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The Spaces of Politics of the London Corresponding Society
Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 783–791 www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review article The Spaces of Politics of the London Corresponding Society Michael T. Davis, Ed, London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2002, 6 volumes, £495 hardback. Introduction ‘Of every rank and of every situation in life, Rich, Poor, High or Low, we address you all as our Brethren’.1 So opens the third address of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). It captures the innovative political style and strategy of the LCS. There is its direct approach. There is its interpellation of diverse groups as part of a common radical democratic project, focussed around parliamentary reform. The LCS has long been a contentious organisation. Establishing itself as a democratic society, open to ‘members unlimited’, amidst the political turmoil and unrest of the 1790s, it was given a central formative role in the narrative of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.2 The members of the LCS were also hailed by a contemporary pamphleteer as ‘one of the most dangerous combinations of Blackguards and Ragamuffins that ever existed in a civilized country [.] a set of fellows, whose sole aim was to subvert our glorious constitution, and to hurry us into all those scenes of blood, confusion and plunder, which have laid waste the once fertile and well-governed kingdom of France’.3 This collection of the papers of the LCS, brought together in six volumes, is a landmark in the publication of documents of political radicalisms in Britain. It gives an incisive sense of the extraordinarily diverse range of texts, debates, activities, repressive legislation and intellectual engagement that the LCS generated. Each selection is headed by a useful editorial introduction and positioning. The first two volumes collect the official pamphlets, broadsides, addresses, financial accounts, reports of meetings and discussions of the procedures of the Society. They foreground the range of the Society’s varied endeavours from producing handbills advertising meetings to publishing and circulating reprints of key documents on constitutional history and reform. The third and fourth volumes present the issues of the LCS’s Moral and Political Magazine which proved a disastrous drain on the organisation’s finances. The fifth volume, which presents some of the most engaging material here, examines some of the pamphlets written on the fringes of the society, without the sanction of the official LCS, and also includes some vehement attacks from reactionary and conservative pamphleteers. Finally, the sixth volume reprints documents relating to the repression of the society, and is centred around the debates over the ‘Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Bill’. This review article considers the materials presented in the different volumes in relation to three key themes. Firstly, it explores the democratic spatial practices deployed through the organisation and the reform networks it shaped. Secondly, it explores the relationship of the LCS and its political identities to q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2004.12.011
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Atlantic routes of political activity. Thirdly, it considers the diverse and contested political identities and tensions that were produced through the activities of the LCS. It outlines some ways in which engagements with the co-constitution of space and politics can illuminate key themes emerging in new political and subaltern histories.4
Making democratic spatial practices One of the defining concerns of the official LCS papers collected here is with attempts to establish democratic organisational practices. The LCS was not only concerned with parliamentary reform. It also had a direct concern with making a democratic logic integral to alternative political practices. Central to these democratic alternatives was experimentation with diverse spatial practices. These practices were not just a chance by-product of the political interventions and strategies of the LCS. They shaped the organisations’ identities and political practices. There were two key aspects of these practices. Firstly, there was the internal organisation of the LCS. Secondly, the LCS’s strategic co-ordinating role between itself and the various other political and reform movements that emerged in the 1790s through Britain and Ireland. These democratic spatial practices were fragile and contested. The LCS was organized into divisions. These democratic ‘cells’ met weekly in groups of 20–30 men in public houses in particular areas of the city. By 1795, the secretary and assistant secretary of the LCS boasted of having ‘forty one regular divisions’.5 The divisions were integral to the movement of the LCS. When divisions ‘collected more than a certain number of members, they divided in two, and thus had the ability, as the Attorney General put it, to ‘spread themselves by degrees’.6 A representative from each division was delegated on to the general committee of the LCS. The divisions facilitated both a democratic imaginary where each division could be represented to the organisation and ‘the more easy and orderly proceeding of the Society’.7 This speaks to the concerns of the LCS to produce organisational forms and conduct that were conducive to political democracy and debate. These forms were defined, at least in official LCS publications, against rough, rowdy ‘low’ tavern political cultures, although as Jon Mee notes some of the ‘meetings associated with the LCS had much more of the flavour of tavern free-and-easies than the civicism stressed in the official publications would suggest’.8 The divisions played a central part in the organisational geography of the LCS. A report attempting to revise the constitution of the LCS, for example, engages with the challenges posed by the mobility of members. If a member is admitted in a section not belonging to that part of the town he resides in, or if he shall have changed his place of residence since his admission, he shall give notice to the secretary, in order that he may be transferred to section to which such part of the town is appropriated.9 This internal LCS report gives a sense of the geography of the divisions as being about ‘mundane’ organisational matters. To the political establishment, however, the spectre of a radical society dividing, spreading and increasing was a threat. Chief Justice Eyre described the LCS, during the trials of Horne Tooke and John Thelwall, as a political monster ‘spreading itself every hour from division to division, and each division producing its sub-divisions, those sub-divisions becoming divisions, and so on ad infinitum’.10 These spatial practices were key to the LCS’s experimentation with democratic organisational forms. They also produced antagonisms as these new political practices struggled to cope with differences
