hardy, John Home Tooke, Francis Place, and John Thelwail. This particular mix of affodable texts, economic and social conditions, and increasing political iiteracy st this period, made it by and large a pnnt-politics culture. These social forces, dong with the popularization and spread of radical materialist science, helped to shape a new and secularized space where classes intersectecl; and, although political conservatives blamed this spread of secular knowkdge for threatening to overtuni the "moral-foundation" of English social life, this thesis will show that materialist philosophy actually vindicated radical-reform arguments favourable to England's majority. 1 would like to give special thanks to my inunediate Wy,John, Gillian, Michael, and Mary, my good fnends John and Margmt Ahsens, and most of al1 my "long suffering" wife, Katharina, for their patient help throughout the various stages of bringing this thesis to its ha1conclusion. I would also like to thank my supe~sorycornmittee member+present, past, and unofficial-Hannah Gay, JddZaslove, John Whatley, Paul Keen, Ian Dyck, Tirthanker Bose, Michael Lebowitz, Stafford Neal, and Alan Vardy, for their many hours of engaging and inspirational discussions, criticisms, and comrnents in moving this thesis forward to its completion. vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

APPROVAL ...... ii ... ABSTRACT...... iii DEDECATION ...... iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... v TABLE OF CONTENTS ...... vii INTRODUCTION ...... I CHAPTER 1 JOSEPH JOHNSON, PATRON OF RADICALS, PUBLISHER OF PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND POLITICS: A REFORMIST NETWORK...... 1 2 CHAPTER n REORDERING CREATION: MATERIALISM,MOMSM, AND SCIENTIFIC ICONOCLASM IN LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE ...... 3 t CHAPTER III EDMUND BURKE, TOM PM,AND THE LONDON CORRESPONDING SOCIETY: THE CONTEST FOR THE GENERAL MTELLECT IN BRITAiN DURING THE 1790s...... 52 CONCLUSION CONSERVATIVE REACTIONARIES, MATERIALIST-SCIENCE, AND RADICAL LITERATURE M ENGLAND OF THE 1790s...... 82 NOTES ...... 87 BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 102 INTRODUCTION

The political controversies of the late-eighteenth-century reflect a long-tem historical problem, one aaiculated well by E. P. Thompson and Cbristopher Hill. These historians were trying to understand the agitations, and attempts, by England's common citizenry to regain theu perceived "lost fieedoms" pertaining to civil rights and Common

Land expropriations. This study is a micro-historical anaiysis of how these civil rights and "lost fieedoms" problems reemerged during the 1790s when a new plebeian space developed fiom new, and secular, reading practices. This new plebeian space underscored and promoted an emerging biologicd and scientific "materiaiist" view of the naturai world, and consequently was used in a variety of ways to solidify the penod's radical-reform arguments. The nse of "natutal science" aitered the intellectual world when people realized its implications for the social and political spheres.

The innumerable variables (social, economic, poIitical) that fuelled the hostile debates between the materialist philosophers of science and the many politicai reactionaries opposed to them in the 1790s, remain to this day not well articulated. It is a common assumption that the French Revolution, and to a lesser extent, the American

Revolution, were the primary cause of reactionary fears felt by political conservatives in the latter decades of the eighteenth century in England. However, these revolutions cm only really account for one way of reading the events that actuaily womed politicai conservatives in Great Britain. The revolutions were used as bogies to divert attention away fiom the very teal, and politicaLly explosive domestic problems on home soil. By pointing to the aîrocities of the French Revolution during the Reign of Terror, English 2 authorities attempted to portray an illusion of relative stability in Britain, and that this stability would be threatened by any similar political activity. Yet, mucb of what they propagated was sirnply hyperbole without great evidence. In this heady political mix the ernergence of fonnal societies, clubs, and associations gave space and voice to new pupsof people agitating for political representation. These people included pets, publishers, and radicais, such as Thomas Beddoes, William Blake, John Clare, Samuel

Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper, Erasmus Darwin, Daniel Isaac Eaton, Maria

Edgeworth, Benjamin Franklin, William Godwin, Thomas Hardy, Mary Hays, William

Hazlitt, Joseph Johnson, Tom Paine, Francis Place, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, John

Thelwail, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, and associations like the

Birmingham Lunar Society, Society for Constitutional Information, and the London

Corresponding Society. Of these 1 will focus especiaily on Erasmus Darwin, Joseph

Johnson, Francis Place, and John Thelwail.

In reaction to the growing number of speaking venues, publishing houses, and other avenues for social and political criticism, the Tory Government of William Pitt and its supporters felt compelled to try to control public opinion. The ideological pundits of

Pitt's government in the legal, military, medicai, religious, publishing, and paid-spying professions, sought to dimpt, break apart, arrest, and punish, what they cailed "Jacobin" ideas.' Many consewative writers, like Edmund Burke, blamed these "Jacobin" ideas for promoting dangerous new forms of materialism and radical-reform politics. They claimed that these ideas threatened the very foundations of British civilkation, and that they had to be resisted. Activities by Pitt's Conservative agents against the "Jacobite scare," however, were, as Mary Wollstonecraft States, a great "bugbear" used to distract public attention.

In her view, among the most serious problems of the day were, inesponsible govemance during a period of great economic turmoil, official abuses against the unemployed and working-poor, and the lack of full civil rights for large numbers of the population. The

1790s was a period of intensified bourgeois activity extending "private property and

'indienable rights"' at the expense of large numbers of people driven fiom the approximately 8 miHion acres of Cornmon Land Enclosures from 1780 to 18 15.2

Although the middling class was winning some civil rights and, with the land owning gentry and aristocracy, were increasing their economic power directly and indirectly through these enclosures, (among the largest land-expropriations in British history), serious problems were felt by the working poor as a result. These added to the problems of the urban working poor and fiieled ever-increasiag hostilities toward the Pitt

Govement.

Much of the literature reflecting this hostility and calling for refonn shows how the intersection of radical-science and plitics gave new agency to the cause of radical- refonn. Materialism was a philosophical idea which through debates about the social and political world were heightened to new levels. Whether complete naturalism or supematuraiism (monist-materialism versus dualism) best explained the natural wortd became quickly embroiled in the arguments propounding whether radical plebeian- politics or conse~ativepolitics best serveâ national interests. in order to show the overlapping connections between radical politics and naturalisrn, 1 have concentrated on four individuals who typify the connections between the chles of writers propagating topics of radical-materiaiist science and reform politics.

The kst, Joseph Johnson, was a pmliic reform publisher of science, dissenting religion, philosophy, history, and politics. The second, Erasmus Darwin, was a medical- scientist who was involved in a range of science societies, associations, and didactic literary productions. The third, John Thelwall, was a lay medical-scientist, minor poet, and radical politicai activist in the London Conespondhg Society. And fourth, Francis

Place, was a skilled labourer, who, because of the advantages of affordable educational literature made possible by publishers like Joseph Johnson and writers like Erasmus

Darwin, also became a self-educated political activist in the London Corresponding

Society. Although the circle of people who held materiaiist views, to a greater or lesser extent, was much larger and included people in this study, 1 have selected these four only.

Their approach to materiaiist philosophy appears to more explicitly intersect with radical politics in their writings than some of their contemporary peers, such as Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, William Wordsworth, William Blake, or Joseph Priestley.

Chapter 1 of this thesis, "Joseph Johnson, Patron of Radicals, Pubiisher of

Philosophy, Science, and Politics: A Refonnist Network," shows Johnson's publishing infiuence on dissenting Unitarianism, moral-reform literature, medicine, science, and politics (the latter dealing with ihe controversies surround'mg the French Revolution and the spread of Jacobin philosophy on British soil). Johnson's publishing business marks the concrete, materiai way in which iiterary production helped to develop new public spaces, inter-connecting the ideological, politicai, and cultural dimensions of British society throughout the 1780s and 1790s. Chapter II, "Reordering Creation: Materialism, Monism, and Scientific

Iconoclasrn in Late Eighteenth-Century Literature," traces the ways in which secular literature and rnaterialist-science intersected. It higbiights some major worh by Erasmus

Darwin, John Thelwdl, and other British and European scientists, adreveals how such scientists hybridized new scientifictheones tbcough the availability of inexpensive literature popularizing scientific debates, medical knowledge, and materialist philosophy.

Materialist-medical knowledge was beginning to advance new physiological evidence that undercut the older "mind-body" dualist models pertaining to the human body and the soul, and threw into question belief systems conceming human mortality and an after-life. Tbese ideas spread in many new directions and found their location in some of the major literary productions of the period. Percy and Mary Shelley's works,

Mont Blanc (1817) and Frunkensrein (1 818), are two touchstones that exempli@ how materialist principles intersect with literature and public opinion. Likewise, the materialist views of John Thelwall in the mid-1790s can be traced to new culturai spsices, such as Guy's Hospital and the London Corresponding Society.

Chapter III, "Edmund Burke, Tom Paine, and the London Corresponding Society:

The Contest for the General intellect in Britian During the1790s:' illustrates the way in which matetialist-science and secular ideas entered into British politics more generally*

Newly formed reform and radical organizations, like the Society for Constitutional information and The London Corresponding Society, blossomed under the expansion of easily accessible and relativety cheap scientific, dissenting, and refomiist Merahire. The profiision of cheap, readily accessible Merature, nsiog literacy rates, and the development of a new public sphere whece secular and political association took place, vurred the 6 education and radicalization of skilled and unskiiled labouring people in profound ways.

Labouring people like Francis Place, Thomas Hardy, Tom Paine, and John Thelwall,

typfi how the rapid spread of secular knowledge amongst workers served to serioudy

challenge the supremacy of Conservative political authority.

In taking up this study, 1will engage with some of Jürgen Habermas's discussions

swrounding the role of publishing in Enlightenment England? Habermas, in his

refùtation of Adorno's and Horkheimer's Frankfiirt School view of the Eniightenment-

with its loss of Gad, morality, and its yielding to an increasingly secularized Capitalism,

contends that the decline of the Enlightenment actually benefited many middling class

people with the emergence of a new public sphere that developed out of the litecary

world. With the collapse of the old regime, these new literary spheres provided a space

and voice for new classes of people to exchange ideas, including, in my view, working

ctass people.

Although what 1 set out to do here is somewhat analogous to Habermas's account

of the emergence of a bourgeois public space and scientific knowledge through print, his

analysis does not sufficiently reveal how the fusion of radical, plebeian politics and

materialist philosophy occurred: a tradition heavily steeped in an oral tradition and in

"common-law" practice. Habermas's theory, because it yields to the idea that the

evolution of public space andl or spheres is primarily the result of bourgeois literary

production, does not adequately account for al1 of the social and matecial variables that

explain the creation of a plebeian public space.

I am here concerned with the very long-standing grievances bound in oraI customs

and traditions, for instance, that Christopher Hiil and E. P. Thompson convhcingly show are a cornmon underlying engine of social discontent and change in British history.

These traditions are what they refer to as the medieval myths of the "Norman Yoke" and

"Freeborn Briton" (underscored by the memory of rebellions like the "Watt Tyler

Rebellion" and numerous peasant revolts) articulated at times of high taxes and Land

Enclosures upon the "Common-People" by the British nobility and later monopoly capitalists? Rhetorically, Thomas Paine invokes the ideas of seventeenth-century

Leveller tracts in his late eighteenth-century writings.

A fusing of the Habermasian mode1 of the public space with this plebeian radical tradition, as exemplified by the London Corresponding Society and its echoing of many of the Leveller "Norman Yoke" ideas, allows one to tap into the long standing social problems of the British people, which were primarily articulated in the oral traditions of an ilfiterate labourhg population. The origins of this radical tradition, as Peter

Kropotkin's later twentieth-century observation on the "mutual-aid" ways of life of

medieval Europe illustra te^,^ link the social conflicts of earlier epochs to those of the late- eighteenth-century. Additionally, Charles Darwin's mid-nineteenth-century evidence

suggests a propensity toward collective living in man. Kropotkin, using Darwin's ideas,

irnplicitiy notes the "conspecific" feelings rhetorically dculated by radical-political oral

and writtm productions of the late eighteenth-century. Thompson's, Hill's, and

Kropotkin's studies infonn the conflicts erupting during the 1790s and their manifest

political expressio~nebolstered by naturai science's intersection with radicd

literature and the consequent rise of a secularized plebeian space.

The subsequent chapters reveal different aspects of the public space in which

scientific ideas, radicalism, and politics merge. Geographically, the network of people occupying this space in inner-London connected with people Living in the outer towns and provinces more genedy: both because of the provincial authoiJhip and the readership. Emergent spaces made it possible for the publishing world of specialized journais and inexpensive books to flourish outside of London where texts such as The

Rights of Man, ReJections on the Revolution in France, the Analytical Review,

Gentleman 's Magazine, and AnriJacobin Review were read and discussed.

Prior to this period, publishers like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel

Richardson in the early- to mid- eighteenth-century helped to fashion and build these new spaces of eighteenth-century intellectual Me. These spaces encornpassed the worlds of technologies, printing, and societies, and provided new ways of exchanging views and

Uiformation. Part of early eighteenth-century London was becoming, as Larry Stewart notes, a "coffee house culture," informally linking formal societies like the Royal Society to gathering places of respite and amusement.' This coffee house culture was where the dissemination of new ideas and discoveries about science, technology, trade, and liberal philosophy could fkeely exchange and circulate.

Coffee houses were places where people, such as merchants, inventors, scientists, medicai physicians, skilled and unskilled workers, could congregate. They inspired a cross-fertilization of ideas and the publishing of new texts. A pacticular contmversy that emerged in the late decades of the eighteenth-century tkom this fusion of ideas, debates, and increased access to published materials, centered on the use of materialist science in medicine. For example, could materialist ideas be used to explain the mind and1 or sou1 as well as the body? Medical advances developed hmradical-rnaterïalist science during the period were both at once celebrated and controversial. The debates conceming medicai science are instructive, as the contested ideas and theories about materialist philosophy ofien betrayed conservative religious and politicai values.

John Thelwaii's life and work makes clear what conservative doctors wished to maintain as conventional medical philosophy. As this study shows in Chapter II, the type of materialist methodology that Thelwall used to explain the mind-sou1 dichotomy in

1793 at Guy's Hospital Physical Society, (one explicitly accepted for explaining physiology), was considered unfit for senous medical inquiry by senior medical doctors.

Thelwall's lectures at Guy's Hospital are indicative of the split between materialism for studying the body as a machine, and the body as a spiritual entity.

Newtonian science, ideas utilkg materialism but pnerally avoiding matters relating to spirit, mind, or God, had been gaining wider and wider acceptance for seventy to eighty- years pnor to Thelwail's medicai investigations. Through "coffee-house" lectures and discussions, Newtonian science, however, began to inadvertently dislodge conservative authority when its materiaikt appmach crossed intellectual categories to inform new plebeian and seculac thinken.

The spread of Newtonian materialism tiiroughout the early eighteenth-century

(later entertained by scientists like Joseph Priestley, David Hadey, Thomas Beddoes, and

Humphry Davy) created yet more spaces via people involved in new technologies (such as the publishing world), roads, and cornunication(mail-pst). Joseph Johnson was part of this new world, and his publishing helped to establish the emergence of a radical political world, such as manifested by the Constitutionai Information and London

Comspondiig Societies! 10

Johnson's publishing brought together thinken fiom worlds of bourgeois life, an old world of Aristocratie society, and plebeian life. For example, Percy Shelley

(aristocratie world) became an acolyte of William Godwin (bourgeois world), drawn to his philosophy of responsible personal governance. The result was a hybridizing, Literally and figuratively, of ideas on refonn literature, philosophy, materialist-science, and radical-politics. Also gaining voice in this period were people like John Thelwall,

Francis Place, Thomas Hardy, Mary Woilstonecraft, and Edmund Burke. Each produced their own literary hybrids of the mmy ideas king discussed.

Edmund Burke, for example-an Irish Catholic educated at a Quaker school and then at Trinity College Dublin? who supported the Amencan Revolution but opposed the

French-was an initial moderate-liberal tunied consewative following his experience, and analysis, of the French Revolution. Liberai reform writers (who supported capitaiism of the period, but sought rights and democtacy for the general public), included people like Daniel Eaton, William Cobbett, and William Godwin. Collectively, people fiom across the political and class spectm questioned religion, upper and lower class privileges, women's ri@, and political authority. What comects al1 of these wtiters is their mutual link back to the publishg world of ide- space of public mediation of their arguments in which to measure how well their ideas stood up to manifesting social and political changes.

Through the world of publishing, activists like physician-scientist Erasmus

Darwin, fieely synthesized ideas of other scientists like Linneaus, Galvini, d'Holbach,

Lamark, and Frankiin, wide dso comecting to a large ceadership, including non-

scientific writers. Universities were not a large part of this world, and the publication of 11 inexpensive literature popularizing new progressive social programmes, such as those with which Darwin and Thelwali were iavolved, conîributed to the spdof knowIedge similsr to today's digital transmission of information. Like in no previous age, new types of people educated themselves and formed societies to represent th& intemsts. Johnson's publishg world helped to connect the new spaces of the British radical tradition, and to form its societies for the discussion of radical ideas within îhe larger secular space.