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internal to divisions and differences between divisions. The debates over the revision of the LCS’s constitution, alluded to above, are a case in point. The Committee of Revision consisted of one member from each division. It was appointed ‘to expunge the objectional parts’ of the original 1792 LCS constitution and ‘to destroy every attempt at an arbitrary usurption of Power’.11 The outcome of this process reveals some of the tensions within the organisational structure of the LCS, for while ‘the revised regulations did receive the General Committee’s approbation in June 1794, protests were again registered from certain divisions of the LCS. The Society continued to operate according to the constitution of 1792.12 Some divisions split entirely from the LCS leading to establishment of rival/ fraternal organisations.13 Division twelve, seceded from the LCS to form the London Reforming Society, arguing that the Committee of Delegates had ‘assumed power which never belonged to [it]’.14 James Epstein has argued that the ‘new political history’ has eschewed a concern with ‘the formal processes of government and institutions of the state’ for a focus on ‘the symbolic investments of actions and communication’ and on ‘questions about how meanings are produced, received and sustained’.15 He has also argued that the sites where politics take place are key to engaging with the meanings of politics and the politics of meanings.16 Through prioritising the meanings, ideologies, texts and imaginations of the political the new political history has arguably downplayed the importance of attending to the practices in spatial practices. There is a need to conceptualise the spatial practices of the political in ways which foreground the generative character of political activity rather than reducing political movements to debates around meaning. The ongoing experiments with spatial practices and organisational geographies were as key to the political identities of the LCS as were the ways in which they contested and debated the meanings of contested words like ‘equality’ or ‘representation’.17 These practices, then, were central to the LCS’s democratic identities and to the way that it brought together different political constituencies and societies around a shared agenda for radical parliamentary reform. Experimentation with organisational geographies also defined the practices through which the LCS articulated its relations with other reform societies through Britain and Ireland. The LCS leadership constructed dynamic relations with these societies. The LCS played an active role here in shaping and constituting the broader reform agenda. They forwarded suggestions for constitutions and organisational practices to new societies and sent them ‘copies of addresses and regulations’.18 The LCS sent emissaries such as John Gale Jones and John Binns on tours of provincial reform societies.19 The LCS leadership also engaged in robust debate with the political directions and identities of such societies. A letter from Birmingham that commented favourably on ‘riot’ received a swift rebuke from the secretary and assistant secretary of the LCS. The authors were given a stern reminder that ‘Riots ought to be avoided with the utmost care’ being ‘the offspring of passion’ and ‘devoid of that system, which alone can ensure a happy REVOLUTION’.20 These political reform networks also drew on often unacknowledged multi-ethnic associations and friendships, which exceeded and unsettled the forms of patriotism which shaped the LCS’s politics.
Radical patriotisms? On 8 March 1792, writing the first correspondence of the LCS to Revd Mr Bryant of Sheffield, Thomas Hardy commented:
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Hearing from my friend, Gustavus Vassa, the African, who is now writing memoirs of his life in my house, that you are a zealous friend to the abolition of that cursed traffic, the Slave Trade, I infer from that circumstance, that you are a zealous friend to freedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man. I am fully persuaded that there is no man, who is, from principle an advocate for the liberty of the black man, but will zealously support the rights of the white man, and vice versa.21 Hardy’s character reference for his Sheffield contact, then, came via Gustavus Vassa, better known today as Olaudah Equiano, the anti-slavery activist whose memoirs The Interesting Life of Gustavus Vassa, became a key abolitionist text. Equiano continued his association with the LCS. Accounts of a fund to give relief to ‘those families, whose husbands and fathers are now languishing in Prison, on charges of High Treason’ in 1794 notes the contribution of Gustavus Vassa, an African, of 10 shillings and 6 pence.22 His involvement situates the LCS as a product of the cosmopolitan subaltern political cultures of eighteenth-century London. Hardy, himself a Scottish shoemaker, drew heavily on a reforming pamphlet that had been addressed to ‘the delegates of [the] forty-five Corps of Volunteers assembled at Lisburn in Ireland’23 in drawing up the principles of the LCS. Irish radicals such as John Binns and William Duane were prominent LCS members.24 The Scottish martyrs, Joseph Gerrald, Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Thomas Muir and Maurice Margarot, who were transported or imprisoned for their participation in the reform movement, were also key figures.25 They had diverse, cosmopolitan experiences. Gerrald had taken over his family’s estate in St Kitt’s and had gone through the remains of his family’s fortune before moving to the US in the early 1780s. There ‘he associated and quarrelled with Thomas Paine’ and practised law in Pennsylvania before returning to England in 1788 where he ‘joined both the Society for Constitutional Information and the LCS’.26 Not only was the LCS made up of radicals with diverse routes, ethnicities and experiences, so the declarations and arguments of the LCS travelled. The democratic societies of Philadelphia followed the proceedings of the LCS and republished them. Such publications allowed the Democratic societies in Philadelphia ‘to conceive of themselves as a part of the ongoing transatlantic and democratic revolutions, since the British societies played a leading part in the rise of reform movements and popular radicalism in response to the French Revolution’.27 These networks challenge accounts of the LCS, such as E.P. Thompson’s, which view its significance only in terms of English politics. Connections and multi-ethnic associations were key to the political make up of the LCS. They assert the importance of geographies of solidarity and contact between diverse political activists which continue to be viewed as marginal to London’s subaltern politics.28 These connections had effects on the kinds of political identities produced through the activity of the LCS. That Hardy saw the project of a radical reform movement in London as inter-changeable with the movement to abolish slavery is significant. Further, it suggests that friendships between figures such as Hardy and Equiano shaped the political outlook, networks and contacts of the LCS. They also exceeded the male-bound character of the LCS. Lydia Hardy’s involvement in the sugar boycott and artisanal, anti-slavery activism was shaped by her friendship with Equiano.29 John Gale Jones encountered politicised women who had studied Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women on his tour of Kent. He notes that he concurred with the wisdom of their views.30 The significance of the unofficial geographies of multi-ethnic exchange and friendship that characterised eighteenth-century subaltern political cultures is only beginning to be recognised.
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Equiano is a key figure here. Not only did he help facilitate links between radicals in Sheffield and London, he also had diverse contacts in Belfast where he stayed for several months in 1791. There he kept company among dissenters such as Samuel Neilson ‘possibly the most radical member of Belfast’s secret committee and then the United Irishmen’. Neilson acted as Equiano’s patron, ‘so that the well dressed, middle aged African appeared with his Interesting Narrative not only at the local booksellers but at Neilson’s drapery business at the commercial heart of the town’.31 These connections and exchanges had effects. Key United Irish radicals, including Neilson and Napper Tandy, were subscribers to the Dublin edition of the Interesting Narrative.32 Neilson gave ‘anti-slavery’ issues a prominent place in the Northern Star, the United Irishmen’s newspaper.33 William Drennan proposed the circulation of addresses on the boycott of sugar.34 These cross-cutting friendships, associations and exchanges challenge accounts of the politics of the United Irishmen that have erased or ignored Equiano.35 They also challenge accounts of the Irish diaspora which construct the Irish as a sealed, ontologically discrete unit of study.36 Further they raise questions about what role Equiano may have played in constructing, facilitating or envisioning connections between the United Irishmen and LCS. LCS rhetoric included appeals to ‘healing the bleeding wounds of Ireland’ and against the ‘savage system of coercion now pursuing in Ireland’.37 LCS appeals and declarations were also circulated to the United Irishmen.38 There are tensions here though. These multi-ethnic associations conflict with the notions of patriotic, manly conduct that structure the conception of radical politics in many of the official pamphlets of the LCS. The LCS drew heavily on the repertoires of English radicalisms. It invoked such distinctively English tenets as the Norman Yoke, the importance of the jury system and the memory of the struggles of John Wilkes.39 Thus although the LCS was founded early in 1792 in discussion of ‘having all things in common’ and committed to equality among all, whether ‘black or white, high or low, rich or poor’40 these aims conflicted with the LCS’s orderly, respectable, patriotic English radicalisms. Linebaugh and Rediker posit a clear temporal rupture which defines a move away from explicit articulation of antislavery and reform struggles together. They argue that due the revolution in Haiti made race ‘a tricky and, for many, in England, a threatening subject, one that the leadership of the LCS now preferred to avoid’.41 This analysis misses the diversity of political identities, practices and trajectories brought together through the practices of the LCS. There were attempts to articulate patriotisms in a plural way, which unsettle Linebaugh and Rediker’s sense of a neat shift or rupture in the political identities of the LCS. A pamphlet on patriotism by an LCS supporter, Edward Henry Iliff, for example, challenges the association of patriotism with a ‘narrow love’ and ‘prejudice’. It argues instead that ‘the narrow love of one’s country, which has been assumed by prejudice and supported by vanity’ should be transformed: into a diffusive spirit of universal affection! Then will the poor African enjoy the sweets of domestic comfort, or voyage the regions of earth with all the dignity of man: colour will make no difference in our relative duties, and a black Negro may enjoy the friendship of his white oppressor.42 This pamphlet was written in 1794, when Epstein argues that the wars with France had made it increasingly difficult to ‘sustain universalist notions of patriotism’.43 It suggests that the LCS and the political circles around it, still maintained an attempt to articulate patriotisms in a plural, multiple way.44 This raises questions about how to make sense of the multiple, diverse and contested political identities crafted through the activity of the LCS. Concerns over the multiple and contested identities forged
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through the LCS recurrently come to the fore in debates over the methods and practices to be used and deployed by the LCS.
Reform or riot? In September of 1794, the LCS published a pamphlet that had been originally drafted by the bookseller John Bone. It was entitled ‘Reformers not rioters’. The pamphlet argued that ‘one of the fundamental principles of this society [.] is that riot, tumult and violence are not the fit means of obtaining a redress of grievances.’45 The pamphlet raised the spectre of the Gordon Riots of 1780 to support this argument. It suggested that they had ‘taught us, that public commotions may occasion disorders, far more prejudicial than the evils they are intended to remove’.46 The pamphlet was written to defend the LCS against accusations that it had been involved in fomenting riots in London in 1794. The pamphlet illustrates the ambiguities of the LCS’s position. Here was a reforming society, with founding principles that it should be made up of ‘member’s unlimited’ which came to define itself against repertoires of popular political activity such as riot. There were certainly strategic reasons for doing so. The repression of the Society (which would eventually lead to it being outlawed in 1799) was in progress with the arrests of Hardy and other LCS members and their trials for treason. The pamphlet also signals some of the tensions in the political program and constituencies of the LCS, both in the circumstances of its production and in the tension it signals between the LCS’s desire to articulate and engage with popular grievances. The circumstances of the pamphlet’s production give some sense of how contested political identities were negotiated through the activity of the LCS. The spy, William Metcalfe, considered Bone’s original draft to be ‘full of the most violent and seditious expressions’ and to be ‘calculated to renew the tumults which so lately prevail’d’.47 Burks and Parkinson produced a corrected version of Bone’s address that was approved and ordered to be printed as ‘Reformers no Rioters’.48 This official LCS line against riot, then, was constructed and disseminated only through excluding dissenting voices. To make sense of such dissension it is necessary to consider the LCS’s role in bringing together diverse constituencies of radicals, reformers, journeymen and ultra-radicals. The LCS made significant attempts to interpellate more marginal groups such as journeymen and artisans. Yet, it sought to confine and articulate such grievances through campaigns for parliamentary reform, rather than disparate popular protests and riots. This at least in official LCS writings emerges from a clear political project. The pamphlet concludes that ‘we cannot waste our time in lopping the numerous heads which are momentarily springing from the Hydra, we wish to deprive the monster at once of existence: Corrupt Parliaments cannot exist, if the people obtain their rights.’49 The conduct of LCS exceeded this attempt to construct rational political identities based around one cause, lack of political representation, and one solution, parliamentary reform. LCS pamphlets and rhetoric proved adept at articulating its concerns in relationship to popular grievances. Printed copies of speeches delivered to a public, general meeting of the LCS held in 1795 pointed to the ruinous effects of war on the poor in dramatic terms: The manufacturer has been seduced from his loom—the militia-man swindled from his domestic employment and the humble cottager kidnapped from the plough. The bread that should support the industrious Poor has been exported [.]50
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The LCS could prioritise parliamentary reform. In addressing constituencies of artisans, however, it was necessary to appeal to the grievances which they faced and to articulate them through repertoires that they identified with. Concerns around impressment are also frequently referred to in LCS rhetoric.51 The tension between a formal, rationalist political program for reform and appeals to, and use of the idioms of, popular grievance partly reflects the ways in which different LCS members were constituted in markedly different relationships to Atlantic networks and routes. Here it is instructive to compare Gerrald’s activities as a lawyer and estate owner with artisans such as Thomas Preston. Thomas Preston, a London shoemaker and LCS member and associate of Thomas Spence, found friendship and work among the cobblers of Dublin and Cork in the early 19th century, and claimed to have led a strike among Cork shoemakers.52 Preston represented the unruly, libertine artisan constituency of the LCS. He drew the sharp condemnation of Francis Place who described him as a ‘lame, drunken, garrulous and poor shoe-maker’ rooted in a degraded radical artisan subculture of men whose ‘circumstances are so desperate as to prevent them having any moral principles’.53 These diverse relationships of LCS activists and members to Atlantic routes of activity suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the singular stories Linebaugh and Rediker tell of a radical Atlantic made up of multi-ethnic solidarities and associations. Attending to the diverse trajectories of LCS activists can foreground some of the multiple political identities and radicalisms forged through Atlantic networks. This position challenges Linebaugh and Rediker’s stories of the revolutionary Atlantic, which are insufficiently attentive to the many different kinds and routes of radicalisms constituted and negotiated through trans-national networks. It also challenges those historians who seek to position groups like ‘the Irish’, as sealed, discrete units of study. Through exploring the diverse trajectories of radicalism that shaped, and were in turn shaped by, organisations like the LCS, it is possible to tell stories about the multiple and contested political identities that traversed and reshaped the political spaces of the Atlantic.