Societies like the Society for Constitutiod Information and London Corresponding

Society illustrate the refonn effort that publishers in which Johnson and his coterie of writers Uivolved themselves, and demonstrate the extension of networks of radical philosophy, secularism, and political thought fushg into organized social rnovements. CHAPTER 1

JOSEPH JOHNSON,PATRON OF RADICALS,PUBLISHER OF PHILOSOPHY,SCIENCE, AND POLITIC S :A REFORMIST NET WORK

Joseph Johnson's success as a publisher was in part due to bis establishing himself as a refomist voice, one able to respond to conservative arguments of the period. Arguments in support of radical and conservative interests introduced a common cmncy of ideas and language surroundmg concepts such as Liberty, Truth, Justice, and Freedom, and spurred social and political debate. Johnson was among the publishers for radical reform who took advanrage of this debate, and his publishing efforts contributed greatly to what Frankfurt School theorkt Jûrgen Habermas defines as the evolution of this era's bourgeois public space-aprint culture ofpolitics-a space dependent upon the formation of a conscious, participatory reading public.10 Habermas poses a more positive view of the eighteenth century public space than his Frankfurt School predecessors. He holds that rather than a disenchantment of the world, enlightenrnent science brought opportunities to new kinds of people who could act and engage in a variety of new public spaces. This chapter endeavours to demonstrate the relevant contributions that Joseph

Johnson and his circle of writers made to the specific plebeian development of this public space via their efforts to create an inforxned and criticai reading public. Joseph Johnson's Me as a book publisher is unusuai in that he did not use his business specificaiiy to eam profits. Although he made a great deal of money over his lifetime, his primary interest in the book trade was to foment social reform. Johnson's priating history cIearly demonstrates a consciou act to undercut the forces of conservative hegemony. He attempted to spur such change through the publication of numemus writers, such as Wiam Cowper, Mary WoUstonecraR, Tom Paine, and Erasmus Darwin, whose subjects and writings educated and delighted the public whiie promoting social reform. Johnson's promotion of reform through pubiishing focused on four pbary mas: Parliamentary reform (the franchise); sociaVmotal improvement (through the dissemination of philosophic, scientific, and medicai knowledge); Dissenter rights, and the abolition of slavery. His circle included John Horne Tooke, Joseph Priestly, William Wordsworth, and, (although not directly pubiished by Johnson but was part of his reform circle), William Godwin." His life-long dedication to reform publications-with the consequent losses of money due to their unpopularity-'2 made him apatron of radicais. Many of his publications ignited reactionary backlash hmpolitically conservative detractors, and his progressive ideals served to push forward new definitions of reading taste." Although Johnson did not publish any works of his own, he actively took part in the editing of the texts of many of his authors. His numerous and informed suggestions to authors, such as William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Joseph Priestley, and Mary Wollstonecraft, not only iaspired new subjects to write about, but also improved book and pamphlet ~aies.'~He was a business confidant, editorial advisor, and ghostwriter, and typically canied on this type of activity with several authors simultaneously. His awareness of public taste and his shrewd business acumen made him one of Britain's largest printers and booksellers of liberai literature during the period.'' Because Johnson did not write or publish any of his own works, it is dicult to gauge the effectiveness of his editorial contributions. Yet, the way in which he selected texts to pubiish, the editorial suggestions he made to bis writers, and the timing of his sales releases, show that he was a major contributor to the evolution of reading taste within the public sphere. Johnson had a close relationship with most of his writers. He gave weekly dinners that helped to cross-fertilize ideas among his authors.16 His home and his dinners, served as a place for radicais " .. .to meet inconspicuously to discuss political events and to formulatte appropriate respoases."" Johnson's close working relationship with the poet William Cowper exemplifies his involved role in an author's subject and book sales. Although Cowper was one of the leading poets during the 1780~~Johnson's decision to eliminate John Newton's preface (a popular critic of religious literature) fiom Cowper's fht editing of the book of poems reveals his understanding of marketing dissentimg, moral reform poetry. His direct and ofien strict handiing of what Cowper wrote and the release dates of sales, denotes Johnson's grasp of what was acceptable to the reading public. Newton's preface attempted to reflect the over importance of Cowper's poetry, and Johnson seerned aware that its dl too judgmental religious tone that " . . .discredited" social oppressions "by the misconduct . . ." shown would convey a spirit of Miltonic fervor that would negatively affect sales. Newton's original preface States that Cowper,

.. . aims to communicate his own perceptions of the tnith, beauty, and influence of the religion of the Bible, -a religion, which, however discredited by the misconduct of many, who have not renounced the Christian name, proves itseif, when rightly understood, and cordially embraced, to be the grand desïderatum which alone can relieve the mind of man hmthe painful and unavoidable anxieties, inspire it with stable peace and solid hop, and &sh those motives and prospects, which in the present state of things, are absolutely necessary to produce a constant worthy of a rational creature, distinguished by a vastness of capacity, which no assemblage of earthly good can satisQ, and by, and by a principle and preintimation of immortality.''

The subsequent sales success of Cowper's poems vindicates Johnson's decision to drop Newton's preface until eight years &et Cowper's reputation had grown. Cowper, like other authors, grew accustomed to Johnson's informative and intelligent criticism. One of bis letters dento Newton August 25, 178 1 testifies that:

1forgot to mention that Johnson uses the discretion my poetship bas allowed him with much discemment. He has suggested several alterations, or dermarked several defective passages, which 1 have comcted much to the advantage of the poems. In the last sheet he sent me he noted three such, al1 which 1have reduced to better order. In the foregoing sheet, 1 assented to some of his criticisms in some instances, and chose to abide by the original expression in others. Thus we jog on together comfortably enough; and perhaps it would be weil for authors in generai if their booksellers, when men of some taste, were allowed, though not to tinker the work themselves, get to point out the flaws, and humbly to recommend an i~nprovement.'~

Through his poetry, Cowper sought to impart ideas of moral and sociai improvement to his readers. For example, Cowper contrasts the ease of upper class life with that of the labouring poor in "Book IV: The Winter Evening" of The Task. He depicts the temble circumstances of tbe poor, jwrtaposing the harsh conditions of iate eighteenth century laissez-faire capitalism-poverty, class antagonisms, and poorly paid work. Cowper portrays the lacernakers of Oiney as representatives of labourers caught in the matrix of inescapable work and poverty. As Knight shows, his "descriptions of the industrious poor . . .managed to catch the eye and the ear of many a deep-pocketed benefactor and many a politician, both parties combining to relieve the hardships of the lacernakers. In this space done Cowper did a traasforming work in Olney [: the pet's home ~ilIage.]"'~Cowper, iike the pet John Clare, knew weii the conditions of the d poor: bis poetry, typical of Johnson's publisbing project, portrays oppressive workuig and living conditions. In The Ti& for exarnple, Cowper's "Winter Evening," portrays the difficulties faced by a rurai lacemaking family:

Poor, yet industrious, modest, quiet, neat,

S... They brave the season, and yet find at eve 111 clad and fed but sparely time to cool. The fiugal housewife trembles when she lights Her scanty stock of brush-wood, blazhg clear But dying soon, like al1 terrestrial joys. The few small embers left she nurses well, And while her infant race, with outspread hands And crowded knees sit cow'ring o'er the sparks, Retires, content to quake, so they be warm'd. The man feels least, as more inur'd than she To winter, and the current in his veins More briskly moved by his severer toil; Yet he too fmds bis own distress in thein. . .. Sleep seems their only refuge. For alas! Where penury is felt the thought is chain'd, And sweet colloquial pleasures are but few. With al1 this thrift they thrive not. Ail the care ingenious parsimony takes, but just Saves the smaii inventory, bed and stool, SkiIlet and old carved chest from public sale. They live, and live without extorted alms From grudging hands, but others boast have one To sooth honest pride, that scom to beg; Nor comfort else, but in their mutual love.21

Cowper's depiction of weavers makes it obvious that regardless of how hard these people work they are nevertheless driven to hardship and poverty. His juxtaposition of their poverty against their Masters' indifference toward them-their "grudging hands," as

Cowper shows them to be-marks what he saw as the injustice and ubiquitous contempt that many in the upper class typically held toward the working poor. Cowper's poetry, aithough not a direct chailenge toward British deof law, private property, or acquisitive consumption of wealth thtough the exploitation of the nuai labourers, is, however, an indictment of expl~itation.~Cowper's poetry, implicidy calling for social reforms to ameliorate such poverty, mirrots Johnson's and his circle of writers' attempt to promote sympathy for those who ndessly suffered. Cowper's poetry, not unlike Wollstonecraft's, Darwin's, and Paine's prose writings, helped raise the attention and conscioumess of such issues in ttie rninds of the British reading public. Johnson's dein promoting reform literature had its price. Often, due to the controversial nature of his authors' subjects, his books did not sell well. In order to offset the losses that some of his publications might othenivise generate, Johnson combined his efforts with other like-minded publishers of the reform cause: he fonned loose publishing alliances, known as congers? Congers were simple syndicates that broke up the responsibiiities of the cornpiete publishing process into its smailer stages of paper acquisition, typesetting, chapter editing, printing, and Wy,delivery of the books to the booksellers that soM tl~ern?~in this way, profit losses did not so adversely affect the business of any one publislier. It was a novel idea that also functioned well to get new writers into circulation, and further semed to bolster the complicated networks of information dissemination of progressive ideas throughout London and to provincial centres. Although Cowper's poems netted Johnson some of his most lucrative pcof~ts,~ many other writers needed more careful marketing to avoid losses. One such writer was Maq Wollstonecraft, to whom Johnson pre-paid ten guineas for her fust book, Thoughts on the Education of llaughters, which he did not immediately p~blish.~~Similarly, Joseph Priestley's first publications, History of Elec~icity,and Essays on the First Principle of Government were risky ventures, and are additional examples of how Johnson split up controversial texts through the congers to avoid potential losses." Further to his marketing strategies, Johnson ofken used anonymous dedications and authorship for high risk, controversial texts to avoid incrimination of either himself or his authors. One example is Johnson's 1777 release of an anonymous author's, Lnws Respecting Women, as they Regard Their Nafural Ri@. This book is a remarkable testimony to the "clear and explicit discussion of issues previously thought the domain of judges and lawyers .. . " Its "Preface" offers an evocative history of mariage, and comments on the patriarchal effects upon farnilies and women. In the introductory editoriai, the dedication States that:

The society of barbarism is unfrendiy to every soft sensation; on the other hand, when unbridled luxury has [rendecedl mankind debauched and unprincipled, the dissolute manners of a courtesan are admired, whilst the

solid accomplishments of a virtuous woman have no attractions. The men become domestic despots, and though the politeness of such times may restrain them fiom gross acts of violence, yet they indulge themselves in a species of cruelty no Iess oppressive and painfiil, if'the torture of a susceptible mind is superior to any bodily suBering. Whilst men allow themselves in a wanton gratification of their passions, they expect from their wives an uuexceptionable conduct, yet these very men are the most forward and loud in stigmatising the whole sex as govemed by whim, caprice, inconstancy, and an unbounded love of pleasure, at the same time that they expect that a nice sense of honow should make them steadily adhere to what is right; that the satisfactions arising fiom self-approbation should lead them to overlook, or at lest nor to resent, every species of negligence and indifference shown them by those husbands; and that the principle of duty and moral obligation should fortify them against al1 the attacks of pleasure or vices?'

Such publications helped Johnson shape new literary tastes without great financial risk. They spmddemand where there was little prior interest, and served to accommodate new writers such as Maria Edgeworth, Mary Hays, and Mary Wollstonectrift. By the 1780s, Johnson had firmly established himself as a progressive publisher. As early as the late 1770s, he began to widen his space of publications from religious and didactic works to include politics, experimental science, Merature, and art. Two distinct üterary and artistic circles formed around him during this period. Arnong the smaller group, based in London, the writers, etchers, and artists included Henry Fuseli, James Gregory, John Bomycastie, and Alexander Geddes. Outside this group was a larger more geographically dispersed one, which included Joseph Priestley, Thomas Henry, Thomas Petcival, Anna Barbauld, John Aikin, and Wilüarn Enfield. Over time, the smaller London based group eventuaüy incorporated many of the writers of the larger group and took on new authors, expanding the network's diversity of writers and the topics of literary concem. Along with those mentioned above, this new larger group inciuded: Gilbert Wakefield, John Home Tooke, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Christie, and, more sporadically, Erasmus Darwin, William Blake, Joel Barlow, William Godwin, Thomas Paine, and other less weli known write~.~During this period, Johnson helped launch the New Annual Register, a magazine aimed at undercutting the elite, conservative propaganda of Robert Dodsley's Annual Regisier. The new magazine was yet another method for Johnson and his circle to introduce to the public's attention belles-lettres and humaniora. In order to keep abreast with wiews and current events, Johnson relied on a number of "ceaders" to review submissions and make recommendationsJOOne of these review-ceaders was Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft had been introduced to Johnson in the late 1780s by John Hewlitt (a writer whom Johnson also published), and became instrumental in Johnson's magazine publishing interests and reform cause. Johnson's working relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft was both complex and inspirational. He served as her mentor professionally, and as a confidaut, aid, and, as Johnson's biographer Gerald Tyson States, as a father-brother personally." Aside fiom her publications-Thoughts on the Education of Daughters; Mary, a Fiction (1788), Original StoriesjFom Real Life, and her translation of M. Necker's De 1'Importance des opinions Religeuses, Wollstonecraft by the Iate 1780s was a vital part of Johnson's combined publishing activities. With the launch of Johnson and Thomas Christie's Analytical Review in 1788, Wollstonecrafl took an active role in regularly reading, reviewing, and contributhg to the magazine.32 Her "plain language" reviews reflect a style that was very much in keeping with Johnson's wish to advance enlightened and liberal boundaries of public thought, thus fomenting social ceform. Her contributions concentrated on the state of novel writing in general, and on a concera for the vulnerability of women in British society. Typical of her emerging review style, Wolistonecrafi, writing on Thomas Holcroft's feminist novel Anna Sr. Ives (1792) in the Analyticul Review, espouses a plain approach:

The moral is assuredly a goud one. It is calculated to sûengthen despairing virtue, to give fmh energy to the cause of humanity, to repress the pride and indolence of birîh, and to show that the true nobility which can alone proceed ftom the head and the heart, claims genius and virtue for its armorial bearings, and possessed of these, despises al1 the foppery of either ancient or modem herr~ldry?~

With respect to the abuses of privilege, patronage, and social excesses of the era, Wollstonecraft's criticisms attest to a language of reform that helped to undercut the roughshod character of late eighteenth-century proto-capitalism. The decay and arrogance that upheld the privilege and social parasitism to which she refers, foreshadows growing industrial centres, such as London, Manchester, and Glasgow, where, as the literary-social historian Steven Marcus points out:

Millions of English men, women, and children were virtually living in shit. Large numbers of people live in cellars, below the level of the Street and below the water line. Thus generations of human beings, out of whose lives the wealth of England was produced, were compelled to live in wealth's symbolic co~nterpart.~~

Capitalism's late eighteenth-century push toward greater and greater social inequality that compelled England's labouring class to deplorable Ievels of existence fiielled Johnson's and his writers' conviction to effect change. Publishing aftected public opinion and inspired sentiments toward political reform. It focused attention on class distinctions and helped to publicly criticize a relatively unchallenged authority, the landed gentry, nobility, and weaithiest members of the emergent capitalist class. Arguably, the most widely discussed issues concerning class antagonisms during this period were the controversies surrounding the French Revolution. This decade-long debate drew many criticisms hmpolitically conservative writers. They saw the French

Revolution as a threat to national security, sùnilar to how contemporary Arnerica saw the Russian Revolution of 19 17. Yet, this was, as Wollstonecraft poignantly states, no less than "a bug-bear" to distract public attention away fiom real and unresolved domestic political and social problems in England-a grand hegemony. Conservative political writers condemned the type of texts that Johnson published-many of them leaning toward Jacobin and/ or materiaiist-philosophy. John Bowles', Letters of the Ghost of Alfied (1798)' criticizing the activities of the London Conesponding Society-a Society that relied on many of Johnson's reform publication^'^-notes that the

. . . Press has become more Iicentious and infiammatory, the Schools of Sedition have been more numerous, the Lecturers more animated, and their Pupils have been more fiequently convened, not merely in their Assemblies, where they leam the first principles of the Science . . .in order to train them to habits of discipline; to inspire them with a consciousness of their strength by a sight of their numbers; to

enlist al1 who are disposed to mischief, under the banners of Disloyaity .. .'6

Eight years prior to Buwles' demonizing of the LCS (London Corresponding

Society), Edrnund Burke's criticism of radicalism in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1 790) warned of the spread of French-Jacobin ideals to British soil. He too criticized reform works like those Joseph Johnson and his circle of writers published.

Burke's attack, (in part a reaction to the reformer Dr. Price),J7set off a storm of political controversy concerning the most tùndamentally esteemed principles that many saw as the harbingers of English civilized life in the 1790s: Reason, Truth, Liberty, Virtue, Justice,

and God. in order to persuade his teaders, Burke attempts to try to juste the historical abuses that France's monarchy perpeûated toward its citizens. He constructs a history that constituted the same " . . .leading principles on which the commonweaith and the

laws are consecrated .. , " in Britain. one that Burke felt aU patriotic British citizens implicitly agreed with!' His aim was to white-wash the French aristocracy's complicity as political agents of an abused monarchy, and to justify their arcane despotic mie. In his ReJlectians Burke fails to point out that the French Revolution was different both in economic and political character than what he envisioned a British Jacobin revolution would be. His comparison of the abolition of France's feudal economy and Britain's more capitalist economy tended to gloss over specific economic characteristics. He negiects to add that Britain had gone through a similar mass disnietion as France in ousting its own monarchy and fonning a republic, one hundred-fi@ years prior in the English Civil War. Burke Merattempts to fuse the advocacy of social reform in Britain with that of the atrocities of the Revolution in France by repeatedly citing Dr. Price's personal accounts of the "glories of the age of the Revolution" and his religious philosophy-a philosophy that Joseph Johnson and his circle of writers felt were worth publishing during the peri~d?~Burke's blame of " . . .the political Men of Letters[,lWexplicitly connects what he sees as a " . .. literary cabal [that] had some years ago formed something like a plan for the destruction of the Christian religion[,]" with a " . . . process [tbat he deems responsible for the Revolution] through the medium of opinion.'"' This medium of opinion, which Burke refers to, implies the existence of a public space and an ongoing debate in Britain. Burke's wish was to warn the British public away fiom what he felt were the dangers of discussing social refonn. The evidence he cites suggests that the outcome of England's debates over the issues of Parliamentary reform, religion, and rational governance of society is undesirable, and he openly calls it "anar~hy.'~' Responding to Burke's Rejections, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Men, foliowing the publication of Tom Paine's, The Rights of Man, demonstrates an easy, accessible style that engages her readers in the gened concems of social reform. Her rebuttal is highly important, as it highlights Johnson's ongoing active participation and role to inspire social change; indeed, her text was among the many that were read and used by later, more poiitically orientated societies, üke the London Corresponding Society. Although Woiistonecraft is the sole author of the text, it was initially Johnson's idea that she should write it to deflect the growing popularity of Burke's RejZe~tions."~Mer reaching a point of physical and mental exhaustion, Wolistonecraft indicated to Johnson that she would be unable to complete a response to

Burke's work in a short enough period to make it an effective defense. Johnson's simple and outright acceptance of her decision, however, seemed to be just the right ingredient to challenge Wollstonecraft's mettle-she wrote and delivered the roughly three hundred- page manuscript to Johnson three weeks later!' Echoing many of the ideas of Tom Paine's Rights ofMan, Wollstonecraft's Vindication succeeds in portraying some of the causes of her society's injustices by depicting the specific and general abuses perpetrated by those holding power. She self- deprecates her authority as a writer, affecting in her readers a mood of integrity and intellectual sobriety. She admits to the reader that:

Not having the leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer [Burke] through al1 the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh garne, 1 have confined my sûictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very

speciai garb .. .w

Her plain speech style lends an air of honest cl- in her response to Burke, and her unadorned writing suggests an honest credibility that undercuts Burke's high-style hyperbole. Her decision to write in the fmt person dictly addressing Burke, demonstrates a sense of persod c~nvictionin the discrediting Burke's fanciful account of the Revolution 'Yhat . .. [at] every moment crossed" her=JS Wollstoneds strategy in refiiting Burke's dramatic presentation of the events in France is to base her arguments on the level of ktprinciples. Burke's constant aflïrmations of "Nature" and the "inherent deferential instinct" of humanity in the ReJlections, forms an easy counter-reference for Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecrafl states, for instance, that,

1glow with indignation when 1 attempt, methodically, to unravel your slavish paradoxes, in which 1can find no fixed first principal to refute; 1 shall not, therefore, condescend to shew where you affirm in one page what you deny another; and how frequently you draw conclusions

without any previous premises . .. 46

She Mersumrnarizes his eulogy for the French Monarchy and his justification of France's aristocracy, undercutting his embellished claims. She states to Burke that:

1 perceive, from the whole tenor of your Reflections that you have a mortai antipathy to reason; but, if there is anything like argument, or first principles, in your wild declamation, behold the result: - that we are to reference the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience: nay, that, if we do discover some errow, our feelings should lead us to excuse, with blind love, or unprincipled filial Section, the venerable vestiges of ancient days. These are gothic notions of beauty - the ivy is beautifid, but, when it insidiously destroys the trunk fiom which it receives support, who would not grub it up?'"