Notes 1. Papers of the London Corresponding Society (hereafter LCS), vol. 1, 3. 2. Thompson’s foundational argument that positions the LCS as central to the emergence of a radical tradition in England, has been brought into question, particularly around its blindness to issues of race and gender, see A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, London, 1996, P. Linebaugh, What if C.L.R. James had met E.P. Thompson in 1792? in: P. Buhle (Ed), C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, London, 1986, 212–219; The LCS was a male bound organisation which constituted political identities around ideas of ‘manly conduct’, but women attended their outdoor meetings and a female citizen published in the LCS’s Moral and Political Magazine. This publication also carried notices of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work, see M. Thale (Ed), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–99, Cambridge, 1983, 87. (hereafter Selections); J. Mee, Rough and respectable radicalism, History Workshop Journal, 56 (2003) 238–244. 3. LCS, vol. 5, 182. 4. On the new political histories see J. Epstein, Introduction: new directions in political history, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002) 255–258; J. Epstein, ‘Our Real Constitution.’: trial defence and radical memory in the age of revolution in: J. Vernon (Ed), Re-reading the Constitution, Cambridge, 1996, 22–51.; D. Karr, Thoughts that flash like lightning: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001) 324–356; For new subaltern histories that have foregrounded the multi-ethnic forms of co-operation and solidarity in the early modern Atlantic, see P. Linebaugh, and M. Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, London, 2000 for their relationship to geography, see D.J. Featherstone, Spatial Practices of Atlantic Resistance(s), Social and Cultural Geography, in press. 5. LCS, vol. 2, 141.
790 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17.
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.
Review article / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 783–791 J. Barrell, Divided We Grow. London Review of Books, 5th June 2003, 8. LCS, vol. 1, 80. J. Mee, Rough and respectable radicalisms, History Workshop Journal 56 (2003) 239. LCS vol. 1, 311. Eyre cited by J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, Oxford, 2000, 387–8. Selections, 120. LCS, vol. 1, 331. LCS, vol. 2, 141. LCS vol. 2,124–5. J. Epstein, Introduction: new directions in political history, Journal of British Studies 41 (2002) 255. J. Epstein, Spatial practices/democratic vistas, Social History 24 (1999) 294–310; see also D. Karr, Thoughts that flash like lightning: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London, Journal of British Studies 40 (2001) 324–356. In arguing that spatial practices of the political should be taken seriously I do not intend to define such practices against meaning, but rather to re-position debates over meaning as a part of political practices which cannot merely be reduced to questions of meaning. See LCS, vol. 2, 156. See LCS, vol. 2, 231–235, 291–296J. Gale Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend &c, London, 1796; J. Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns, Philadelphia, 1854, 58–72. LCS, vol., 2, 139. Memoir of Thomas Hardy D. Vincent (Ed), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790–1885, London, 1976, 45–46. Equiano was in fact revising his memoirs for a new edition. LCS, vol. 2, 280. LCS, vol. 2, 11–28. See D. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic, Dublin, 1998. For a recent politicised articulation of the memory of the Scottish Martyrs see Adam McNaughten’s song ‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill’ recorded by Dick Gaughan on Redwood Cathedral, Greentrax CDTRAX 158, for lyrics see: http://www. dickalba.demon.co.uk/songs/texts/thommuir.html J. Epstein, ‘Our Real Constitution’: trial defence and radical memory in the age of revolution, in: J. Vernon (Ed), Re-reading the Constitution, Cambridge, 1996, 29. A. Koschnik, The democratic societies of Philadelphia and the limits of the American public sphere, circa 1793–1795, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 58 (2001) 618. For accounts of London’s subaltern politics which make little or no reference to these multi-ethnic networks see R. Porter, London: A Social History, London, 1996; N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain, Oxford, 1998. C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, London, 1992, 39. J.G. Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend &c, London, 1796, 91. N. Rodgers, Equiano in Belfast: a study of the anti-slavery ethos in a northern town, Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997) 75. See O. Equiano, in: V. Carretta (Ed), The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, London, 1995, 25–26. N. Rodgers, Equiano in Belfast: a study of the anti-slavery ethos in a northern town, Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997) 73–89. See J. Allen (Ed), The Drennan-McTier Letters, 1776–1793, vol. 1, Dublin, 1998, 386. K. Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760–1830, Cork, 1996. K. Kenny, Diaspora and comparison: the global Irish as a case study, Journal of American History 135 (2003) 135, 137. LCS, vol. 2, 265. See Selections, 134. See LCS, vol. 1, 139–188, 226, LCS, vol. 2, 49. P. Linebaugh, and M. Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra, London, 2000, 274. P. Linebaugh, and M. Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra, London, 2000, 274. LCS, vol. 5, 175–6. J. Epstein, ‘Our Real Constitution’: trial defence and radical memory in the age of revolution, in: J. Vernon (Ed), Re-reading the Constitution, Cambridge, 1996 39.