WolIstonecraft's analogy of the French aristocracy as this %y" symbuIically represents the stmggle of the French people. It depicts the worst effects of the rampant social parasitism of the atistocracy on France. Woilstonecraft's metaphor undercuts Burke's attempt to support the privileged unjust authority governing Britain through her portrayai of how it chokes off, then kills the host-public that gives it life. Her answer to the condition is simple and unpretentious. In order for the French people to prosper, it was necessary that aristocratie devanish. Wollstonecraft's fmal summary of Burke's apology for the rule of monarchicai-govenunent reaffüms her indictment of Britain's power structure. Using a form of argument like Tom Paine's rhetorical references to the Norman Yoke in the Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft points out how:

In the infancy society, confining our view to our own country, customs were established by the lawless power of an ambitious individual; or a weak prince was obliged to comply with every demand of the licentious barbarous insurgents, who disputed his authority with irrefiagable arguments at the point of their swords; or more specious requests of the Parliament, who only allowed him conditional supplies.J8

Her final portraya1 of the inglonous roots of British civilization undermines Burke's virtuous vision of nobility, chivalry, and paternalistic benevolence of the Protestant faiGd9"pillars," in Burke's view, of Britain's constitution. In contrast, she poignantiy asks:

Are these the venerable pillars of our constitution? And is Magna

Charta to test for its chief support on a former grant, which reverts to another, tiU chaos becomes the base of the rnighty structure - or we cannot tell what? - for coherence, without some pervading principle of order, is a solecism.SO Woiistonecrafl also assisted Joseph Johnson edit four Merseparate reviews of books and pamphlets comtering Burke's arguments in the March 1791 publication of the Analytical Review. The editor states that:

This issue of the Anaiytical Review celebrates Tom Paine's Rights

of Man: being an Answer to Mr. Burke 's Attack on the French Revolution, as a pamphlet well worthy of systematically treating each of Burke's felicitous daims through rational debate. "The public," the reviewer states, or rather mankind in general, have very considerable obligations to Mr. Burke, for bringing under review and discussion in his celebrated publication, so many topics of the highest importance to human happiness. Forhmately for the present age, politics and govemment are no longer mysteries enveloped in the dark shades of divine right and feudal prejudice; in the present dispute men will be taught by their interests to determine on which side the force of argument preponderates.''

The effectiveness of Johnson's progressive publications, such as those reviewed in the March 179 1 Analytical Review, ofien drew negative public attention. One of Johnson's most celebrated radical-science authors, Joseph Priestley, a Dissentiog Unitarian minister, scientist, and political-reform theocist, drew so much controversy hmconsmative fundamentalists due to his progressive ideas on religion and his radical politics, that he had his Birmingham home, laboratory, library, and scient& apparatus demolished and set ablaze by "Church and King" Rioters in 179 Priestley was one of the more popularly known members of the Birmingham Lunar Society-a society dedicated to the advancement and popularization of science-with which Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, and other scientists were afnliated, and many of whom were published by Johnson. Moteover, the Anaiytical Review 's continuous publication of informed reviews and articles on science, medicine, geography, history, philosophy, politics, literature, and religion, appeared to incteasingly worry the official agents at the highest levets of the conservative echelon. In 1798, the Pitt Govenunent sought to counteract Johnson's Analytical Review by subsidizing a highly antagonistic and hostile cornpetitor, the Anti- Jacobin, or, Weekly Examiner?' Aithough short-lived, this newspaper's successor, the AnriJacobin Review, more aggressively sought to stop Johnson's Analyticul. The arrest of one of Johnson's fellow booksellers for the publication and selling of one of Gilbert Wakefield's seditious tracts, Reply to the Bishop of Llandafi and the AR 's (Analyticail Review) sympathetic response, drew the following castigating wiew hmthe Anti- Jacobin:

But does the Analytical reviewer expect to impose on the public by this affection of liberality to a man to whose fate he is perfectly indifferent? Does he imagine that we do not know that the proprietor of the Analytical Review is himself under prosecution for selling the same pamphlet of Mr. Wakefield? It is not the prosecution of Mr. Cuthell, then, but the prosecution of Mr. Johnson, that excites the indignation of these vend and conternptible critics, as well as that of the whole Party, who are bursting with spite, and thirsting for revenge. It is by his orders to men whom he pays for scribbling in his miserable Review, that every writer who exposes the dejecrs, as they are deliçntely temed, of Mr. Wakefield's pamphlet, is abused in the most scurriious and indiscriminate manner. We advise, therefore, these critics, in future, to throw off a mask which wiH no longer conceal theu abject, and boldly, ifthey dure, pronounce an eulogy, on the loyalry of this favorite pubiisher [~ohnson]." The editors' invective and the character assassinations of Johnson and his circle of writers exposed the AntiJacobin Review 's implicit attitude that infonning the British people on political and social matters was deemed undesirable and dangerous. In this sense, it echoed and bolstered the conservative position that constitutional democracy necessacily leads to social chaos. This argument neatly overlooks the fact that life for the majonty of citizens in the late eighteenth-centwy was already in a state of social chaos: food riots, and large public rallies against the Pitt Goventnent in the 1790s abounded, and in this social turrnoil the Constitutional Information and London Corresponding Societies arose and became politically invol~ed.~~ The attitudes expressed in the Anri-Jacobin Review toward the Analytical Review Mertestify to the underlying ahof its publishers to quash the voice of the "refom- press" and prevent the Merspread of reform discussion pressing for change. Mer Johnson's inability to run the practical details of his publishing business due to the arrest and prosecutions of many of both himself and his writers, and governent sponsored harassrnent of the radical-reform movement in general toward the close of the 1790sYf6the AJR (AnfiJacobinReview) boasted its greatest victory. Six months afler the July publication, the propnetors of the AJR published the following account:

The Analytical Review has received its death-blow, and we have more reason to congratulate ourseives upon the share which we have had in producing its dissolution, than it would be expedient here to unf01d.~'

However, the "death" of the Analytical Review, to the disappointment of those favourable to the views of the AntiJacobin, did not mark the end of Johnson's contributions to "enlightening the public mind" in Britain. Johnson survived his moribund magazine, publishing progressive texts until his death in 1809. His legacy of the pursuit of "Truîh, Liberty, Justice, and Virtue" was alrnost entkly in the radical tradition. To writers like Burke and editors of the MR, the rnajority of the British populace was '"the swinish mu!titude"sa whose lives were to be ruied through fear, ignorance, and, if necessary, force. Johnson and his coterie of writers aimed to level consarvative biases and prejudice toward the general public from writers like Burke. Johnson and bis writers, moreover, hughtheir concerted and continuous dedication to fieedom of expression useci their publications to banish ignorance, and openly challenged coaservative authority. Theù wish to challenge the conventions of political power that upheld Britain's many laws injurious to the labouring-poor, sparked social discussion and rational dialogue on topics such as constitutional politics, religious dissent, materialist-science, and Jacobin philosophy. These discussions fed an environment of hybridization and cross-fertiliition of ideas on law and order, and new ways of seeing the natural world that informed the period's new plebeian space-topics

to which the next NO chapters shall attend. REORDERING CREATION MATERIALISM, MOMSM, AND SCIENTIFIC ICONOCLASM N LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITERATURE

Earth, on whelrrp a thousand nations beiad, And &an, brooding ht3 proli/ic bed Nighf 's changefui orb. blue pole. and silvety zones, Wkdher wwI& encircle cuher swis, One Mind inhabits, one di&& Sou1 WieIdr the limbs, andmingles with the whole.

Virg. En. Vi.; Erasmus Darwin. ZOONUMM (1794)

Nature is the Uniiiited. Those who grasp this grasp alsa ihat with reference to her there can bc no question of beginning and en4 of the above and below, of the innmost and outermost. [ïlhese nrms do not refer to Nature in general . .. but merely to her parts, to her pmducts, the single thingsjg

Joseph Dietzgen (1 828-1888)

It cornes as little surprise tbat Humphry Davy, inventor of the Davy Lamp and leading memkr of the Royal Mtution of Great Britain, writing on the materiality of the human mind and sod in An Essay to prove that the Thinking Powers depend on the Organization of the Body, chose to leave his manuscript unpublished. Not unlike other popularizers of materialism who found the exercising of caution necessary, Davy crossed out a statement in his manuscript: "The Imnrateriaüsts have blasphemously rnaintained an impious Opinion. Tbat God oue of whose attributes they assert to be omnipotence is incapable of making Matter think[,ra 60th wodd have likely run hirn afoul of many of his contempotaries if he had chosen to publish it. Davy's interest in materialism, like that of other scientists of the Iate eighteenth century, was not unususil. He was part of a larger circle of progressive scientists and naturalists who underscored the importance of materidist investigation into natuml phenomena. In late eighteenth-century Britaui, scientists like Davy continued to undercut older scientific ideas concemhg the ongin of life and nature; they interestecl themselves in the debates concerning supernatural and secular explanations of the universe. Since the Iate seventeenth and early eighteenthcenturies, public discussions engaging Newtonian science in coffee house lectures, in specialized technology classes, and by Fellows of the Royal Society, were leaning Merand Mertoward materialkm to explain natural phenornena!' The cultural implications of science's new ways of conceiving the organic world were profound, and many authors were well aware of what scientists were doing. The resulting debates became intense. Although Davy was not explicitly involved in the public debates on this issue, one rather well known naturalist arnong the rnany who did participate was Erasmus Darwin (1 73 1-1 8021, grandfather of Charles Darwin. Although Desmond King-Hele credits Erasmus Darwin's naturalisrn with influencing much of the literature published during the last two decades of the eighteenth-century? my focus in this chapter will show that not only Darwin, but also other scientists of the late-eightenth-century, found theù way into the discourses on medicine, history, politics, and fiction. This illustrates how the nenirorks of people from the various Literary, political, and scientific worlds intersected. In this chapter I will treat Erasmus Darwin's ZOONOMA, or, The Lmvs of Organic Life (1794) and John Thelwall's Essay, Towurds A Definirion OfANIII_hiL VIT'(l793) as primary examples of the type of late eighteenth-century literature that chailenged conventional notions of He, society, and politics. Darwin and Thelwall typically represmt a large nehivork of scientific theorists and poets in Britain, who iqired the second generation romantics liePercy and Mary Shelley, whose works

Mont Blanc and Frankenstein were to exernplify science's explanations on matter and humanity's relation to it. The materialist philosophy that Darwin, Thelwail, and other scientists adhered to met with serious opposition throughout the seventeen-nineties? Consewative politicd reaction, such as the Church and King mob riots of the l79Os,6J was strong toward scientists who were seeking material explanations for the basis of existence, especially their attempts to account for the human mind and sou1 fiom a materialist point of view. Until this time science had generally avoided discussion of this topic, considering the basis of the mind and soui to be n~nmaterial.~British political and religious conservatives took these new materiai explanations very seriously and associated them with the worst attocities of the French Revolution; they turned them into a bogie responsible for moral and social deca~.~~ According to historian Matthew Grenby, during the politically charged atrnosphere following the French Revolution British conservative novelists produced no less than sixty anti-Jacobin novels over an eighteen-year pend denouncing the evils of radical-materialist philosophy.6' As the poiitically conservative Edmund Burke cogently outlines in his ReJections on the RevoIution in France (179O), "a new description of men had grown up, 1 mean the political men of Mers [and] the Encyclopædia form[ing] something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion.'"' The plan to which Burke alludes was what he saw as king set out by writers like William Godwin and organizations like the Society for Constitutional Information. Conservatives generally feared this would unsettie Britain's social order if left unchecked. Reactionary polemics to stem radical philosophy consequently divided conservative and liberal writers and radical scientists attempting to capture the popular imagination. Among the radical scientists were Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin, Humphry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, and John Ttielwaü. Social refom wtiters, such as William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecmft, and publishers like Joseph Johnson, took up and expanded upon many of the conciusions of materialist phiiosophy. As shown in Chapter 1, writers from journais like the Anti-Jacobin Review, twk great pride in their role as critics of radical ideas. One year derthe launch of the AJR, for instance, its publishers stated:

We have been induced to make part of our plan, by the consideration that department of criticism has long been monopolized by men who, favouring views of the French Economists and other Philosophists of modem times, have facilitated the propagation of principles, subversive of social order, and, consequently, destructive of social happine~s.~~

These publishers were referring to the materialist philosophy used by Darwin, ThelwaIl, and many of Johnson's writers. Further to this Canning, Ellis and Frere additionaily published the "Loves of the Triangles" (1798), and The Pneumaric Revellers: An Eclogue (1800). The first publication satirically attacks Erasmus Darwin's doctrines and his interest in galvanism; the latter attacks the Pneumatic Institution, with which Humphry Davy was also associated through his working relationship with Thomas Beddoes.'' Canning, Eiiis, and Frere, in their Anti Jacobin magazine's editorial, " celebrated a munially shared "response to the Pitt govemment's arrest and conviction of the Analytical Review 's owner, Joseph Johnson, for selling seditious materials."" Canning, Ellis and Frere felt that Johnson's conviction was in part attributable to their efforts; according to Golinski in Science as Public Culture,

the editors of the AnriJacobin Review undercut and attacked Johnson for king a favourite publisher and îiiend of the PRIESTLEYS, the DARWINS, the GODWINS,and other un-prejudiced authors, who have kindly taken upon themselves, for the last twenty years, the important task of enlightening the public mind?

These three publishers, not unlike Burke and other political conservatives, FeIt that such "enlightening of the public mind" was the surest route to atheism, social chaos, ad anar~hy.~~They refed ta people like Priestley, Darwin, and the Godwins as "Levellers" and "Republicans," popularizing the ideas of the French Revolution and promoting its spread to Britah7' Yet, why did the French Encyclopædists and English scientific philosophers so upset British Conservatives? Miy did they so vigorously try to discredit thern? In providing answers to these questions, let us retum to Erasmus Darwin. Darwin is typical of the type of science writer demonized by conservatives. His popularizing of new scientific ideas, in his The Botanic Garden, The Temple of Nature, Zoonomia, and

Phyrologia, made him ci well-known figure in the literary ~orld.~~Through his association with the Birmingham Lunar Society, he was acquainted with many other scientifically minded men of the day, including Joseph Priestley, Thomas Beddoes, James Watt, and Josiah Wedg~ood.~~He had a familiarity with the experimental works of Benjamin Franklin, and modelled many of his early evolutionary concepts derthe French philosophes: Helvetius, Buffon, Lamark, Diderot, and d'Holbach-al1 of whom sought naturalist explmations for nature's mysteries?' Further, Darwin popuiarized Linnaeus' anthropomorphic classifications of plants and animals, a methodology that set the fiamework for scientists to articuiate the theory of evol~tion.'~ Erasmus Darwin's popuiar works on science and evolution foreshadow Jean Baptisté Pierre de Lamark's later, more concrete, %se and disuse" organ specialization theory of evolution in Philosophie zoologique (1809) and his own grandson, Charles's theory of natural selection in The Origin of Species (1859). Erasmus Darwin's, The Bofanic Garden (1791), for instance, held "life as having its origin in the sea at a time when there was no dry land, and having as its principle cause the effect of the sun's wmthon complex chemical chains,"s0 and anticipated his later speculations on evolutionary human and animal diseases in Zoonomia (1794). In Zoonomia, Darwin cogently argues:

. . . would it be too bold to imagine that in the great length of tirne since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of rnankind, ail warm-blood animals have arisen hmone living filament which THE GREAT FIRST CAUSE endued with anirnality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by imtations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end? Zoonomia II, 240"

Darwin's later poetry shows his advancing knowledge of the evolutionary links betwee matter, the organic-world, and humanity. His poetry exemplifies, perhaps better than his prose works, how Darwin's science rnight have intersected with the social world. In his posthumously published, The Temple of Narure (1 8O3), he States that:

ûrganic Life beneath the shoreless waves Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves; First forms minute, unseen spheric glas, Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mas; These, as successive generations bloom, New powm acquire, and Iarger limbs assume; Whence countless groups of vegetation spring, And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing. .. . . / Imperious man, who niles the bestial crowd, Of language, reason, and reflection proud, With brow erect who scoms this eacthiy sod. And styles himself the image of his God; Arose fiom rudiments of form and sense, An embryon point, or microscopic ens! Temple of Nature (1803) vol. 18*

Darwin's poetry ceconfigures the ideas of many well-known scientists of his day, such as

Baron d'Holbach, Joseph Priestley, and Benjamin Franklin. It underscores Linnaeus's interrelating classification system of nature that, as Linnaeus States analogously in one of his letters: "If the navel-string remained, the children wodd hang together, like a tapeworm, then it would be more obvious that they are one.""

Although not an evolutionist hiaiself, Linnaeus's classification system suggested particdar relationships between animals and plants to support the commonly held belief in Chain of Being philosophy. Ironicdy, however, Linnaeus's taxonomy helped validate

Darwin's and other scientists' claims favouring evolutionary theory. Lisbet Koemer suggests that Erasrnus Darwin, like other early evolutionists, drew upon Linnaeus's method of classification to validate evolution as a demonstrable theory of biological change in animals and plants. Linnaeus's classification system cleariy portrayed the families of flora and fauna in an orgaaized and systematic manner, thus making it casier 38 for proponents of evolution to demonstrate links between various animal, andi or plant species. Perhaps more than any other scientist of the penod, and against his intentions,

Linnaeus enabled a "public space of science" to debate evolution and creation theories in an informed manner."

Darwin's naturalism builds upon an early dialectical-monism found in Greek

philosophy.8s In order to better conceptualise the naturaiism debates of the l79Os, it will

be usefui to understand a bit of the history of this Greek materialism, found in the works

of Anaximander and Pythagotas, and Iater in the ideas of Zeno and Socrates. Their

monist philosophy's relational methodology se& interconnections of matter and

phenomena. Monism works on the basis of a material structure that has no beginning or

end: phenomena are related.a6 The philosophy holds that the entirety of the universe is an

inter-related whole, comprishg itself of divisible matter that undergoes a ceaseless

process of becoming and passing away. Nothing leaves the universe nor is anything

gained-only the universe's form changes. This connectedness of al1 matter links the

universe as a single whole-mutability, dialectics, and/ or evolution being its natural

state.8'

In Zoonomia, Darwin impiicitly refers to monist-materialist theory positing a

naturalist view on how seemingly two separate things can occupy the same space. He

holds that the integration of the human senses of smell, touch, hearing and sight suggest

matter's monistic interco~ectioIl--fhetheoretical bais of eighteenth-century radical

science. in an extended passage hmZoonomia, for instance, Darwin posits that: The impossibility of two bodies existing together in the same space cannot be deduced hmour idea of solidity, or a figure. As won as we perceive the motions of objacts that surround us, and Iearn that we possess power to move our own bodies, we experience, that those objects, which excite in us the idea of solidity and of figure, oppose this voluntary niovement of our own organs; we are .. .taught . . .by experience, that our own body and those, which we touch, cannot exist in the same part of space. But this by no means demonstrates, that no two bodies can cxist togettier in the sme part of space. Galilæo in the preface to bis works seems to be of the opinion, that matter is not impenetrable . . . beings may exist without possessing the property of solidity, as weH as . . . without possessing the properties, which excite out smeli or taste, and can thence occupy space without detniding other bodies fiam it; but we cannot become acquainted with such beings by our sense of touch, any more than we can with odours

or flaveurs without ow sense of meIl in taste. But that any beiig can exist without existing in space, is to my ideas utterly incomprehensible?

DaMin's study of naturalism in Zoonomia is a combined two-volume work of some fourteen hundred pages. His other literary contributions were also substantial; the Boranic Garden, for instance, was over two hundred fi@ pages. DaMrin heaviiy footnoted his poems and prose works with highly detailed and eIaborate explmations of scientific facts, theories, and histories. They wece didactic popularizations of naniralist philosophy directed toward the public as well as oiher scientists? His contributions are examples of the ways in which circles of scientists during this pend directly intersected with non-scient& readers, thus widening the space of infiuence that materiaüst- philosophy was gaining. Attempting to quant@ his acnial influence on his readership proves problematic, but if the inaumerable criticisms levied against hirn by consemative jownals are any indication, his contributions must have been noticed widely. Darwin not only had a marked effect on other scientists and the public in the 1780s and 1790s. Two noteworthy writers tbat he later ùiauenced are Percy and Mary Shelley. Desmond King-Hele notes that Dr James Lind introduced SheUey, as a schoolboy, to Darwin's poetry and pmse-along with William Godwin's Political Jmtice.'"' Lind, Shelley's mentor, also had close links with the Darwin circ1e and the Birmingham Lunar Society, and served as an educational conduit in the spread of materialist philosophyP1 Yet, as much as Danvin potentially influenced the Shelleys' understanding of materiaiism, it would be an over-assumption to clah that he informed al1 of their ideas about science. Danvin's independent work and his affiliation with the Birmingham Lunar Society together were merely part of a network of European-wide scientists breaking new gcound in biology, chemistry, and electricity. The influence of this larger Continental-network informed the Shelleys, and authors like them, ieading to their acquisition of scientific knowledge. Their knowledge was a social and philosophic hybridization of many new ideas and theories that were emerging in the public space and its main interconnecting net.ks. However, in order for these naturaiist-scientists to create networks of influence in society, levers of rapid publishing and marketing methods were required to spur public interest and debate. Debate was crucial to the fostering of new scientific theories, and in this sense, publishers sewd in vital ways to advance scientSc knowledge, and provided a context for science to infiuence other aspects of social life. Publishers, like Daniel Eaton, Richard Cadile, Thomas ~pence," and Joseph Johnson, spread materiaiist- scientific understancihg pragmaticaiiy. They deiivered the scientists' ideas to their readers, thus facilitating a means by which both the public and other scientists codd more easily learn about new discuveries. In this context, publishers belped, as much as scientists did, in the popuIarization of science and creation of a public scientific space. Darwin's publisher, Joseph Johnson, actively marketed the writings of numerous controversial scientists to foster public debate. He ofien published scientific views that contested earlier ones he had p~blished?~He greatly contributed to an increasingly iduential public space in which ideas on medical science, materialism, and evolution flourished. Such interfaces between literature and rnaterialist philosophy merge in two well- known literary examples, Percy Shelley's Monc Blanc (1 8 16) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1 8 18).* These two works reveal the couple's fusion of their experiences in the Swiss-Italian Alps with the radical materialist-science of the day-monist in orientation?' In contrast to the journal notes that the Shelleys made during their passage through the Swiss Alps, Percy Shelley's portrayal of the mountain(s) in Mont Blanc connects his vision of a hannonic balance of inorganic matter with nature's web as a whole. Shelley's materialist encoding of Mont Blanc's rnystery in verse traces his "leap" fiom "passive perception to voluntary contemplation,'* comecting the mountain symbiotically with its environment. The poem underpins eighteenth-century idem of evolutionary philosophy, such as Darwin's." Sirnilarly, in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley draws upon the imagery of the Swiss Alps and on radical materialist principles in order to vivify her monster. The SheIleys' literature blurs the period's conventionally understood link between the organic/ inorganic worIds, and life and death. On the one hand, Mont Blanc reveals the complex fusion of monist-naturalisrn that spurs al1 matter, including the mind?' On the other, Frankenstein reveals Mary Shelley's criticism of science's impetus to master the governing principles of matter to recreate life without regard either to social or individual consequences-an impulse seemingly exempiifîed by such scientific experimenters as Luigi Mvani, Luigi Aldini, and Andrew Ure* The portrayai of nature in Mont Blanc, for instance, exhibits Shelley's dismissai of the typically dualistic belief of a supernatuml entity that stands beyond the ni verse.'^ Shelley's verse, echoing Darwin's Virg. En. epigraph in Zoonomia. roots thought and consciousness in nature's matenal universe. Shelley sees Mont Blanc and "spirit" as part of a process combining energy, matter, and force. The mountain not only stirs the human imagination, it acts as a perpetual engine of change.'" It is an extension indicative of

Shelley's matenalist vision in Mont Blanc S " . . .everlasting universe . . . / secret Strength of things . . ."

Within the dædal earth, lightning, and rain, Earthquakes, and fiery flood, and hurricane, The torpor of year when feeble dreams Visit the hidden buds, or dreamless sleep Holds every future leaf and flower; -the bound With which fiom that detested trance they leap; The works and ways of man, theu death and birth, And that of him and ail that his may be; Al1 things that move and breathe with toi1 and sound Are bom and die; revolve, subside, and swell. Power dwells apart in its tranquillity, Remote, serene, and inaccessible; And this, the naked countenance of earth, On which 1 gaze, even these primeval mountains Teach the adverting rnind.'02

If one was unaware that Shelley had written this poem it could easily be mistaken for one of Erasmus Darwin's poems about evolution. Shelley's allusion to the eartb's constant process of change through "earthquakes, fiery floods, and hunicanes" conuects eighteenth-century mam-theories about the earth-such as James Hutton's "steady- state" geological theory about land formation and erosion over vast periods of hme'L with the French philosophe, Baron d'Holbach's, explanations conceruing the biochemicd changes of Me to death, and hmdecay back to life.Iw The mountain's ability to support life-via its glacial waters, rivers, and delivery of nutritive rninerals-connects d'Holbach's micro-theories of cellular-life to the macro- theories of Hutton's earth processes. Glaciers, plants, animals, and man, feed parasitically on the universe and Mont Blanc's life-sustaining energies. Shelley's reference to the "Power [that] dwells apart in its tranquillity" implicitly refers to the singular relation of the cosmos's energy to Mont Blanc's inunediate environment-the continuation of the universe's Onenes~.~O~ Like Erasmus Darwin, Shelley's naturalism informs the interdependency between the organic and inorganic universe; Shelley signals the unified set of conditions that undergo ceaseless mutation, adaptation, and reorganization in nature.lM Rather than a cause-effect system of change, Shelley's vision in Monr Blanc holds that the entirety of the universe is an interrelated whole, comprising itself of divisible matter undergoing ceaseless change of f~nn.'~'Devoid of hierarchies or diamemc oppositions, Monr Blanc's universe neither gains nor loses matter-form merely alters.'08 The intrinsic movement that Shelley depicts is his rendering of nature's evolution-the dialectics of monist philosophy, as he understood it-a logic that treats the process of constantly c hanging universe. Iw ïbe "feeble dreams" that Shelley depicts links many natural thing+"living ihings that dweii 1 Within the dada1 eattb; lightening, earthquake, and fiery flood." The poem underscores Erasmus Darwin's speculations on Joseph Priestley's and Benjamin Franklin's electrical experiments on the organic and inorgani~,"~üfe and death, and the "movement of matter." Moreover, it also reveais Sheiiey's implicit debt to Baron d'Holbach's materiaiism: a scientific approach which Darwin and Priestley borrowed in part to inform their own explanations of Life."' D'Holbach's theories conceming biochemistry, which aided Damin's understanding on the çhemical principles of life,'" fomed part of the same ideological networlc of science to which Erasmus hlonged. D'Holbach persody met and knew many of Darwin's contemporarie+"Benjarnin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, . . . and Adam Smith"-through his later acquaintance with young English students whom he met while he was shidying in Holland at the University of lei de^^."^ Of d'Holbach's contributions in his Système de lu nature (1770) relating to the chemical basis of life and death, (influencing Erasmus Darwin, aud later, Percy Shelley), the search for the bais of organic iif~entraito d'Holbach's scienceis also the predorninating inspiration and theme of Mary Shelley's most famous and criticai novel of this science-Frankensrein. During the period of Mary Shelley's publication of Frankenstein, the compulsion for scientists to unveil life's mysteries had reached dmost obsessive proportions. Scientific theories, for example, like Hermann Boerhaave's 1724 "elastic fire-fluid" theory of the body, Jean Nollet's "Leyden Jar" experiments un paralytics in 1746,"" and d'Holbach's chemical basis of life and death, had al1 been furthered by new scientific

discoveries and theories attempting to account for the tnie basis of life. Among these new scientific activities were Àlessandro Volta's and Luigi Galvani's elecüical experiments upon the nervous systems of animals, and Joseph Priestley's and Thomas

Beddoes's "pneumatic airs" relating to human physiology-'" al1 of which find direct

reference in Frunkemrein. Indeed, as Mary Shelley's states: the inspiration of her novel came about as a result of overhearing one of many conversations between Percy Shelley

and Lord Byron on "the nature of the principle of Me, and whether ttiere was my probability of its ever havhg been discovered and ~ommunicated.'"'~Her portrayal of this new science's experimentation through Victor Frankemtein's creation of the wretch. however, made scientific fact of the day appear truly stmger than her fiction. in Frankenstein, Victor's enthusiasm mirrors much of the zed many contemporary scientists displayed in seeking the basis of Vie. Victor's rationalization for animating the Lifeless &une of a man, (implicitiy betraying the enthusiasrn typified by scientists like Darwin and d' Holbach), leads to his statement:

1 saw how the fine form of man was degraded and wasted; beheld the

corruption of death succeed to the blossoming cheek of life; 1 saw how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain. I paused, examining and analysing al1 the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change fiom life to death, and death to life,'" until fiom the midst of this datkness a sudden light broke in upon me -a light so bcilliant and wonderous, yet so simple, 1 alone should be reserved to discover so astonishing a secret."'

By 18 18, when Shelley had completed Frankenstein, scientists were intensely engaged in trying to reveal the material properties of life. Experimentai discoveries as eariy as the seventeen-eighties and nineties were illuminating the role between electricity and the nerves in relation to other organs of the body anirnating the "animal œc~nomy,""~as well as oxygen's role in the blood. Out of these experiments attention to electricity's role within the human body yielded the most profound results, and Shelley's depiction of Victor's experiments appear tame by cornparison with some scientific investigations occhgat the tirne.'*' Shelley exemplifies an awareness of these investigations through another of Victor's statements, depicting particular scientific experiments on human cadavers alrnost verbatim."' Echoing such experiments, Victor Franlcenstein States:

It was on a dreary night in November that beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that aimost amounted to agony, 1 colected the instruments of life amund me, that 1 might intiise a spark of king into the Weless thing that lay at my feet. It was aiready one in the morning; the min pattered dismally against the panes, and my cade was nearly bumt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-exb'nguished light, I saw the du11 yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its 1imbs.lu

Comparisons of Shelley's account in her novel of the monster's vivification and real experiments occwring at the tirne ~veala chilling similarity. For example, Iwan Morus's "Galvanic cultures: electricity and life in the eady ninekenth century" gives an account of an expriment conducted in London by Luigi Aldini, who:

On 17 January 1803 was provided with the opportunity of perfoming on a human subject. In the presence, amongst others, of Thomas Keate, President of the Royal College of Surgeons, the body of Forster, executed at Newgate for the murder of his wife and child, was taken down and made available for experimentation. The poks of a large galvanic battery made of alternate plates of copper and zinc were comected with various parts of the dead man's anatomy. ELectrical connections were made between his ears, between his mouth and eacs, and between his ears and his anus. The result was a startling exhibition of contractions and convulsions.

On the first application of the process to the face, the jaw of the deceased criminal began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were hombly contorted, and one eye opened. In the subsequent part of the process, the right hand was raised and clenched, and the iegs and thighs were set in motion. It appeared to the uninformeci part of the bystanders as if the wretched man was on the eve of king cestoreci to Ge. Anon (1 803) Philos. Mag. 14, 364-368.IU

Coinciding with Shelley's publication of Frankenstein fifieen years after Aldini's experiment, Morus gives a further account of a more stunning series of experiments that took place in Scotland. The chemist Andrew Ure conducted Merexperiments on the body of another executed criminal on November 4,18 18:

In his account of the experiments Ure descnbed how, under the influence of a powerful electric current, the corpse had recommenced breathing and how different limbs were made to move again through electricity. The experiments on the dead man's face were, however, the most spectacular "every muscle in his countenance was simultaneously thtown into fearful action; rage, horror, despair, anguish and ghastly srniles, united their hideous expression in the mwderer's face, surpassing far the wildest representations of a Fuseli or a Kean.""'

Yet, unsettling as these medical experiments were, their explicit connections to the literature of the period more importantly point to some of the reasons why reactions by political conservatives became so violent toward this type of science. As insidious as these experiments were, their popularization comecting them back to their origin- materiaiist-philosophy4sn~bedpolitical consematives far more. Yet, why was this so? In answering this question, it is of interest to note that not many of these specXcaiiy materialist experiments atûacted strong scientific criticism fiom politically conservative detractors. Consemative criticisrns in pamphlets and periodical magazines, such as the AntiJacobin Review, usually tended toward broad character assassinations of radical scientists, such as Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin, porûaying thern as sensational materialist "projectors" of social chaos. Edmund Burke's Reflections echoes these sentiments; he, similar to the AJR, engages neither the merit of individual expeiunents that materialist scientists executed nor their abilities to explain nature comprehensively. Rather, he demonizes materialist-philosophy as responsible for the social chaos of Revolutionary France.'" Cnticisms of materialist-science tended toward the general and vague rather than the specific, and suggest that the broader philosophical implications of radical materialism unsettled conservatives more than any particular discovery. Thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin, and the French philosophes explained everyday natural phenomena like electricity and its relation to life without recourse to the supernatural, or God. The idea of explaining nature's living forms without God triggered profound reaction during this period. The potential political ramification of this method of thinking for conservatives was that it implicitly threatened to undermine the ideologicai tenets upholding political control. They cortectly feared that in addition to underpinning scientific conclusions, materialist methodology could analyze, For instance. society, economic conditions, and politics.

Reformers, like William Godwin and Joseph Johnson's circle of authors began to challenge old justifications of society's economic divisions with a renewed sense of vigour for the radical cause.'26 They rejected deference toward the Pitt goverment (a governrnent indifferent toward the plight of the unemployed and poor), tbrowing off the yoke of theological and philosophical hegemony fettering their advance of refonn.'" To hem society and politics appeared quite naturally to fall within the domain of radical materialist inquiry: new branching extensions of monist-dialectics. in addition to radical-politics intersecting with materialist-science, materiaiist- science also was intersecting with radical politics. Many of the scientists we have been dealing with-aot unlike Godwin, Wollstonecmft and Johnso-were ail interested in and supported radical-refonn politics and the French ~evolution.'~~Many of the answers that these scientists saw as remedies for society's social problems-extension of the male fianchise, abolition of the monarchy, and redistribution of parliarnentary representation based on population-threatened, in the opinion of many politicai conservatives, to turn British Life upside-side down.129 Their materialist based nanvalism vindicated their radical-reform politics, because it fiirther undercut age-old the~logic&philosophical assumptions underpinhg such ideologies as the Chain of Being, Divine Right, Predestination and Providence, which setved to help legitimate conservative political authority. Their science, in this context, was effectively, if not completely, iconoclastie. Darwin, Priestley, Franklin, and Johnson's coterie of other writers are excellent examples of the type of individuals whose discoveries and wtitings helped other people make the philosophical connection between radical materialism in science and the militant rationalism of radical-reform politics. Like them, a less well-known figure interested in science, medicine, and politics, John Thelwall, employed a materialist analysis of the human body in his An Essay Towards A Definition OfANIML VITALi7'Y. Thelwall, undercutting the blood vitdity principles of John Hunter, (an erninent surgeon to St. George's Hospital and a Fellow of the Royal Society), surmised that blood is in itself an organ of the body that acts symbiotically with other organs, such as the lungs and netvous system, to vivifL e~istence.'~'Thelwall's conclusions were monist in appmach."' Thelwall's medical conclusions about the vitality of the body in his materidist approach are salieni, because they caused a typical medically-conservative reaction when attention was tumed to explain areas of the human body deemed sacred and belonging to the domain of religious specuiation, such as the human soul.. Thelwall's fmt lecture received respect and acclaim by the members of the Physical Society at Guy's Hospital in 1793- hospitai noted for its progressive stance toward medicine.'" However, derhis fht lecture, senior medicai doctors at Guy's Hospitai voted his second lecture, "On the Origin of Sensation," out of the minutes of Society several months later. In his memoirs, Thelwall States that he read "On the Ongin of Sensation " to the Society,

. . .in which, (without digression or allusion to other topics) precisely the same train of ideas was pursued, and the phenomena of mind were attempted to be explained upon principlespurely Physicai, nothing could surpass the fhy of opposition with which (il was assailed. Dr. Saunders, together with several other leading men of the Hospitals, (who, like himseif, never shewed thek heads in the Society upon any other occasion) came down, in a mas, to intempt the discussion; and, fiom the language and earnestness exerted upon the occasion, one would have thought that the existence of the theological and political institutions had depended upon the agitation of a question of physics, among a group of hospital pupils. In short, the paper, after having been read and accepted, and discussed for three successive nights, was, by the exertions of these gentlemen, voted out of the ~ociety[.]'~~

It appears that at the time medicai ideas relating to the body based upon materiaiist-science did Iiktie to upset prominent members of leading medical establishments. Yet, when matenalist views extended to the domain of the "mind" or

"soul" the potential conclusions proved intolerable. The Physicai Society's Minutes read:

Meeting: January 25,1794 (15" meeting .. .) of the Physicai Society held at Guy's

Hospital, London. Undet this meeting's "Public Minutes: .. .The majority of presidents were of the opinion that the paper [On the Origin of Sensation] delivered in for the Prize did not answer the question proposed[.]" It is of interest to note, however, that the Physical Society's previous minutes disclose that Thelwaii's paper, On the Origin of

Sensation, was accepted on theconsecutive evenings. The Guy's Hospital senior

physicians who voted Thelwali's second lecture out, dismissed his conclusions on the

basis that the "Paper appears to have no application to the practice of medicine or

surgery, therefore in no degree interesthg to a society which has for its object the

improvement of these arts[.Y1"

The medicai establishment at Guy's Hospital, seemingly sensing the danger that

materialist conclusions could undennine vested belief about human spirituaiity, used its

authority in a highly contradictory rnanner, (according to its own mandated ru le^),"^ to

suppress Thelwall's study. This, however, was by no means the end of Thelwail's, nor

other radicals', intersections with their society and the emergence of a public space. The

insurgence of radical materialism into the networks of plebeian politics was to become

the zenith of the philosopby's greatest social contnbution to England's late eighteenth-

century. EDMUND BURKE,TOM PAINE, AND THE LONDON CORRESPONDING SOCETY: THE CONTEST FOR THE GENERAL INTELLECT IN BRlTAIN DURING THE 1790s