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44. See also John Gale Jones’s condemnation of slavery in J.G. Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend&c, London, 1796, 63. 45. LCS, vol. 1, 290. 46. LCS, vol. 1, 290. 47. Selections, 215. 48. Selections, 215. 49. LCS, vol. 1, 293. 50. LCS, vol. 2, 91, see also 189. 51. See LCS, vol. 1, 336. 52. T. Preston, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Preston, Patriot and Shoemaker, London, 1817. 53. J. McCalman, Radical Underworld, Oxford, 1986, 30.
David Featherstone Department of Geography University of Liverpool Liverpool UK
Review article The Spaces of Politics of the London Corresponding Society Michael T. Davis, Ed, London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2002, 6 volumes, £495 hardback. Introduction ‘Of every rank and of every situation in life, Rich, Poor, High or Low, we address you all as our Brethren’.1 So opens the third address of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). It captures the innovative political style and strategy of the LCS. There is its direct approach. There is its interpellation of diverse groups as part of a common radical democratic project, focussed around parliamentary reform. The LCS has long been a contentious organisation. Establishing itself as a democratic society, open to ‘members unlimited’, amidst the political turmoil and unrest of the 1790s, it was given a central formative role in the narrative of E.P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class.2 The members of the LCS were also hailed by a contemporary pamphleteer as ‘one of the most dangerous combinations of Blackguards and Ragamuffins that ever existed in a civilized country [.] a set of fellows, whose sole aim was to subvert our glorious constitution, and to hurry us into all those scenes of blood, confusion and plunder, which have laid waste the once fertile and well-governed kingdom of France’.3 This collection of the papers of the LCS, brought together in six volumes, is a landmark in the publication of documents of political radicalisms in Britain. It gives an incisive sense of the extraordinarily diverse range of texts, debates, activities, repressive legislation and intellectual engagement that the LCS generated. Each selection is headed by a useful editorial introduction and positioning. The first two volumes collect the official pamphlets, broadsides, addresses, financial accounts, reports of meetings and discussions of the procedures of the Society. They foreground the range of the Society’s varied endeavours from producing handbills advertising meetings to publishing and circulating reprints of key documents on constitutional history and reform. The third and fourth volumes present the issues of the LCS’s Moral and Political Magazine which proved a disastrous drain on the organisation’s finances. The fifth volume, which presents some of the most engaging material here, examines some of the pamphlets written on the fringes of the society, without the sanction of the official LCS, and also includes some vehement attacks from reactionary and conservative pamphleteers. Finally, the sixth volume reprints documents relating to the repression of the society, and is centred around the debates over the ‘Treasonable Practices and Seditious Meetings Bill’. This review article considers the materials presented in the different volumes in relation to three key themes. Firstly, it explores the democratic spatial practices deployed through the organisation and the reform networks it shaped. Secondly, it explores the relationship of the LCS and its political identities to q 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jhg.2004.12.011
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Atlantic routes of political activity. Thirdly, it considers the diverse and contested political identities and tensions that were produced through the activities of the LCS. It outlines some ways in which engagements with the co-constitution of space and politics can illuminate key themes emerging in new political and subaltern histories.4
Making democratic spatial practices One of the defining concerns of the official LCS papers collected here is with attempts to establish democratic organisational practices. The LCS was not only concerned with parliamentary reform. It also had a direct concern with making a democratic logic integral to alternative political practices. Central to these democratic alternatives was experimentation with diverse spatial practices. These practices were not just a chance by-product of the political interventions and strategies of the LCS. They shaped the organisations’ identities and political practices. There were two key aspects of these practices. Firstly, there was the internal organisation of the LCS. Secondly, the LCS’s strategic co-ordinating role between itself and the various other political and reform movements that emerged in the 1790s through Britain and Ireland. These democratic spatial practices were fragile and contested. The LCS was organized into divisions. These democratic ‘cells’ met weekly in groups of 20–30 men in public houses in particular areas of the city. By 1795, the secretary and assistant secretary of the LCS boasted of having ‘forty one regular divisions’.5 The divisions were integral to the movement of the LCS. When divisions ‘collected more than a certain number of members, they divided in two, and thus had the ability, as the Attorney General put it, to ‘spread themselves by degrees’.6 A representative from each division was delegated on to the general committee of the LCS. The divisions facilitated both a democratic imaginary where each division could be represented to the organisation and ‘the more easy and orderly proceeding of the Society’.7 This speaks to the concerns of the LCS to produce organisational forms and conduct that were conducive to political democracy and debate. These forms were defined, at least in official LCS publications, against rough, rowdy ‘low’ tavern political cultures, although as Jon Mee notes some of the ‘meetings associated with the LCS had much more of the flavour of tavern free-and-easies than the civicism stressed in the official publications would suggest’.8 The divisions played a central part in the organisational geography of the LCS. A report attempting to revise the constitution of the LCS, for example, engages with the challenges posed by the mobility of members. If a member is admitted in a section not belonging to that part of the town he resides in, or if he shall have changed his place of residence since his admission, he shall give notice to the secretary, in order that he may be transferred to section to which such part of the town is appropriated.9 This internal LCS report gives a sense of the geography of the divisions as being about ‘mundane’ organisational matters. To the political establishment, however, the spectre of a radical society dividing, spreading and increasing was a threat. Chief Justice Eyre described the LCS, during the trials of Horne Tooke and John Thelwall, as a political monster ‘spreading itself every hour from division to division, and each division producing its sub-divisions, those sub-divisions becoming divisions, and so on ad infinitum’.10 These spatial practices were key to the LCS’s experimentation with democratic organisational forms. They also produced antagonisms as these new political practices struggled to cope with differences