It is difficult to Say which are the most revolting subjects of contemplation, the bastard king who led the way, the ready tools who deluged a whole land with innocent blood at his command, or the reptile swarms who, in the following age, stole in afier them to deeds and usurpations cqually detestable. Let the English people, when they hear of high blood, rccollect the innocent blood of their fathen on which it fattened, and the spawn of miscetlaneous nameless and lawless adventurers, fiom whom it really flow~.~~~

John Hampton. The Aristocracy of England (1846)

"Yea," said he, " and shall they who see itiemselves robbed wonhip the robber? Then indeed shall men bt changed hmwhat they are now, and they shall be sluggards, dolts, and cowards beyond al1 the earth hath yet born. Such are not the men 1 have known in my life-days, and that now i love in my death."13'

William Morris. A Dream of John Bal1 [ IWS)

Inherent in these two nineteenth century epigrams are the grievances of the oppressed that reach back far into the history of Britain's class-stmggle. Their words ring with an implicit longing for a return to an age of equaiity and brotherhood-one perceived devoid of exploitation, where "community-democracy" prevailed. Their words teste to an imagined past before the "yoke of Normanism" swept away the common lands, forever placing the economic fetter of rent, taxation, and tiîhes upon the Lives of the common people.'3s The ubiquitous conflict between oppressed and oppressors during the 1790s in England brought the nation to the edge of a social cevolution like no other period before. Mass meetings of dissent, tadical publications, secular ideology, and plebeian educational lectures were gaining the interest of the nation's common people, threatening to potentially over-turn society at its core if lefi unchecked. Yet, why was this period so unique politically? What social factors combined in this period in English history to produce such activity amongst the common people? Moreover, why was this momentum notable to claw-back the fetters of rampant parasitism, traceable back to the "land-theft" of this 'Worman yoke"? This chapter endeavows to examine these uncertainties; in order to accomptish this task, 1 shail examine the threads of British radicaiism through the study of one of England's most revolutionary plebeian societies, the London Corresponding Society, and one of its leading orators, John Thelwail, and its secretary, Francis Place. Furthemore, 1 shail examine two of the period's most widely discussed polemics that informs many of the core issues at the heart of this Society: Edmund Burke's ReJlections on the Revolution in France and Tom Paine's The Rights of Man, polemics with which Joseph Johnson and his circle of authors were intensely engaged. As chapter II partially shows, John Thelwall's use of monist-materialist analysis in both of his medicai lectures at Guy's Hospital spurred more than simply controversial ideas about medicine in one of London's leading hospitals. Monist-materialist philosophy laid, as it did for other radical-scientists, the basis for his materialist conclusions about politics and society. Thelwall, as well as being intetested in medical science, was also a member and well-known orator for the politically active London Corresponding Society, This Society used works printed by Joseph Johnson's publishing busine~s,"~such as Tom Paine's Rights of Man as well as the works of the Society for Constitutional Infonnation-of which Johnson himseifwas a paid s~bscriber.'~~ The coalescence of this cadicd materidist philosophy and literature in the late eighteenth-century is apparent in the activities of the London Corresponding Society, one of the most vociferous, well organized, and politically threatening reform organizations (as the Pitt Goverment's numemus reactions against it attest) of the era. It is my argument that Joseph Johnson's publications and fiterature popuIarizing the ideas of rnateriaüst philosophy, social criticism, and politics hetped to change public opinion towd the ideas of liberty, truth, and ceason: ideas which later became the foundation of' the London Corresponding Society's cause for political reform. 1would like to underscore the importance of the London Corresponding Society and John Thelwall in Britain's plebeian public sphere during the 1790s by f%st looking at several examples of publications that were popular when this society was at its peak of political activity. These publications ranged fiom those of'fenng a perspective of conservative politics that denounced the LCS's (London Corresponding Society) aims

and called for the "censorship of the press," through those of a more "middle-chss" graduaiist refonn view, to those with a radical agenda that sought universal suffrage and politicai refonn as its object. Al1 of these publications refl ected the discussions that comprised the dialectic of the wider public spsce. John Bowles' the Letters of the Ghost ofA1bd forms part of a long series of reactionary conservative publications set off by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. It is an example of conservative literature bat reiterates the London Corresponding Society's intentions to violate "liberty and propery . . . II in. a fashion similar to the "republicansand levellers" of former tir ne^.'^' Bowles cefers to LCS as "the Conspirators" who "conceal their ultimate designs under the mask of refom."'" Yet, what was Bowles inferring when he refers to the LCS as "Conspirators"? In the context of Britain's cecent history, Bowles and the consematives for whom his publication spoke, were fiightened of the "levellers"' ideals because they called for abolition of the monarchy, Pariiamentary refom, universai male sec, and certain redistri'bution of the old common lands. Bowles attempted to ascribe the goals of the LCS to an age-old conflict violently contested during the Puritan Revolution, where Cromwell's seinire of power in 1648-9 forcibly suppressed Leveiiers and other radical refomers. These Leveiiers not only called for a remto a "pre-Norman" Saxon past to justi@ their demands, such as a return of the common-lands to the "People," but "they aiso moved to a conception of natural rights, the rights of man."'" The Levellers drew upon an argument that was unambiguaus in its assertion that the tyranny placed upon the common people of England onginated with the advent of, what Christopher Hill refers to as, the "Norman Y~ke.'''~ The concept is an important one, rhetoncally linking radical arguments of the 1790s, like in Tom Paine's Rights of Man, to agesld grievances implicitly well understood by the common English citizenry. That Bowles' references in his polemic are directed toward the LCS is certain, because, as he indicates in his titie, it is "Addressedto the Hon. Thomas Erskine and the Hon. Charles James Fox - On the Occasion of the State Trials at the Close of the Year 1791, and the Beginning of the Year 1795. " Bowles alludes to the years that the highly publicized court proceedings were brought against twelve members of the LCS, ail of whom were acquitted. Bowles, and other conservatives who felt as he did about these acquittais, saw the need to increase the power of governmental laws against seditious materials in order to stem the tide of popular agitation for reform. To help accomplish this they advocated censorship of the press."' In his Letters of the Ghost ofAlRed, Bowles uses language that is both suggestive and infiammatory. His account of the LCS, and its activities, primes his readers' imaginations with visions of civil disobedience and wuest. He associates the activities of the LCS with the very decay of British society, and asserts in his final argument that neglecting to institute seditious laws "will crown with success the machinations of the Disaffectecl, and render the cause of Anarchy triumphant."'u6 Although Bowles' pamphlet, and other consemative publications, did not imrnediately sway the government to enact censorship, the use of his pejorative choice of words such "Disaffected" and "Anarchy" echo an implicit evocation of the centuries-otd conflict between Britain's miers and ded. The "Anarchy" to which Bowles refers is not the stateless, property- less, peacefùl conception of a fiture society, but rather it is "The honor, confusion and dismay [and] . .. subversion of the Thr~ne""~and subversion of the "liberty and property" of Britain's ding class. Bowles' rhetorical strategy is to goad his readership to rally against what he perceives to be the dangers of the populist "fiee-speech." One individuai Bowles portrayed to demonstrate what he saw as a threat to British society was "The Lecturer, who makes a livelihwd by the sale of his Seditious Poison, . . . " Jobn Thei~all.''~Thelwall, already a prominent member of the LCS, was one of those tried and then subsequently acquitted for seditious libel in 1794-1 795. Yet, why was this tendency towards popular free speech and John Thelwall's lectures such a threat to writers like John Bowles? The answer to this question partially lies in John Thelwdi's Peacefùl Discussion And Nor Tumuiîuary Violence: The Means of Redressing Nufional Grievance (1 795). The test of the answer Lies in the historicai events leading up to the tirne of this publication, and with Bowles's repressive appeai to increase the censorship powers of Britain's sedition and treason laws. Thelwall's PeacejUI Discussion And Nol Tumultuaq Violence, a radical publication, addresses a number of reactions that stem fkom England's war with France.

Anti-Jacobin sentiment in England was at its height during this period.'" On page one of Peaceful Discussion, Thelwall outlines the gravity of the national situation at this time, identifiing that it is the British Govemment who are the "pretended supporters, but real destroyers, of British Liberty .. ." not the ~ple.'~*Members of the Government are, States Thelwail, "but the fiiends of the tottering cause of despotism and ~orruption.""~In order to counteract this despotisrn and corruption, Thelwail claims that the solution lay in "[tlhe universai discussion of equai rights and equal laws, which smooth the rugged asperities of unequai conditions[.]"'" He drew into the space of public debate subjects which the ruling class would have preferred be kept silent. Tbis is why social conservatives, like Bowles, so despised him. Consematives recognized the social potential that Thelwall's discussions about refoms had as engines of politicai change. Indeed, Thelwail's PeacefUI Discussion speech testifies to the real power that these discussions had, as estirnates at the the indicate that approximately one hundred fi@ thousand people attended the open-air anti-gagging protest at Copenhagen-House where he spoke in 1795."' Yet, in relation to this power of free-speech and political action within an atmosphere of military despotism and sedition laws, Thelwall cautioned his listeners to restrain themselves against the use of violence to redress theu national grievances. In his Discussions he States that angry rebellion and destruction of "the necessaries of Life . . . " is pointless because it merely engenders "still worse despotism than ever .. . [and] you increase the evil, instead of removing it[.]"'Sd Thelwail fiirther added that political action must "[a]dhere . . .to reason and to the principles of truth and justice; for they are the principles of Liberty." This point was important for Thelwall, as he contended at the time

that once the principles of liberty and the causes of corruption are understood, it "will be no longer in the power of tyrannical ministers to oppress you under the semblance of liberty[.]"'"

The semblance of liberty foms the backbone of Thelwall's political vision. Once the common people of England identify the source of their oppression, Theiwall stated, their conditions of enslavement "must be redressed by wholesale . .. rernoval of the cause: .. . Parliarnentary Corruption! -the system of Cabinet intrigue! -the system of Rotten Boroughs!" However, Thelwail cautions that this xmovai of the cause "is not to be done by turnultuary rashness, . .. malevolence, or faction. It is only to be effected by a steady adherence to reason, truth and justice";'% for ''Truth," wrote Thelwall, like reason

and justice, "is omnipoten~"'~~In aîi senses, "knowledge," to the radicals, was "power";

and they well knew how to use it. Politically, these speeches were too honest, too tme, and too dangerous.

Thelwall's speech reiterates part of the ongoing debates seking the nation at the the: Edrnund Burke's Refiections on the Revolution in France and Tom Paine's Righrs of Mm. Both Burke and Paine used language in a new and highly rhetorical way. Their liberai use of organic and culturai metaphors to convey their arguments served to reinvent the language of conservatism, (as in Burke's case), and revolution, (in Paine's case). Their use of language and use of terms such as Th,Liberty, Freedom, and Justice, bridges the memory of the ancient class conflict in Britain and brought to the fore debates which sought answers to "who" should rule the nation, and "why. " The debates inherent in their works go beyond the bourgeois and radical space contemporary to their age, back to periods ternote in the minds of most of their reading public. The language inherent in these debates historically overarches the ongins of both the bourgeois and radical spaces, as illustrated by what E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill mutually refer to as the "Nonnan Yoke" and/ or the "Free-born Englishrnan." The specifics of this earlier English history were not the main issue, but rather it was their utility to create an effective rhetorical pta$orm to spur the radical position of the 1790's

that mattered. Tom Paine's work, Common Sertse (1 776), for instance, exemplifies how he grounded the arguments for political reform during the later haif of the eighteenth century in ancient conflicts of exploitation before the advent of medieval mercantile capitaiism. He states that:

A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England, against the consent of the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. The plain truth is that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking int~.'~~

Paine's statement underscores what John Baxter, a leader of the London Corresponding Society, wrote about this early origin of British subjugation-that "Onginaiiy" the "constitution must have ken ffee." Baxter's deductions that %e Britons having being subdued fïrst by the Romans, next by the Saxons, these again by the

Danes, and, tinally, al1 by the Normans . . ."'59 corroborates Christopher Hiil's research that fùids evidence of this view of Norman conques in Andrew Hom's Mirrors of Justice, wcitten in the thirteenth century. Hill, fiirthemore, traces the odyssey of Hom's work through its transcription in Elizabeth's reign to Coke's reading of it in the House of Commons in 162 1: the era shortiy derthe medieval period that Paine makes many references to in his Righis. This evidence reveals that the arguments inherent in the bourgeois and new radical-plebeian spaces of the 1790's beg for a historical explanation that more ûuiy accounts for these more remote concerns bond up within the very language of British radicalism. Theiwail's advocacy of fiee speech, rationai discussion, and non-violent political action, although in sympathy with many thinkers of the day, met with great reservation Erom many detractors. This reservation is an example of the radical language of class conflict which Hill and Thompson allude to, and spurred new critical debate about the validity of the Govemment's censorship Iaws, and whether these laws were good for the nation. Part of this debate involved William Godwin's Considerations On Lord Grenville 's And Mr, Pitt's Bills Concerning Treasonnble And Seditious Practices, And Unluytil Assemblies, a mitigating appeal somewhere between Thelwall's plebeian speech and the rightist polemics produced by politically conservative writers. In February 1796, as an example, Gentlemen's Magmne (a conservative magazine) attacked Godwin's pamphlet for its seemingly political contradictions. It atternpted to use Godwin's gradualist reform and elitist ideas about social responsibility and "readership" to vindicate its pro-censorship stance. Godwin conceded that: "A doctrine opposite to the rnaxims of the existing govemment may be dangerous in hands of agitators, but it cannot produce very fatal consequences in the hands of philosopher^.'"^' The Gentleman 's Magazine 's use of one of Godwin's arguments to advocate censmhip senred to undercut Godwin's intentions to argue against Pitt's Seditious Practices and Unlawful Assemblies bills-an intention Godwin was unabIe to foresee. Further, although Godwin suggested in his Considerations the many dangers of arousing crowd passions prematurely before rational thought occurs, as he alluded the radicals were doing, weakened his argument against censorship when he stated that phiiosophers were the only people responsible enough to possess dissident material. Es statement inadvertently set up an intellectual hierarchy that rationalized a form of censorship- exactly the type of argument that the editors of Gentleman 's Magazine wished to hear, and one that implicitly echoed the arguments put forward by Burke in his Rejlections. Although William Godwin had accused the LCS at the time of "thoughtlessly pursuing conduct, which was caiculated sooner or later to bring on scenes of confusion[,l" he viewed, contrary to Burke's pessimism about fiee-inquiry, the Govemment's "high treasony*trials at "Old Bailey . . ." as the ûue cause which "conspicuous1y forced the moderate and the neuüal, to take their station in the ranks of the enem~."'~'Although Godwin did not support the methods manifesting the French Revolution, he concluded that if these proposed Seditious Practices and Unlafi Assemblies laws passed "the statesman would be perpetually in danger of intrenching upon the fieehold of our liberties." His rationalizations that to infnnge upon the LCS's liberties would eventually translate into the intiingement on the fieedoms of al1 the citizens of the nation.'63

For Godwin and middle class reforrners like him, what ultimateiy was most important was that the fteedom for rational debate be kept open in order that "Truth and Reason" may usher in a civil society. Godwin's position, in this regard, is similar to that of Tom Paine. Paine, in his response to Burke in The Rights of Man, states, for instance, that Reason and ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these cm be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machiaery of Government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.'"

Paine's conception of ignorance refuted Burke's approach to social awareness. Burke desired an adherence to religion, monarchy, and ultirnately, bourgeois authority. To undercut Burke's almost impenetrable assertions and advance the popularization of knowledge, members of the London Correspondhg Society, Paine, and other refomiers, formed a liaison to defeat the social oppression that held society back fiom improvement.

The liaison was one that would alter the character of British politics forever. In order to address what changes the LCS and other refomers made to British politics, 1 would like to examine the importance of this Society's place within the political context of the time, the factors that &ove its motives for radical-reform and manifested it as a fully secular- plebeian space. 1 will also look next at one of its most dedicated and committed members, Francis Place, to demonstrate how this Society, (not unlike other spaces of influence of which Joseph Johnson was a part), developed through its unique and skilled labourkg-class membership. Francis Place's life, self-education, and introduction to the world of collective economic and political organization, exemplifies the typical member of societies like the London Corresponding Society. Place was self-educated and widely read on the type of reform literature that Joseph Johnson and his cucle of writers published. in this sense, Place was very much a product of the era's informed and critical reading public, typiwg a newly realized political matunty: a product of the intricate networks of materialist- science, workingman's lectures, and an emerging plebeian political space. Place's working class background and motivations for becoming one of the leading figures in the London Correspondhg Society refl ects much of the same interests that brought other members, like Thomas Hardy and John Thelwall, to join the LCS. Place, as a teenager in the 1780s, was apprenticed by one of his father's neighbours as a leather breeches-maker. A slump in the industry, common to many trades at the time due to the ccde-skilling"of production processes, compelled Place to work for less money in the "stuffbreeches" industry until the Breeches Maken Benefit Society called a strike of leather breeches makers in the spring of 1793. These years for Place formed his understanding of the boom/slump cycles of proto-industrial capitaiism and the strife it caused for working people.'65 It served to prepare Place, as it did others who later joined the LCS. The Breeches Makers' sûike that involved the young Place began badly, having for its two hundred fifty members a mere £200 in its sûike fund. Therefore, the strikers could only sustain themselves for three weeks, Place became involved in the strike and devised the idea of "going on the tramp" and lodging with breeches-makers in other parts of the country. Place proposed that certificates be made in order to enable the striking workmen to stay one night at another breeches-maker's home and collect one shilling. He dso proposed that the tradesmen make two "mg-fair"breeches per week for eight shillings. Furthemore, he suggested that an address setting out the reasons for the strike should be printed and circulated. Al1 of his ideas being adopted, he was made manager of the shop to sel1 the breeches that the striking tradesmen were to make.166 The strike, il1 timed and poorly funded, quickly fell through. Because of bis activities in the strike, Place was penecuted and barred fiom employment for a period of six months.16' He and his wife suffered severe poverty during the period, forcing him to pawn their possessions in order to obtain credit to eat. While seeking work during this period, Place studied ceaselessly. He read Greek and Roman histories, Fielding's novels, some of Hume's Essays, books on geography, anatomy, surgery, science, and the arts. He also read many biographies and authors on law, such as Adam Smith and John Locke. Place's self-education se& as a primer for his future dein both reform politics movement and the London Correspondhg Society.I6' Like many LCS autodidactic members, such as Thomas Hardy, John Home Tooke, and John Thelwall, Place acquired his knowledge fiom the profusion of relatively cheap publications marketed through printers such as Joseph Johnson: two of the most noteworthy being Paine's Age of Reason and The Rights of Mian. Place came to maturity at what Jürgen Habermas cites as the apex of the eighteenth century's bourgeois public space-a culture based inprint-politics-and one that bolstered the oral and çustomary traditions of the radical-plebeian movement. Place, like other working class people, benefited fiom the cheap availability of literature and the new spaces that dlowed people to become educated in new ways. He was, like other LCS members, included in part of the space now open to the public through print, clubs, associations, and the popular dissemination of knowledge. During Place's active life, the primary issue for radicals was parliamentary reform. Since the English Civil War, some republicans, primarily in the tradition of the Levellers and Diggers, had gone so far as to advocate manhood suffiage.lbg John Wilkes revived this issue for suffrage in his riotous campaigns of the 1760s and 1770s. Echoing many of the demands made by the Levellers and Wilkes, Major John Cartwright later published "the six points of the Charter" in 1779, these points included: universai suffrage (ofmen); annual elections; secret ballot; equal number of voters in each constituency; abolition of property qualifications for voting; and payment for elected Members of ~arliament."~ In the following year, the Society for Constitutional Information fomed in order