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internal to divisions and differences between divisions. The debates over the revision of the LCS’s constitution, alluded to above, are a case in point. The Committee of Revision consisted of one member from each division. It was appointed ‘to expunge the objectional parts’ of the original 1792 LCS constitution and ‘to destroy every attempt at an arbitrary usurption of Power’.11 The outcome of this process reveals some of the tensions within the organisational structure of the LCS, for while ‘the revised regulations did receive the General Committee’s approbation in June 1794, protests were again registered from certain divisions of the LCS. The Society continued to operate according to the constitution of 1792.12 Some divisions split entirely from the LCS leading to establishment of rival/ fraternal organisations.13 Division twelve, seceded from the LCS to form the London Reforming Society, arguing that the Committee of Delegates had ‘assumed power which never belonged to [it]’.14 James Epstein has argued that the ‘new political history’ has eschewed a concern with ‘the formal processes of government and institutions of the state’ for a focus on ‘the symbolic investments of actions and communication’ and on ‘questions about how meanings are produced, received and sustained’.15 He has also argued that the sites where politics take place are key to engaging with the meanings of politics and the politics of meanings.16 Through prioritising the meanings, ideologies, texts and imaginations of the political the new political history has arguably downplayed the importance of attending to the practices in spatial practices. There is a need to conceptualise the spatial practices of the political in ways which foreground the generative character of political activity rather than reducing political movements to debates around meaning. The ongoing experiments with spatial practices and organisational geographies were as key to the political identities of the LCS as were the ways in which they contested and debated the meanings of contested words like ‘equality’ or ‘representation’.17 These practices, then, were central to the LCS’s democratic identities and to the way that it brought together different political constituencies and societies around a shared agenda for radical parliamentary reform. Experimentation with organisational geographies also defined the practices through which the LCS articulated its relations with other reform societies through Britain and Ireland. The LCS leadership constructed dynamic relations with these societies. The LCS played an active role here in shaping and constituting the broader reform agenda. They forwarded suggestions for constitutions and organisational practices to new societies and sent them ‘copies of addresses and regulations’.18 The LCS sent emissaries such as John Gale Jones and John Binns on tours of provincial reform societies.19 The LCS leadership also engaged in robust debate with the political directions and identities of such societies. A letter from Birmingham that commented favourably on ‘riot’ received a swift rebuke from the secretary and assistant secretary of the LCS. The authors were given a stern reminder that ‘Riots ought to be avoided with the utmost care’ being ‘the offspring of passion’ and ‘devoid of that system, which alone can ensure a happy REVOLUTION’.20 These political reform networks also drew on often unacknowledged multi-ethnic associations and friendships, which exceeded and unsettled the forms of patriotism which shaped the LCS’s politics.
Radical patriotisms? On 8 March 1792, writing the first correspondence of the LCS to Revd Mr Bryant of Sheffield, Thomas Hardy commented:
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Hearing from my friend, Gustavus Vassa, the African, who is now writing memoirs of his life in my house, that you are a zealous friend to the abolition of that cursed traffic, the Slave Trade, I infer from that circumstance, that you are a zealous friend to freedom on the broad basis of the Rights of Man. I am fully persuaded that there is no man, who is, from principle an advocate for the liberty of the black man, but will zealously support the rights of the white man, and vice versa.21 Hardy’s character reference for his Sheffield contact, then, came via Gustavus Vassa, better known today as Olaudah Equiano, the anti-slavery activist whose memoirs The Interesting Life of Gustavus Vassa, became a key abolitionist text. Equiano continued his association with the LCS. Accounts of a fund to give relief to ‘those families, whose husbands and fathers are now languishing in Prison, on charges of High Treason’ in 1794 notes the contribution of Gustavus Vassa, an African, of 10 shillings and 6 pence.22 His involvement situates the LCS as a product of the cosmopolitan subaltern political cultures of eighteenth-century London. Hardy, himself a Scottish shoemaker, drew heavily on a reforming pamphlet that had been addressed to ‘the delegates of [the] forty-five Corps of Volunteers assembled at Lisburn in Ireland’23 in drawing up the principles of the LCS. Irish radicals such as John Binns and William Duane were prominent LCS members.24 The Scottish martyrs, Joseph Gerrald, Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Thomas Muir and Maurice Margarot, who were transported or imprisoned for their participation in the reform movement, were also key figures.25 They had diverse, cosmopolitan experiences. Gerrald had taken over his family’s estate in St Kitt’s and had gone through the remains of his family’s fortune before moving to the US in the early 1780s. There ‘he associated and quarrelled with Thomas Paine’ and practised law in Pennsylvania before returning to England in 1788 where he ‘joined both the Society for Constitutional Information and the LCS’.26 Not only was the LCS made up of radicals with diverse routes, ethnicities and experiences, so the declarations and arguments of the LCS travelled. The democratic societies of Philadelphia followed the proceedings of the LCS and republished them. Such publications allowed the Democratic societies in Philadelphia ‘to conceive of themselves as a part of the ongoing transatlantic and democratic revolutions, since the British societies played a leading part in the rise of reform movements and popular radicalism in response to the French Revolution’.27 These networks challenge accounts of the LCS, such as E.P. Thompson’s, which view its significance only in terms of English politics. Connections and multi-ethnic associations were key to the political make up of the LCS. They assert the importance of geographies of solidarity and contact between diverse political activists which continue to be viewed as marginal to London’s subaltern politics.28 These connections had effects on the kinds of political identities produced through the activity of the LCS. That Hardy saw the project of a radical reform movement in London as inter-changeable with the movement to abolish slavery is significant. Further, it suggests that friendships between figures such as Hardy and Equiano shaped the political outlook, networks and contacts of the LCS. They also exceeded the male-bound character of the LCS. Lydia Hardy’s involvement in the sugar boycott and artisanal, anti-slavery activism was shaped by her friendship with Equiano.29 John Gale Jones encountered politicised women who had studied Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women on his tour of Kent. He notes that he concurred with the wisdom of their views.30 The significance of the unofficial geographies of multi-ethnic exchange and friendship that characterised eighteenth-century subaltern political cultures is only beginning to be recognised.
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Equiano is a key figure here. Not only did he help facilitate links between radicals in Sheffield and London, he also had diverse contacts in Belfast where he stayed for several months in 1791. There he kept company among dissenters such as Samuel Neilson ‘possibly the most radical member of Belfast’s secret committee and then the United Irishmen’. Neilson acted as Equiano’s patron, ‘so that the well dressed, middle aged African appeared with his Interesting Narrative not only at the local booksellers but at Neilson’s drapery business at the commercial heart of the town’.31 These connections and exchanges had effects. Key United Irish radicals, including Neilson and Napper Tandy, were subscribers to the Dublin edition of the Interesting Narrative.32 Neilson gave ‘anti-slavery’ issues a prominent place in the Northern Star, the United Irishmen’s newspaper.33 William Drennan proposed the circulation of addresses on the boycott of sugar.34 These cross-cutting friendships, associations and exchanges challenge accounts of the politics of the United Irishmen that have erased or ignored Equiano.35 They also challenge accounts of the Irish diaspora which construct the Irish as a sealed, ontologically discrete unit of study.36 Further they raise questions about what role Equiano may have played in constructing, facilitating or envisioning connections between the United Irishmen and LCS. LCS rhetoric included appeals to ‘healing the bleeding wounds of Ireland’ and against the ‘savage system of coercion now pursuing in Ireland’.37 LCS appeals and declarations were also circulated to the United Irishmen.38 There are tensions here though. These multi-ethnic associations conflict with the notions of patriotic, manly conduct that structure the conception of radical politics in many of the official pamphlets of the LCS. The LCS drew heavily on the repertoires of English radicalisms. It invoked such distinctively English tenets as the Norman Yoke, the importance of the jury system and the memory of the struggles of John Wilkes.39 Thus although the LCS was founded early in 1792 in discussion of ‘having all things in common’ and committed to equality among all, whether ‘black or white, high or low, rich or poor’40 these aims conflicted with the LCS’s orderly, respectable, patriotic English radicalisms. Linebaugh and Rediker posit a clear temporal rupture which defines a move away from explicit articulation of antislavery and reform struggles together. They argue that due the revolution in Haiti made race ‘a tricky and, for many, in England, a threatening subject, one that the leadership of the LCS now preferred to avoid’.41 This analysis misses the diversity of political identities, practices and trajectories brought together through the practices of the LCS. There were attempts to articulate patriotisms in a plural way, which unsettle Linebaugh and Rediker’s sense of a neat shift or rupture in the political identities of the LCS. A pamphlet on patriotism by an LCS supporter, Edward Henry Iliff, for example, challenges the association of patriotism with a ‘narrow love’ and ‘prejudice’. It argues instead that ‘the narrow love of one’s country, which has been assumed by prejudice and supported by vanity’ should be transformed: into a diffusive spirit of universal affection! Then will the poor African enjoy the sweets of domestic comfort, or voyage the regions of earth with all the dignity of man: colour will make no difference in our relative duties, and a black Negro may enjoy the friendship of his white oppressor.42 This pamphlet was written in 1794, when Epstein argues that the wars with France had made it increasingly difficult to ‘sustain universalist notions of patriotism’.43 It suggests that the LCS and the political circles around it, still maintained an attempt to articulate patriotisms in a plural, multiple way.44 This raises questions about how to make sense of the multiple, diverse and contested political identities crafted through the activity of the LCS. Concerns over the multiple and contested identities forged
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through the LCS recurrently come to the fore in debates over the methods and practices to be used and deployed by the LCS.