to publish iiterature to promote radical refon. Joseph Johnson, (as noted, a paid subscriber of the Society), published some of its texts. The Society sought many things, among them were: improvements for the legal position of Catholics; and the ternoval of "rotten borough" constituencies conûolled by smdcliques."' The SC1 (Society for Constitutional Enformation), however, was not without its problems. In 1783, a coaiition between Whig leader, Charles J. Fox, and Lord North (an arch-enemy of refom), to decide the Society's future, split its membership. Apart fiom this split, the SC1 was for the most part primarily a rniddle-ciass society reflecting middle class concerns. Trade unions, dissenting religious groups, and debating clubs, were just beginning to senously provide labouring men with political education and experiences of organization. The French Revolution (initially welcomed in Britain because of its early aims of achieving something like Britain's limited monarchy) and Tom Paine's Righrs of Man, Mer spurred republican ideals within England's labouring population. As much as these ideals were gaining popularity, the SC1 could not address al1 of the issues concerning working people.'" Conditions were tough for many labouring people in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Francis Place commented on what such conditions meant for numerous people who laboured under the rigid realities of laissez-fire capitalism when he was involved with the LCS. In proto-Dickensian style, Place depicts a typical working man in his Autobiography (1793-1795) how:

the hopes of a man who has no other means than those of his own hands to help himself are but too ofien illusory+and in a vast nunber of cases, the disappointments are more than can be steadily met, and men give up in despair, become reckless, and &r a rie of poverty end their days prematurely in misery .. . I have seen a vast many such, who when the evil day has come upon them, have kept on working steadily but hopelessly more like horses in a mi& or mere machines than human being, their feelings blunted, poor stuitüïed mowig animais, working on yet unable to support their families in any thing like cornfort, fiequently wanting the common necessaries of We, yet never giving up until "misery has eaten them to the bone," none knowing none caring for hem, no one to admiaister a word of cornfort, or if au occasion occurred which might be

of service to them, none to rouse them to take advantage of it. Ail above hem in cirçumstances, calumniating them, classing them with the dissolute, the profligate and the dishonest, hmwhom the chamter of the whole of the working people is taken[.] Justice will never perhaps be done to .. . [the por] because they may never be understood, because it is not the habit for men to cmfor others beneath them in rank, and because they

who employ them will probably never fail to look grudgingly on the pay they are compelled to give them for their services, the very notion of which produces an inward hatred of them, a feeling so common that it is visibIe in the countenance and manners in nearly every one who has to pay either jounieyrnen, labourers, or servants[.] Those who having been once well off in the worfd fdl into poverty seldom long survive their change of circumstances. 173

In a society which engendered such bleak, down and out conditions, coupled with a growing sense of public indignation at the govement's unwillingness to mitigate them, the London Correspondmg Society formed in January of 1792. The Society was eventually to displace the role of the SCI. The basis of the LCS's membership was wider than that of the SCI. Thomas Hardy, a shoemaker and an original founding member, reflected îhe more marked plebeian values of this new Society. Its scope was more encompassing of the needs and concerns felt by many labouring people. Aithough the Society's cause was a political one, it strategically adopted the word '%orresponding" in its name in order to circumvent a law that made it iiiegd to have a single politicai association in more tban one town. The Society's early minutes attest to its idea of engaging Britain's dispossessed citizens in a fomof informed debate in order to manifest change. In this regard, its mandate was similar to those of Joseph Johnson and his circle of writers. The minutes of the LCS state:

. . . in our inquiries we soon discovered that gross ignorance and prejudice of the bullc of the nation was the greatest obstacle to the obtaining redress. Therefore our aim was to have a well regulated and orderly society formed for the purpose of dispelling that ignorance and prejudice as far as possible, and instill into their minds by means of the press a sense of rights as fieemen, and their duty to themselves, and their posterity, as good citizens, and hereditary guardians of the liberties transmitted to them by their f~refathers."~

It is this "hereditary guardians of the liberties transmitted," the social and secular evolution of ideals that cal1 for a "fiee Briton," to which both Thompson and Hill allude. Burke's ideals, in contrast to those of the LCS and Tom Paine, that Hill and Thompson cite, accounts for the rise of the Monarchy and 6~commonwealth""Shm a historical reference point of early Protestant individualism and/ or Loiiardism, rather than from the deeper seated mots of English civilization. The LCS's and Paine's plea to repatriate such long lost liberties traces back to what social and political theorist Peter Kropotkin later suggested is the basis of distant social and personal longings to realize collective freedom. Kropotkin's theory, based on the "conspecific mutual-aid" bais of humanity, suggests that it is the condition of hurnan evolution that actuaiiy fosters cornmunitaian- relations of society. Kropotkin's early twentieth-century hypothesis throws light on the conflicts of the

British radical tradition. In his book, Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution, Kropotkin, thinking of Charles Darwin's theory of naturai selection, and survival of the fittest, wanted to counter the latter idea with the natural idea of munial aid-he posited tbat The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with al1 the past evolution of the human race, that it has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding ail vicissitudes of history. It was chiefly evolved during periods of peace and prosperity; but when even the greatest calamities befell men-when whole populations were decimated by misery, or groaned under the yoke of tyranny-the same tendency continued to live in the villages and among the poorer classes in the towns; it still keeps them together, and in the long run it reacted upon those niling, fighting, and devastating rninorities which dismissed it as sentimental n0n~ense.l'~

Kropotkin's theory, applied to the politicai atmosphere of the 1790s, suggests that the primary shortcornhg with Burke's conception of the 'bcommonwealth"is that it depends too greatly on a "religious and chivalric"'" mode1 to explain the bourgeoisie's stniggle for political supremacy rather than an economic one. Burke, for instance, ignores the much older unresolved conflicts of oppression stemming trom land expropriations that exist within the collectivized memory of our forefathers and mothers-their loss of economic fieedom prior to the medieval period-a predating of the guilds displacement of the ancient clan system of organization, Kropotkin's mutual-aid explanation is remarkably like the LCS's position on social liberty, and rather than entirely confuting Charles Darwin's mid-nineteenth-cennuy conclusions on "survival of the fittest," Knipotkin concurs with Darwin's later ideas that

it is the "moral faculties" in man that truiy fonn the bonds of society's polity. This polity is part of the same community feeling that Thelwall, Wollstonecraft, and other radicais, including radical materialists such as Erasmus Darwin, (Charles's grandfather), irnplicitly refer to in their 1790s writings, which, in turn, ecboed mid-seventeenth-centucy demands by such Pwitan Dissenters as the Levellers, Diggers, and Rante~s."~

Charles Darwin's moral theory about man implicitly underpins Kroputkin's notion of a collective economic relationship between people-an apparent universal in the cultures Darwin cites. Darwin's and KropotkUi's answers help explain why the age- old struggles to develop hedom during the medievai peciod, which Burke implicitiy suggests are the "liberties" of humanity, is ignored as a topic in his Reflections. In contrast, Paine's comments about a pre-chivalry medievd period more explicitiy address the bonds that exist between common people. In The Descent of Man, Danvin echoes Paine's cal1 to reconstitute England's Comrnons, foreshadowing Kropotkin's mutualism. Darwin States that:

Social animals are impelled partly by a wish to aid the members of their comrnunity in a general manner, but more commonly to perform certain definite actions. Man is impelled by the same general wish to aid his fellows . . .179

Kropotkin's and Darwin's observations help to underscore the LCS's and Paine's references to the ancient fieedoms of England. Their later conclusions can help us to measure the vecisimiIitude of Burke's polemic, and suggest that the arguments of writers like Paine and Johnson's reform authors were more persuasive. Further, Hiil and Thompson's "Norman Yoke" theocy of the "Free-bom English" additionally substantiates that the image of the loss of freedom in ancient Briton is the more probable condition for a secularization of ideology: one that is rhetoncaiiy persuasive to regain ancient lost "righis" and "natural" conditions of freedom. In sum, this histocical clash of intetests between oppmsors and oppressed validates the evolution of the bourgeois and plebeian classes not on the bais of conflict between the feudal aristocracy and emerging capitalist class, or capitalist class and dispiaced minorities, but rather on systems of exploitation tbat displace people regardless of the specific character of their economic organization. Such basic themes are ofi repeated in medieval popular culture, such as John Ball's speeches, and "fair-minded champions of al1 fair-minded people[;] . . .Guy of Wanclck, Bevis of Hampton, and Robin H~od[.]"'~It is an argument that Burke's ReJections widely overlooks. The LCSs political support for manhood segeand annual parliarnents, as well as its sympathy for the French Revolution, testi@ to its conunitment to the "mutual bonds" that underscore plebeian history, as exemplified in its serialization of Major Cartwright's Leveller tract, the Essay, in 1792.'" Such testirnonies, however, did not leave the LCS's reputation untamished. inevitably, the LCS's views brought scorn fiom conservative detractors. Consetvative groups, such as the Church and King mobs, accused and argued that the LCS's ideas were an organized attempt to destroy England's "Altar and ~luone."'" Indeed, Thomas Hardy recounts one of Burke's "mad rants" in the House of Commons as referring to the LCS as the "'Parent Society"' and "'Mother of al1 rnis~hief.'"'~~Burke, like other conservatives at this time, both disliked and distrusted the LCS. Its advocacy of "open-discussion" incited Burke's sense of righteousness and bourgeois morality. He diarnetricdly opposed its fke-inquiries, and openly advocated repression of the reading audience, as well as of authors, in the beIief that the lower classes were incapable of understanding the complex argument that would justifj their

subordination: ''where a man is incapable of receivhg Benefït through bis reason, he must be made to receive it thro' his fm. Here the Magistrate must stand in the place of the Professor. They who cannot or wül not be taught, must be coerced."'" Yet, despite opposition hmits political opponents, the LCS prospered. Burke's views, not holding Parliarnentary sway, did not directly affect the LCS's or SCi's activities. The LCS worked closely dong 6ththe members of the larger Society for Constitutional Monnation as its atly, and soon made the SC1 and its leader, John Home Tooke, the official voice of Bntain's nationwide movement for refom. Within six months, LCS membership increased fiom its initial eight people to two thousand members.'" However, because of it success, its enemies also increased. Conservative groups, such as the "Church and King" societies and the ccAssociationfor Preserving Liberty and property against Republicans and Levellers," spontaneously formed as a reaction against the French Revolution's Paris massacres of Royalists and the Fraternal Edict, as well as the growing popularity of both the SC1 and LCS.''~ The reforms which the LCS widely advocated, as argued in Paine's Rights of Man, (the LCS's " .. .bible"'8'), fiightened as many people as they attracted. By 1792-3, as the French Revolution moved through regicide and tyranny to war with England and Europe, the counter revolutionary forces (or anti-Jacobins) grew rapidly. Hostility intensified during the war at the mere mention of Tom Paine, French Jacobins, or even reform.ls8 In 1793-4, the Pitt Government banned seditious publications, suspended "habeas corpus," and msted the key leaders of both the Constitutional Information and London Corresponding Societie~.'~~ The trumped up arrests were a ploy by the Pitt Government designed to quel1 the growing popularity of these two ~ocieties.'~'Within months of the arrests, Francis Place became interested in the London Corresponding Society through his landlord, a member of the Society, who encouraged Place to j~in.'~'He very soon became a committed and energetic member of the LCS. The LCS General Committee elected him to become a member of one of its committees to assist the defense in the treason trials of October to December in 1794. Place's statements in his autobiography about these trials convey the tensions tbat the govemment prosecutions created. His 8th of December (1793-95) entry declares: Al1 or nearly all the persons apprehended were members either of the London Correspondhg Society or of the Society for Constitutionai Information. The violent proceedings of the Govemment fnghtened away many of the members of the society and its number was very considerably diminished. Many persons however, of whom I was one, considered it meritorious, and the performance of a duty to become members, now that it was threatened with violence, and its founder and secretary was persecuted. This improved the character of the society as most of those who joined it were men of decided character, sober, thinking men; not likely to be easily put hmtheir purp~se.'~'

The eventual acquittal of the charges against the leaders of the two Societies in London, and the consequent public support f'avouring them, embarrassed the Pitt Government irn~nensely.'~~Later that same year, undeterred by these acquittais, the Pitt Govemment quickly passed through Parliament laws banning meetings of over fifty people, as well as rnaking it treason to coerce Parliament, devise evil against the King, or incite contempt of the C~nstitution.'.~~The trials took theù toll on the LCS membership. After the trials, Thomas Hardy, greatly affkted by his wife's death after an attack by a loyalist mob on theù home, resigned hmactive politics. His resignation, and the severe blow to the LCS caused by the trials, lefi the Society without strong leadership, and membership numbers began to suffer. Similarly, the SC1 fell prey to the disniption resulting fiom the triais, and the paralyzing effects of the increased powers of the treason and sedition laws. The SC1 was unable io withstand the increased pressures fiom the laws and disbanded shortly thereafter.'q5 The political vacuum that occurred &er the SCI's dispersal left the LCS as the sole remaining head of the movement for parliarnentary refonn. In bis autobiography, Place, echoing the liberal objectives of Johnson and his circles of witers, knew full well the importance that the LCS served as an educator of refom for working class people to learn to wield the kaowledge necessary for political action. The LCS after rapidly assuming the SCI's role, was mentioned by Place in his autobiography:

The moral effects of the Society were very great indeed, it induced men to read books, instead of spending their tirne at public houses, it induced them to love their own homes, it taught them to think, to respect themselves, and to desire to educate their children. It taught them the great moral lesson to 'bear andforbeur'. The discussions in the divisions, and in the Sunday aflernoon reading and debating associations held in their own roorns, opened to them views to which they had been biiid. They were compelled by those discussions to find reasons for their opinions, and to tolerate the opinions of others. In fact it gave a new stimulus to a large rnass of men who had hitherto been but too justly considered, as incapable of any but the very grossest pursuits, and sensual enjoyments. It elevated them in society.lg6

In the, the LCS's push for reforms regained public confidence. This confidence helped to regenerate a new temporary popularity for the LCS. Place at this tirne was assiduous, and sold the bulk of the tickets for the Society's 6rst public meeting since the arrests in May 1794. On June 29,1795, in St. George's Fields, an Address to the Nation drew approximately one hundred thousand pe~ple.'~'The issues high on people's minds were the increashg bread and food prices, Britain's costly war with France, and the gened poverty hmeconomic trade-depression. Place found "the state of the irritation which the circumstances of the time produced, &ove the people into clubs and associations to obtain Peacq Reform and Cheap bread. Those who associated were fully persuaded up by causiug as great a ferment as possible to goverment wouId be overawed and concede htthey had reque~ted."'~~ In September 1795, yet another meeting ofone hundred fifty thousand people gathered near Copenhagen House in a militant Address to the Nation. The meeting's primary aim was to ensure tbat,

his Majesty should consider the sacred obligations he is bound to îulfill, and the

duties he ought to discharge: he shouid recollect, that when he ceases to consult the

interests and happiness of the People, he will case to be respected: and that Justice is a debt to which the Nation hath a right to demand fiom the Thr~ne.'~~

Three days after this demonstration, a hostile crowd met the King when he attempted to open Parliament. A pain of glas in the King's coach, broken by a small Stone, pmvoked the Government (who blamed the Copenhagen Houe meeting for the public's unrest) to introduce the two bills aga& treason and sediti~n.'~On November 12, the LCS held a Public Meeting against these bills. Estimates of the demonstration claim that up to two hundred thousand people attended to Listen to what was to become London's largest-ever public meeting.20' It was at this meeting that John Thelwall reiterated hmmemory its Resolutions and Petitions developed out of his "Peaceful Discussion, not Twnultuous Violence" tra~t.'~ The '"TwoActs" that the demonstration addressed received Royal Assent on December 18,1795. The fkt act made it High Treason to imagine, invent, devise, or intend the death or wouding of the King, or depriving him of his Crown or any other of his dominions, by any writing or overt act. The second act made it Kigh Treason to hold any meeting of over fi@ people without prwious approval of a magistrate. The Two Acts achieved their object: theder causing the LCS's and other reform societies' memberships to steadily decline. Membership in the LCS fell fiom one thousand eigbty six in February of 1795 to one hundred eighty eight by De~ernûer?~~ Over the succeeding months, the Society eventually reorganized and published The Moral and Political Magazine of the London Corresponding Society as its official journal between July 1796 and May 1797.20" Place took over the publishing of this magazine, but by the summer of 1797 he had accumulated so many debts from its publication tbat he was eventually forced to stop its produ~tion.'~'Further to this, in order to avoid personal liabilities and prosecution for the Society's debts, Place had to let his membership lapse?06 By April 1798 LCS suffered yet another difficulty. Further arrests demoraiized its remaining committee leaders and members, and damaged the Society's public presence. The arrests, dong with personai harassrnent against members like Thelwall fiom Government authorities, coupled with the closure of its magazine, eventually &ove the Society to operate underground. Within a year fiom this period, the Government finaily proscribed the Society under the "Comspondiig Societies Act of 1799." From this period on, the Society as a political force was effectively moribund.'07

Yet, dong with the British goverment's move to "proscribe" the LCS in order to mitigate the efforts of the reformists, additionai events were unfolclhg that would suppress the advent of radicalism. During the succeeding eighteen year period between 1790 and 1808, as has been noted by Matthew Grenby, consecvative authors in England produced no less than sixty anti-Jacobin novels denouncing what they saw as the eviIs of reform and radical philosophy, especially the French Revolutionary ideals and radical thought on British s~il.~~~They formed part of an on-going push by the cornervative government, patrons, and publishers, to undercut the authority of radicalism in Britain.

Burke's use of language in his Refections, as earlier alluded to, is a foremer O€ this style of emotive writing. It denotes a sense of historically based Christian-Protestant family values of paternalism and deference to the authority of "God." His many references to religion and its ccdestruction"implicitly remind his readers of the royalist conception of the "divine nght of kings." This divinity is "natural," Burke argues, and is based upon the ecclesiastic philosophy of God's "chain of being" that orders al1 things within the universe, especially the social hierarchy of humanity. In bis Refections Burke portrays this concept of the chah of king in order to ju- class distinctions. He states, for example, that

The occupation of an hair-dresser, or of a working tallow-chandler, cannot be a matter of honout to any person-to say nothing of a nurnber of other more servile employments. Such descriptions of men ought not to sufTer oppression fiom the state; but the state sufferç oppression, if such as they, either individually or collectively, are pemitted to nile. In this you think you are combating prejudice, but you are at war with nature.'*

Further to this justification of class hierarchy, Burke explicitly suggests that yielding to the ideas of "rationalism" and "deism" wouid destroy that which remains sacred to society. Burke called for modifications in the constitution to correct social problems through socially virtuous acts of benevolence carried out by those in authority. In order to create a sense of %irtuen that society should aspire to Burke uses family and household descriptions to porttay the idea of social goodness and personai morality. His invocation of the word "nature" implicitiy supports the bais of his position as something superceediig the man-made authority in society. Such descriptions make it easier for his audience to identify with his arguments. For instance, he states in Rejlections that:

Al1 the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which hannonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautifl and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. Al1 the decent drapery of life is to be rudely tom off. AU the supedded ideas, fùrnished hmthe wardrobe of a mord imagination, which the kart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessacy to cover the defects of our naked shivering nature, and tu raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as a ridiculous, absurd, and aatiquated f~hion.~"

Moreover, Burke's jwctaposition of such easily identifiable farnily conceptions and sense of religious history against a backdrop of images of murder and destruction of life and property, depict in tangible and concrete temthe outcome of "rationalist" philosophy. Burke's fictional account of the Revolution demonsûates the power of his rhetoric to affect public opinion. He States that:

History will record, that on the morning of the 6'bof October 1789, the king and queen of France, after a day of confusion, dm,dismay, and

slaughter, lay down, under the pledged securîty of public faith, to indulge nature in a few hours of respite, and iroubled melancholy repose. From this sleep the queeo was first stattled by the voice of the sentine1 at her door, who cried out for her, to Save herself by flight-that this was the last proof of fideiity he could give-tbat they were upon him and he was dead. Instantiy he was cut down. A band of cniel niffians and assassins, reeking with blood, nished into the chamber of the queen, and pierced with an hundred strokes of bayonets and poniards the bed, hmwhence this persecuted womau had but just time to fly almost halfnaked, and through

ways unknown to the murderers had escaped to seek refuge at the feet of a king and husband, not secure of bis own 1% for a moment?" His depiction of the assauit on the queen, although unproven, implies a cornplete loss of al1 hwnan dignity and sense of sacredness. He implies that the niff~ansdid not only threaten to mderthe queen, but that their greater intentions were probably to tape her. His statement that they "rushed into" her "chamber. . .whence this . . .woman had but tirne to fly alrnost halfnaked . . ." elicits in tiis readers deep-seated conventional senses of propriety and decency. He purposefy stirs the core of what people commonly perceive as the primary codes of behaviour defîning what is "sacred and profane." For the British reading public during the period, conservative arguments such as Burke's homey maxim: "Do not leave the plain wholesome ROAST BEEF of OLD ENGLAND for the megre unsubstantial diet of these political French Cook~[,]""~was assuredly a more powerful voice in the new public space than the more rational and factual competing arguments put forth by radical refonners, such as Tom Paine's. The radical refonn arguments, on the other hand, appeared to be in advance of the public's readiness to accept them- Paine's Rights of Man, although concise, well argued, and rhetorically persuasive, stands as an example of the public's reticence to yield to the discourse of rationalism. Paine's Rights of Man addressed many facets of history that could reasonably justifi revolution in Britain: "he was calling the dispossessed to action[.] The most enthusiastic tesponse to the French Revolution came ftom the victims of the industrial revolution. To them the rights of man funiished a telling criticism of the constitution fiom which they were excluded. .. .200,000 copies of The Rights of Man were distributed[.Pl3 But why did Paine's, the LCS's, and other radical reformer's anti- conservative arguments, with unquestionable popularity, fail to spur the sentiments of the dispossessed in England to act? Paine's Rights of Man may offer part of the answer. Although Paine and many refonners looked to the cepublics of France and America as models of fiedom and mial prosperity, his portraya1 of them reveals a certain naive glossing over of the actual conditions that common people in these nations had to endure-especially those in America. In his Rights of Man, for example, Paine explicitly States that,

As America was the only spot in the political world, where the principles of universal ceformation could begin, so also was it the best in the naturai world . . . -1ts first settlers were emigrants from diierent Ewopean nations, and ofdiversified professions of religion, . . .meeting in the new [world], not as enemies, but as brothers . . . In such a situation man becomes what he o~ght.~'~

This idea of "brothers" meeting in a new type of society mutually assisting one another as citizens of the world deceptively undercuts Paine's understanding of what America's true federation meant to the majority of its inhabitants. Paine's concentration on the success stories of America rather than the relative failmes (by and large publicly unnoticed), and his rather hopefbl account that France was now unfettered to follow America's lead, was simply unredistic given the economic situation. This lack of realism probably harnpered radical-reform's voice in the new public space. Paine's view, for example, that:

.. . what we now see in the world, fiom the Revolutions in America and France, are a renovation of the nanual order of things, a system of principles as universal as tmth and the existence of man, and combining moral with political happiness and national pro~perity[,]~'* ignores the fact that Fmce's experience with its Revolution was not altogether uniike England's experience aimost one hundred fifty years prior-a bourgeois revolution, not a plebeian one. Furthmore, his account of America during this period glosses over what most slaves and labouring people experienced in that "morally and happy" nation. American historian Billy Smith places Paine's naïve account of America in context. Smith recounts what early modern Amenca was like for the average citizen. He States, for instance, that in

the burgeoning, large metropolis of Eighteenth-century Philadelphia . . . laboring-class neighborhood streets generally went unpaved, watchmen made rounds sporadically, scavengers appeared infiequently, and mounds of garbage fed a multitude of pigs, chickens, dogs, nts, and vermin."'

Smith's conclusions about America during the latter half of the eighteenth century conjure questions about what the gras-roots' understanding in England's port cities was

of these large American towns. Could sections of labouring people (stevedores, etc.) in England have been more aware than Tom Paine of the econornic conditions for "dispossessed" wageworkers in Amenca? Might they have been aware that life in America for people of their class was little diierent than in England-abject poverty, back breaking work, and diseases for most? If they did know, how would Paine's arguments sound to them-like perhaps "pie in the sky" propagmda? Moreover, if Paine's goal was to inspire the common-man of England to act-a plebeian culture devoid of formal education due to the requirement to toi1 in order to exist-how were such explanations about British social realties taken during the period? Paine's economics, for instance, were probably not appreciated by bis general readership:

.. . seventeen millions is applied to two different purposes; the one to pay the intetest of the national debt, the other to the current expenses of each year. About nine millions are appropriated to the former; and the remainder, king nearly eight millions, to the latter. .. . mt is so much like paying with one hand and taking with the other, as not to ment much notice. . .217

His analysis would have required a rudimentary knowledge of how the national debt affects a common person's life-a view needing an understanding of "nation" in a time when such a concept was still emerging. How would the working poor view Paine's global notions of nation? Moreover, how reiidy were the common people of England-people never entmsted with the vote-for Paine's utopian vision that

Al1 the land, the waters, the mines, the houses, and ail permanent feudai property, must return to the people, the whole people, to be adrninistrated in partnership by the parishes. This is our natural situation, al1 our improvements lead us towards its accomplishment, it arises out of our oId Saxon institutions and the part. .. recaptured as it were fiom the Conquest at different times[.12"

Indeed, Paine's suggestion in his Rights that "[tlhe Parliament in England, in both its branches, was erected by patents fiom the descendants of the Conqueror. [And that tlhe House of Comrnons did not originate as a matter of right in the People, to delegate or elect, but as a gant or boon . . to England's ruiers, seemed to more effectively affront any sense of nationalism than remove it. Paine's, "ou cannot nile beyond the grave," refutation of Burke's clah that "'[a]U teformations we have hitherto made have

proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity[,]' not the absttact nghts of man,

[and that these] were the safest constitutional guarantee .. .7'22" failed to inspire the public. Reformist condemnations of the nation's authonty, such as exhibited in Paine's Rights of Man, condescended toward British sentiment of homeland tather than inspiring social change. This apparent failure on the part of reformers to sway what Burke seemed to conectly perceive as the "irrationaiity" bolstering the "order"of social hierarchy, explains ia part why the public during the late eighteenth century were not ready to usher in radical political change. Indeed, it appears that the London Corresponding Society's confident observation that "[tJhe SWISHMULTITUDE are well aware that it matters

very little who are the HOG DRIVERS, while the present wretched system of corruption is in existence""' in 1795 was ail too premature, al1 too elite, and al1 too incorrect in gauging the tnie 6bdemocratic"volitions of thek fellow country people in bringing about social revolution. CONCLUSION

CONSERVATIVE REACTIONARIES, MATERlALIST-SCIENCE, AND

RADICAL LITERATURE IN ENGLAND OF THE 1790s

The political struggle between conservatives and radical refomers for the public imagination during the late eighteenth-century cannot be easily separated fiom the ascendancy of materialist philosophy that challenged older value systems upholding

English civil authority. Joseph Johnson was among the publishers of the new expression for radical refom that took advantage of the spread of emerging public spaces where socially progressive ideas took hold. His patronage of new authors writing in the British radical tradition, (writers who took advantage of the oral traditions of earlier revolutionary rhetoric), conüibuted to what theorist Jürgen Habermas broadly defines as the evolution of this era's public space-uprint culture ofpolitics. Whether Jürgen

Habermas' theory about the growth of public space(s) in the late eighteenth-century is the

best way to mode1 how literature and culture intersect, is perhaps not as important in

terms of this paper's argument and what agency these spaces actually provided for

Britain's labouring majority.

While these new spaces helped to facilitate education for new ctasses of people-

like Mary Woiistonecraft,Humpbry Davy, Thomas Beddoes, Thomas Hardy, John

Thelwall, and Francis Place-what is important to note about these spaces is that

conservative authority never yielded any of its power to radical-reform without

opposition. This opposition, ofien openly contested by political conservatives through 83 satiricai character assignations of reformes, pamphlet attacks on liberal ideas in general, and distorting propaganda of Jacobin and religious sentiment, made the reform- movement's transition into the public domain through clubs, associations, and publishing extremely problematic. What is perhaps more important to Habermas's, (and to a lesser extent Stewart's and Golinski's), conclusions that clubs and associations spurred awareness, knowledge, and a new plebeian space, is how the actual materialist- methodology discussed throughout this study crossed the boundaries of science, literature, and politics. Together these things îused seemingly disparate subjects like evolution, naturalism, social criticism, and radical politics.

The works and publications of people like Erasmus Darwin, Benjamin Franklin,

John Thelwail, Mary Wollstonecrafl, William Wwin, and Joseph Johnson attest to this intersection of new science, new social philosophies, and new public spaces. It is my contention that it was not necessarily what the new public spaces brought to these new classes of people that used materialist-philosophy, but rather what these new people brought to the new spaces. It was through these people, their ideas, materid objects, such as printùig presses, bookstores, and mail-posi, that new ideas arose. In the case of al1 of the major figures discussed in this thesis, one can trace the philosophical tenets grounded in radical-materiaiism and the dissotution of supernanualism. This dissolution and

debunking of supernaturaiism heIped uproot the ideas that protected conservative power,

ideas such as the Chain of Being, Pre-Destiny, and Divine Providence. It is irnplausible

to think that either the new spaces, or the new people who occupied them, came about in

any linear cause and effect fashion, In this sense the evolutioa of public spaces, and 84 development of secular, monist-materiaiist thinking, completely depended upon a diaiectical emergence.

Yet, this dialectical emergence was hught with setbacks. In the case of radical politics, where materiaiist-philosophy saw its manifest potential for social agency most cogentiy realized, the politicai "stone-walling" of reform ideology demonstrates the very real limitations on which spaces could legally flourish and which could not. However, this is not to dismiss that al1 of the new and old competing spaces coexisted in a hune of public discome, contributing to the broad historicai outcome. Their uneasy liaison led ta a new synthesis. Just as the radicalism of the late eighteenth-century subsided, so too did the Anti-Jacobins. Both gave way to new forms of association, canying forth the seeds of dissent and conservatism into the nineteenth-century.

Government policy toward radical poIitics, such as those of the London

Corresponding Society, became increasingly reactionary as the century came to its close.

In 1793-94, the Pitt Government's banning of seditious publications, suspension of

"habeas corpus," and arresting of key leaders of both the Constitutional Information and

London Corresponding Societie~,'~semd to close dom the growth of the plebeian

public space. Within five years of this period, the Government's proscription of the LCS

under the Corresponding Sociefies Act of 1799 effectively drove what was the epitome of

radical-reform's public space underground as a voice of political opp~sition.~

The Pitt Government's rnethod of effectively banning the voice of reform

underscores the perceived degree of power that radical-materialist philosophy had to

potentiaiiy topple consemative dominance. This threat, implicitiy drawing its rhetorical

power hmmaterialist-science, long-held historical conûicts between the oppressed and oppressors, and reform publishing, informs the reactionary fervour sunounding the criti~isms*~directed toward scientists Iike Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin and

Erasrnus Darwin, and social activists Iike William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecra.fl, and

John Thewall.

The matenalist-scientific examinatioas of the body, mind, and soul-empowering radical politics-explains why consematives in the seventeen-nineties and early eighteen hundreds had reason to fear the radical materialism of monist science. This science swept away the need for supernaturd and religious explanations to account for nature and

human existence. Like science, reform politics too were increasingly turning to

materialist philosophy to undercut hegemonic authority. It grounded the basis of radical

and reform literature firmiy on the tenets of early evolutionary theory, dialectics, and

materialist-monism.

The materialism of radical-science mixed with the social conditions and political

awareness at this time brought the social wodd of late-eighteenth-century Britain

uncornfortably close to the edge of political revolution. Writers like Percy and Mary

Shelley read both Darwin's Temple of Naltrre and Zoonomia, and they would have at

least been aware of the political underpinnings inherent in Thelwall's work due to

Thelwall's close association with the London Correspondhg Society, the Society for

Constitutional Information, the treason trials, and Joseph Johnson-fiiend and publisher

of Mary Wollstonecrafl, William Godwin, and Tom Paine. hdeed, Shelley's more

political poems and prose, such as England 1819, Queen Mab, and A Philosophical View

of Reform, attest to this in£iuence on his political and literary development incorporating

materialist thinking into bis work, The intersection of science's naturai explanations of 86 life and politics of reform-typified by such people as Erasmus Darwin, Jobn Thelwall and the Shelleys-forged the vital impulse of Iiterature to effectively cnticize conservative domination and inspire change. This is what political conservatives in the late eighteenth-century so feared, and, moreover, why they so vigorously struggled to keep materialist philosophy hmthe public gaze. NOTES

Royle and Walvin (1982), 75. ' Roberts and Roberts (1980), 475. Habermas. The Structural Transformation ofrhe Public Sphere (1998).

Thompson (1 963), 94-95; Hill (1997), 361.

Darwin (1930),234.

Stewart (1992). Claeys (1995),XXV-xxvi. Roe States: "The Treasury Solicitor's papers relating to the SC1 in the Public Record Office (PRO), London, contain a mmuscript List of members of the Society whose subscriptions were in arrears in 1793. Among those fiom whom payment was due appears-Josh. Johnson St. Paul's Churchyard 1 yr 1 - 1 -." Roe (1982), 198.

Kreis. "Edmund Burke, 1729-1797"; in, The Language of Polifics:England and the French Revolution. http://www.pagesznet/-stevek/inteIlec~ecturel4a.html#burke

'O Royle and Walvin (1982),59-72.

Tyson (1975), 1.

" Ibid, 2.

l3 Ibid, 2.

I6 Ibid, 118-1 19.

"Ibid, 121. " Cowper (1968), 475-476.

Thompson (1963), 94-95. Tyson (1979), 10.

" Ibid, 10. '' Ibid, 45.

I6 Ibid, 45. " Ibid, 44-45.

28 LmRespecting Women. Unknown author, pp. vi-vii; in, Tyson (1979), 50. l9 Ibid, 65-66.

Io Ibid, 58,62.

Ibid, 65-66.

32 Ibid, 67,101.

33 ibid, 104.

'' Johnson published both Tom Paine's The Rights of Mun and Mary Wollstonctaft's Vindication of the Rights of Man, mong many other radical-reform texts.

36 Bowles (1798), 100.

" Dr. Richard Price, a well-known Dissenter, was a fnend of Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Priestley, and Home Tooke; Mary Woiistonecraft listened to Price's occasional political sermons, and was influenced by his view that diII people were entitled to equal education. Todd (2000), 59-6 1.

I8 Burke (1 790); in, Keen (1999), 145.

39 ibid, 104-1 10,114-1 l7,f36-l42,l54,I6O-l62. Joseph Johnson's circIe of writers included Dr. Price. " ibid, (147).

42 Tyson, (1979), 118-121.

43 ibid, 118-121.

45 ibid, 33. " Ibid, 38.

47 Ibid. '* Ibid, 40. Burke (1 790), 142.

'O Wollstonecraft (1791), 40. ''Analyticul Review Art. XVTI: (3 12-320); (Review title): Rights of Man: being an Answer to Mr. Burke 's Attack on the French Revolution. By Thomas Paine, Secretary for Foreign Affairs to Congress, &c. and Author of Commun Sense. 8vo. p.162 3s. sewed Jordan, 179 1. " Sheps (May l989), 46.

53 Gerald Tyson States that the copy in the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress has this notation in an eighteenth-century hand: "a treasury journal." "Joseph Johnson: An Eighteenth Century Bookseller": sec footnote 37.

" Anti-Jacobin Review (July, 1798), 84-5.

" Tyson, (1975), 2.

" Anii Jacobin Review (Decernber, 1798).

Burke (179O), 130.

59 Dietzgen (190,272.

60 Davy. Unpublished manuscript, An Essay to prove fhat the Thinking Powers depend on the Organization ofthe Bo& Courtesy of Frank James, The Royal Institution of Great Britain, London: reE no. RI MS HD 13f, pp.33-46. Stewart (1992), di,xxxi, 92,94, 115-1 18,143-147.

62 King-Hele (1986), Int.

63 Many anti-refonn groups and publications, such as AntiJacobin Review: July, 1798, Church and King mobs, and Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, vociferously fought against philosophies, such as materialism, which they felt threatened social order.

" Church and King" societies and the "Association for Preserving Liberty and property against Republicans and Leveiiers": in, Smith (1984), 75.

65 Hemck (1997), 145-1 50. Haeckel (1929)' 354-358.

66 Paul Keen notes that in the 1792 edition of the Annual Register such ideas were complemented "'[bly means of the press, the grand forum in which al1 public affairs were agitated, .. .the minds of men were alienated from kings, and became enamoured with political philosophy' (iv)"; additionaily, Keen demonstrates T.J. Mathias's citing of ". . .Priestley's 'King-killing wishes and opinions' as an example of these modem philosopherdYof the French Philosophes' materiaiist ideas. Keen (1999), 45,49.

67 Grenby Merexplains the way the govemment responded to fears that French Jacobinism might infect the British public through the novels that had recently become so popular. The campaign to reclaim fiction for loyalty, patriotism, and piety led to the publication of sixty conservative novels. They tell us what the British anti-Jacobins thought they were up against, and what strategies they develop to combat the threat from Revolutionary France. Grenby (1 999), writing The AntiJacobin Novel for Cambridge University Press.

" Burke (1900), 137-8.

69 AntiJacobin Review (September, l798), 4.

" Ibid, iv. " Ibid, 85. Ibid.

l4John Bowles' pamphlet, Letfers of the Ghost ofAljFed oddressed to the Hon Thomas Erskine and the Hon. Charles James Fox on the occasion of the state trials at the close of the year 1 794 and the beginning of the yeur 1795 (1798) serves as a mode1 of politicaiiy consmative hyperbole attempting to undercut the ideas and writings of radical philosophers acquainted with the manifest political mission of the London Corresponding Society. Bowles States that ". ..the excess to which they mean to carry it [fiee discussion], is a powerful engine for the subversion of Governrnent - a mighty Lever, sacient, if judiciously applied, to averturn the Social Order of the Whole World" (106- 7). In Keen (1999), 155-6. Such fiee discussion implicitly referred to the inquiries of naturalists investigating and writing about social conditions of the period, such as Joseph Priestley and Thomas Beddoes. Also, Burke rnakes sirnilar references in Refleçtions, 147. '' The publishers of the AntiJacobin similarly use Burke's reference to levelling, ofien cited in ReJections, to deride the idea of liberty of the French Revolution.

76 Publication dates of Darwin's works were: The Botanic Garden (1791-2), The Temple of Nature (1 803) Zoonomia (Vol. 1,1794; Vol. II, 1796) and Phytologia (1 800).

Schofield. "The industrial Orientation of Science in the Lunar Society of Birmingham"; in, ISIS (1957), 410.

" Porter (1989), 39,41; Bowler (1983), 77-78.

Harrison (197 l), 26 1.

Porter (1 989), 56. Ruse (1 998) cites Darwin in his study: "Darwinism and atheism: different sides of the ssune coin?", 17-20.

Casey (1926), 128-9.

Darwin (Vol. 1 1794); Vol. II, 1796), 113-1 14.

Darwin's intimate counection with the Birmingham LwSociety and ûiendship with Benjamin Fmkhexplicitly aimed towards the leaming and dissemination of new scientific ideas, popuiarized most oflen through bis poeûy. King-Hele (1986), 187-188- " Sirnkin, & Newspaper Publishers"; in, Spartacus Internet Encyctopedia. United Kingdom: http:/~www.s~artacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Dublishets.htm.

93 Mann (1 964), 10. Tyson (1979), 2-3.

94 Shelley. History of a Six Weeh' Tour; in, Claire (1965), 42-6.

95 Writers such as John Thelwail, Thomas Beddoes and-as Richard Matlak, James McGavran, and Desmond King-Hele suggest-William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge, similarly shared this materialist philosophy. King-Hele (1994 Spring), 114- 118. McGavran (1994 Spring), 118-122. Matlak (1990 Spring), 76-81.

% Endo (September 1995), 283.

97 One of Shelley's early biographets, Richard Garnett, and Michael Scrivener in his study on Shelley's radicalism, show that upon Shelley's arrivai to the Swiss-ltalian Alps his imagination was fluent with the classical naturalist ideas of Pliny the Elder, Baruch Spinoza, as well as those of Erasmus Darwin, and Baron d'Holbach. Gamett (1917), 3 1- 40. Scrivener (1982), 68,77.

'' Garnett, Scrivener.

99 Luigi Galvini, Luigi Aidini, and Andrew Ure were instrumental in discovering and advancing electrical experiments on plants, animais, and hurnan beings. Gaivani's electrical discoveries are the origin of the term "galvanism," a theoreticai system that boih influenced Erasmus Darwin, and which Mary Shelley claims inspired the wnting of her novel, Frankemtein, Heilbron (1979), 70,353. Morus (l998), 7-8.

1M) Many authors, such as Frances Ferguson and Hugo Donnelly, have attributed spiritualism and/ or deistic dualism as the philosophicai basis of Shelley's thinking and writings; however, this study's examination of materialist monism holds that Shelley's use of materiaiist monism incorporates the conception of spiritualism and/ or duaiisrn as part of al1 matter. Its inclusion in the cosmos is as a single whole, or oneness. Shelley's reading of materialism advances Spinoza's view of "theistic" monism (see below notes, 101, and 104).

'OL Richard Garnett's suggestion that Shelley found inspiration for the oneness of nature in Pluiy's Natural History is suppoaed by Pliny's discussions on topics such as the longevity of an elephant's memory king comparable to that of a person's; the unfiirling of plant buds in spring; and ebb and flow of tides with the passing of the moon. Garnett - Merreveals how Spinoza's generai monism built upon Pliny's naturalism, which Shelley later raid. Pliny 'The Elder" (1962), Vol, III, 10-12; Vol. X, 135. See, for instance, Shelley's works: Mutabiliîy, Hpn to Intellectira1 Beauîy, and Mont Blanc.

'O2 Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mont Blanc Lines Wriiten in the Vale of Chamouni (1816): IV.84-100; Mellor and Matlak (1 996), 1063-4.

'O3 Hutton's steady-state rnodel, in Transactions (l788), and Theory of the Earth (1795), that land masses constantly eroded by wind, min, and rivers, are carried to sea and then deposited on the ocean hr,is ailuded to by Erasmus Darwin in the Economy of Vegetation LI (1793), ,377.394.

'O4 Darwin alludes to both Hutton's and d'Holbach's theories in many of his poetic works, which Shelley later takes up. In d'Holbach's cellular system, processes of death and decay occur simuitaneously within organs as new celMfe generates. Similar to Spinoza. but devoid of his pantheism, Shelley underscores the importance of being aware of the "oneness" of the universe in relation to understanding nature. Indeed, in Spinoza's mind there is no separation between the universe and nature. Spinoza's philosophy, although theistic, does not contradict the more materialistic/ monist conceptualizations of either Erasmus Darwin or d'Holbach because it, lietheirs, explains the universe's inorganic basis as dialectically inseparable fiom organic life. It constantly looks for the connections between the two, rather than dividing them into abstract diametrical oppositions. D'Holbach and Darwin's views inform Shelley's poetic descriptions in Mont Blanc about the nature of life and death, consciousness and "god," and the relationship of inorganic matter to the organic world. "Baruch Spinoza." Magnusson (1993), 1380.

'O5 Shelley refers to "The everlasting universe of things / Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves, /. . .where fonn the secret springs / The source of human thought its tributes brings", in the opening stanza of the poem. He concludes the last stanza again with the same idea of interrelationship: "The secret Strength of things / Which govems thought, and to the infinite dome / Of heaven is as faw, inhabits thee!" His allusion to "And what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind's imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?" rhetorically fiames the answer to the stands final question if the monism of nature is accounted for: the mind's imaginings are not vacant- they are driven by the everlasting universe of which they are of a part.

'O6 Fred Casey (1926) cites tbis classical Aristotelian position mown to Anaxiamander, Pythagonis, and later, Zeno and Socrates) in bis popularization of monism and dialectics, 64-79. G. Plekhanov (1895) finther elaborates on the Greek "monos"/ or one idea in "French Materiahm of the Eighteenth Century": The Development of the Monist View of History . - 'O7 Materials "foms" forever are emerging into newer foms whilst subsequently passing away hmolder ones. Monism is without hierarcbies or diametric oppositions; it interprets phenomena in terms of degrees-cold being a humoral idea of heat; darkness, a relative lack of light. Nothing leaves the universe nor is anything gained-matter'sforms simply evolve. Fitch (19 l4), 150-16 1.

'O8 Casey (1926), 128-129.

'O9 Ibid, 129.

"O In tenns ofthe evolution of science, this monistic philosophy anticipates the theoretical biologist, Ernst Haeckel's summary that: "Mechanical and chemicai energy, sound and heat, light and elecûicity, are mutuaily convertible; they seem to be but dif5erent modes of one and the same fundamental force. . .[: theJ'monism of energy.'" Haeckel (1912), 208.

IL' Cushing (lWl), 33.

Il2 Erasmus Darwin expands upon d'Holbach's biological work in The Temple of Nature. See Paul Henri Dietrich, baron d'Holbach's, De 1 'Esprit (1758).

Il3 During his school days at university of Leyden, (Max Cushing states), d'Holbach was "writing very good English, and al1 of his life he was a fnend of Englishrnen and English ideas." Among other English thinkers that d'Holbach knew were: Hume, Garrick. Wilkes, Sterne, Gibbon, Horace Walpole, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Priestley, Lord Shelburne, Gen. Barré, Gen. Clark, Sir James McDonald, Dr. Gem, Messrs. Stewart, Demeter, Forddyce, Fitzmaurice, Foley, etc: Leyden University trained many EngIish students to become medical doctors. Cushing (1 97 l), 5- 18.

"'Heilbron (1979), 70,353.

Ils Priestiey's "phlogisticated and dephiogisticated airs" and Beddoes' many experiments on al1 kinds of gases, especially nitrous oxide, that had an exhilarating, animating effect upon people that many conservaiives attributed to French discovecies invading England. Golinski (1992), 8-9,118,171.

"%q Shelley (1994), 364.

'17 Cf. Darwin, me Temple of Nature IV.383-404; and Davy, Discourse, 5-6, appendixes B. 1.Ci and B.2.i, 80.

11* Ibid, 80.

Il9 A few scientific examples include: John Hunter's theories of the role of blood in the human body; Joseph Priestley's discovery of the role of oxygen in blood, Lamark's .------Philosophe zoologique (1809); Erasmus Darwin's cefaences to Dr. Priestley's "spontaneous origin of microscopic animals" in the Temple of Nature as well as his two volume examination of human disease in Zoonomia (1 794); Humphry Davy's unpublished "Essay to Prove that Thinking Powers Depend on the Organization of the Body.'' See ah,I. Helvetius's earlier eighteenth-century study, An Essay on Animal Oeconomy (1 723).

''O As Iwan Morus States: "Where Galvani had experimented largely with fiogs, Aldini was considerably more flamboyant in bis efforts. He experimented with rabbits and dogs and even with the heads of oxen, showing that the signs of etecûicity could be produced Erom the contact of muscle and nerve tissue without the use of metals. Between 1800 and 1805 he travelled extensively throughout Europe, repeating his spectacular performances and spreading the creed of animal electricity, whereby electricity was held to play a central (if not vital) role in the operations of the animal economy." Morus (1998), 7-8. See also Iwan Morus's Frankenstein 's Children: Electriciîy, fihibition, and Experiment in Early-Nineteenth- London (1998) for similar eiectrical experiments,

'" It is plausable that Leigh Hunt if not certainly the Shelteys themselves were aware of such experiments, as the ones conducted by both Luigi Aldini and Andrew Ure were widely published in philosophicai/science monthlies. (See endnote 96 below for Shelley's reference(s) to these experiments). '" Shelley (1994), 80,85.

lu Morus (1998), 7-8.

'" ibid, 8; Ure (1835) Quarterly Journal of Science, 283--294. It is remarkable to note how important corpses were for medicai experimentation during the years just before Mary Shelley completing Frankenstein. Iwan Morus Merindicates: "Electrical experiments such as these on the bodies of the dead were by no means cornmonplace in England, or if they were they were not widely and publicly reported. The only legitimate source of subjects for experimenîation at this time was the bodies of executed crirninals, and experirnenters were hiildly likely to widely publicize any experhents they had conducted with that other source of fi& corpses, the resufiection trade." Although it is unknown if Mary Shelley had first hand kuowledge of the resurrection trade, it is highly probable that she would have learned about it (or its reptation) through her husband, Percy, Byron, and or/ Leigh Hunt (who, as an informed &ter, social critic, and publisher, would have arguably been aware of this trade and the experiments).

IZS See also Gentlemen 's Magainne (1790s) for Mercriticisms of radical scientists and reform politics.

126 Godwin, for instance, in Caleb WilIiamr3portrays the abuses of laad-ownership and archaic laws that subjugate and hann the common people of Britain. Fuaher, his Political Jwtice calls for a complete revolution in the manners of society toward justice, economics, and liberty. Johnson, similacly, published Tom Paine's The Righrs of Man, wtiich took the ideas of liberty Merthan Godwin. Such arguments grounded morality on a basis of concrete, "indienable" rights of material existence cather than conservative- religious notions of property law based upon God.

12' Johnson, Paine, Priestley, Thelwall, and many other agitators working for refom paid dearly for this defiance toward the Pitt Govemment. Their ''crimes" were primarily trumped up, and the Pitt Govemment's spies late arrested many of the reform writers and pubMers for making refonn views and criticisms public. (See notes below concerning the anests and trial of John Thelwall and other members of the London Corresponding Society.) '*'Golinksi (1992) and Desmond (1989) give full accounts of these scientists' and politically reforrners' activities.

'EJ Priestley and Franklin openly supported the French Revolution, and advocated many of the reforrns propounded by the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society (ofien refened to as "Levellers" by conservative writers during the period, as they advocated many of the same refoms as the Levellers one hundred fifty years earlier). Christopher Hill cites nurnerous historical accounts of the decades prior to the latter half of the seventeenth century, as in his The World Turned Upside Down,how knowledge was used as power by Diggers, Levellers, and Ranters, especidly knowledge about politics, physics and medicine, to underscore persuasive revolutionary rhetoric. Similar rhetoric was used in revolts and rebellions centuries earlier by figures such as Wat Tyler and John Ball, but tended toward religious interpretation of scripture and ancieut rites of the cornons cather than arguments based on the naniralism of materialist-science, such as those made by radical-teformers in the late-eighteenth- century. See John Thelwall's An Essay Towards A Deffnition OfAnimal Vitaiiry (London: T. Rickaby, 1793) and his political speeches, such as, Peucefil Disczrssion, and not Tmultuary Violence (London: Printed for John Thelwall, 1795), as well Golinksi (1 992) and Desmond (1989) for a more thorough treatment of the connecticxi between radical materialism, politics, religion, and society.

Thelwall. (1793): Courtesy of the Radcliffe Science Library.

'" Jan Golinski (1992) notes Davy's observation that: "'The Phenornena which were formerly attributed [to] psyche seem to be the effect of a peculiar action of fluids upon solids and solids upon fluids. The Body is a fine tuned Machine,' echoing the title of the most infamous of eighteenth century materialkt works, L 'Homme Machine (1748) by Julian Oîky de La Mettrie", 172. '" "The Physical Society Minutes January 25: 1794 (15' meeting. ..) held at Guy's Hospital, London." Courtesy of Andrew Baster, Physical Society Archives, Guy's Hospital Library.

13' Laws of the Physical Society, held at Guy's Hospital. London: Printed by H. Reynell, M DCC LXXXV: (4). The Society's niles read: "CHAP. II. DISSERTATIONS. RUZE 1. At every Meeting of the Society, a Dissertation shall be read, on a medical, chirurgical [(surgical)], or philosophical, Subject" Courtesy of National Library of Medicine,

Hampden. The Aristocracy of Eng[and; in, Hill, (1965), 118-1 19. '" Morris (1898), 138. "'This is part of Christopher Hill's research supporting the mythical premise of "the Norman Yoke," a trope of radical rhetoric fïrst showing its written origins in the thirteenth century. Hill (1 965), 50- 122.

'19 Knight (1865), 274. Mann (t964), 10.

I4O "The Treasury Solicitor's papers relating to the SC1 in the Public Record Office (PRO), London, contain a manuscript list of members of the Society whose subscriptions were in arrears in 1793. Among those hmwhom payment was due appears-Josh. Johnson St. Paul's Churchyard 1 yr 1-1-." Roe (1982 Autumn), 198.

14' Bowles. Letters of the Ghost ofA@ed; in, Keen (Reading 1999)' 52-53.

14* ihid, 53.

lJ3Hill, (1965), 75-82. Ibid, 75.

'j6Bowles, in Keen (1999)' 125.

14' ibid, 102. '" Ibid, foomote, 105-106.

14' Roberts and Roberts (1980), 540-542. IS' ibid, 3. ln ibid, 8. lS3 Claeys (1995), xxv-xxvi. '" Thelwai1(1795), 10. lSs ibid, 1 1. '" ibid, 11-12.

Is7 Ibid, 17,

Is8 Tom Paine quoted in, Thompson (1963),94-95.

'60 Hill (1997), 361.

16' Gentleman's Magarine (Febniary 1796), 142; reviewing Godwin's Considerations On Lord Grenville 's And Mr. Pitt's Bills Concerning Treasonable And Seditious Practices, And UnlawjÛl Assemblies.

Ibid, 82.

'63 Ibid, 74.

Paine; in, Keen (Reading i 999), 533, lb' McCaiman (1988),28.

'M ibid, 16-1 8. '" Miles (1988), 19,

Ib8 "Francis Place," Dictionary of National Biogruphy, 1276-77; Miles (1988), 17-1 8.

'69 ThOmpson (1963) 24-25; Hill (l965),95-96.

''O Miles (1988),20. '" McCaiman (1988), 28. '" Ibid, 23-24. ln Place; in, Keen (Readings 1999), 127-129. 17' 17' Burke (1790),143-145.

In Burke (I790), 14 1-144.

"'John Liiburne (1615?-1657). "The Picture of the Counsii of State [Liburne Defies the Authoritiesj; Gerrard Wmstanley (1609?-1676?). From 'The Tnie Levelers' Standard Advanced"; Abiezer Coppe (1 619-1672]. From "A Fiery FIying RolI"; in, Abrams(1993), 173501736;1740-1741; 1744-1745.

Dyck (1 W6), 85.

"' Hill (1965), 96.

*This letter is reprinted in his autobiography, Mernoirs of Thomas Hardy, 1832, 105- 11; in, Place. Autobiography, Dec. 1 793-1 795,130. ls4 Burke. The Correspondence,vi. 304; in, Smith (1984),74.

IS6 Place (1793-4), 22; Thompson (19631,125. la' Harrison (1 W),254.

lSg Roberts and Roberts, (1980), 539-542.

'90 Further to the arrest and failure to convict individual mernbers, The f itt Government proscribeci the LCS under the "Corresponding Societies Act of 1799." The SC1 was by the latter 1790s moribund. See below: Thompson (1963), 191; Miles (1988), 38.

19' Miles (1988), 24. '% Thompson (1963), 148-149.

19' 19' Place (1793-4), 25; Thompson (l963), 150.

Francis Place. The Autobiography of Francis Place Il Sept. 1797-April1799: (198- 199); also, Place to Rogers, 15 January 1832, Place Coll., Set 68, item 22; Add. Mss. 27,808, iX 59-60; in, Miles (1988), 40.

Ig7 Royle and Waivin (1982), 75.

19' Place (1793-4), 41.

'W Ibid, 29.

200 Cleays (1995), xxvi.

'Oi Ibid, xxv.

'O2 Ibid

'O3 Miles (1988), 30. Thompson (1 963), 182.

Miles (1988), 32.

2W ibid.

'O7 Thompson (1963), 191; Miles (1988), 38.

'O8 Grenby (1999), notes that: "The lecture explains the way the govemment responded to fears that French Jacobinism might infect the British public through the novels that had recentîy becorne so papular. The campaign to reclaim fiction for loyalty, patriotism, and piety led to the publication of sixty conservative novels. They tell us what the British anti-Jacobins thought they were up against, and what strategies they develop to combat the threat hmRevolutionary France."

'O9 Burke (1790), 100-101.

'Io Ibid, 128. '"Ibid, 121-122. "'Smith. (1984), 75.

213 Hill (1965), 102. "4 Paine; in, Keen (Reading 1999), 548.

*15 Ibid, 537.

"6 The authcites four separate labouring-poor studies for this portrayal of late eighteenth century Philadelphia; in, Smith (1994), 165.

'17 Paine; in, Keen (Reading 1999), 619.

2'8 Hill (1965), 107.

"9 ibid, 100.

"O Ibid, LOO. "' ibid, 108.

"2 Roberts and Roberts (1980), 539-541.

223 Thompson (1963), 19 1; Miles (1 988), 38.

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