Reform or riot? In September of 1794, the LCS published a pamphlet that had been originally drafted by the bookseller John Bone. It was entitled ‘Reformers not rioters’. The pamphlet argued that ‘one of the fundamental principles of this society [.] is that riot, tumult and violence are not the fit means of obtaining a redress of grievances.’45 The pamphlet raised the spectre of the Gordon Riots of 1780 to support this argument. It suggested that they had ‘taught us, that public commotions may occasion disorders, far more prejudicial than the evils they are intended to remove’.46 The pamphlet was written to defend the LCS against accusations that it had been involved in fomenting riots in London in 1794. The pamphlet illustrates the ambiguities of the LCS’s position. Here was a reforming society, with founding principles that it should be made up of ‘member’s unlimited’ which came to define itself against repertoires of popular political activity such as riot. There were certainly strategic reasons for doing so. The repression of the Society (which would eventually lead to it being outlawed in 1799) was in progress with the arrests of Hardy and other LCS members and their trials for treason. The pamphlet also signals some of the tensions in the political program and constituencies of the LCS, both in the circumstances of its production and in the tension it signals between the LCS’s desire to articulate and engage with popular grievances. The circumstances of the pamphlet’s production give some sense of how contested political identities were negotiated through the activity of the LCS. The spy, William Metcalfe, considered Bone’s original draft to be ‘full of the most violent and seditious expressions’ and to be ‘calculated to renew the tumults which so lately prevail’d’.47 Burks and Parkinson produced a corrected version of Bone’s address that was approved and ordered to be printed as ‘Reformers no Rioters’.48 This official LCS line against riot, then, was constructed and disseminated only through excluding dissenting voices. To make sense of such dissension it is necessary to consider the LCS’s role in bringing together diverse constituencies of radicals, reformers, journeymen and ultra-radicals. The LCS made significant attempts to interpellate more marginal groups such as journeymen and artisans. Yet, it sought to confine and articulate such grievances through campaigns for parliamentary reform, rather than disparate popular protests and riots. This at least in official LCS writings emerges from a clear political project. The pamphlet concludes that ‘we cannot waste our time in lopping the numerous heads which are momentarily springing from the Hydra, we wish to deprive the monster at once of existence: Corrupt Parliaments cannot exist, if the people obtain their rights.’49 The conduct of LCS exceeded this attempt to construct rational political identities based around one cause, lack of political representation, and one solution, parliamentary reform. LCS pamphlets and rhetoric proved adept at articulating its concerns in relationship to popular grievances. Printed copies of speeches delivered to a public, general meeting of the LCS held in 1795 pointed to the ruinous effects of war on the poor in dramatic terms: The manufacturer has been seduced from his loom—the militia-man swindled from his domestic employment and the humble cottager kidnapped from the plough. The bread that should support the industrious Poor has been exported [.]50
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The LCS could prioritise parliamentary reform. In addressing constituencies of artisans, however, it was necessary to appeal to the grievances which they faced and to articulate them through repertoires that they identified with. Concerns around impressment are also frequently referred to in LCS rhetoric.51 The tension between a formal, rationalist political program for reform and appeals to, and use of the idioms of, popular grievance partly reflects the ways in which different LCS members were constituted in markedly different relationships to Atlantic networks and routes. Here it is instructive to compare Gerrald’s activities as a lawyer and estate owner with artisans such as Thomas Preston. Thomas Preston, a London shoemaker and LCS member and associate of Thomas Spence, found friendship and work among the cobblers of Dublin and Cork in the early 19th century, and claimed to have led a strike among Cork shoemakers.52 Preston represented the unruly, libertine artisan constituency of the LCS. He drew the sharp condemnation of Francis Place who described him as a ‘lame, drunken, garrulous and poor shoe-maker’ rooted in a degraded radical artisan subculture of men whose ‘circumstances are so desperate as to prevent them having any moral principles’.53 These diverse relationships of LCS activists and members to Atlantic routes of activity suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the singular stories Linebaugh and Rediker tell of a radical Atlantic made up of multi-ethnic solidarities and associations. Attending to the diverse trajectories of LCS activists can foreground some of the multiple political identities and radicalisms forged through Atlantic networks. This position challenges Linebaugh and Rediker’s stories of the revolutionary Atlantic, which are insufficiently attentive to the many different kinds and routes of radicalisms constituted and negotiated through trans-national networks. It also challenges those historians who seek to position groups like ‘the Irish’, as sealed, discrete units of study. Through exploring the diverse trajectories of radicalism that shaped, and were in turn shaped by, organisations like the LCS, it is possible to tell stories about the multiple and contested political identities that traversed and reshaped the political spaces of the Atlantic.
Notes 1. Papers of the London Corresponding Society (hereafter LCS), vol. 1, 3. 2. Thompson’s foundational argument that positions the LCS as central to the emergence of a radical tradition in England, has been brought into question, particularly around its blindness to issues of race and gender, see A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, London, 1996, P. Linebaugh, What if C.L.R. James had met E.P. Thompson in 1792? in: P. Buhle (Ed), C.L.R. James: His Life and Work, London, 1986, 212–219; The LCS was a male bound organisation which constituted political identities around ideas of ‘manly conduct’, but women attended their outdoor meetings and a female citizen published in the LCS’s Moral and Political Magazine. This publication also carried notices of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work, see M. Thale (Ed), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–99, Cambridge, 1983, 87. (hereafter Selections); J. Mee, Rough and respectable radicalism, History Workshop Journal, 56 (2003) 238–244. 3. LCS, vol. 5, 182. 4. On the new political histories see J. Epstein, Introduction: new directions in political history, Journal of British Studies, 41 (2002) 255–258; J. Epstein, ‘Our Real Constitution.’: trial defence and radical memory in the age of revolution in: J. Vernon (Ed), Re-reading the Constitution, Cambridge, 1996, 22–51.; D. Karr, Thoughts that flash like lightning: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001) 324–356; For new subaltern histories that have foregrounded the multi-ethnic forms of co-operation and solidarity in the early modern Atlantic, see P. Linebaugh, and M. Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, London, 2000 for their relationship to geography, see D.J. Featherstone, Spatial Practices of Atlantic Resistance(s), Social and Cultural Geography, in press. 5. LCS, vol. 2, 141.
790 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.
17.
18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.
26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.
Review article / Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 783–791 J. Barrell, Divided We Grow. London Review of Books, 5th June 2003, 8. LCS, vol. 1, 80. J. Mee, Rough and respectable radicalisms, History Workshop Journal 56 (2003) 239. LCS vol. 1, 311. Eyre cited by J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, Oxford, 2000, 387–8. Selections, 120. LCS, vol. 1, 331. LCS, vol. 2, 141. LCS vol. 2,124–5. J. Epstein, Introduction: new directions in political history, Journal of British Studies 41 (2002) 255. J. Epstein, Spatial practices/democratic vistas, Social History 24 (1999) 294–310; see also D. Karr, Thoughts that flash like lightning: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London, Journal of British Studies 40 (2001) 324–356. In arguing that spatial practices of the political should be taken seriously I do not intend to define such practices against meaning, but rather to re-position debates over meaning as a part of political practices which cannot merely be reduced to questions of meaning. See LCS, vol. 2, 156. See LCS, vol. 2, 231–235, 291–296J. Gale Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend &c, London, 1796; J. Binns, Recollections of the Life of John Binns, Philadelphia, 1854, 58–72. LCS, vol., 2, 139. Memoir of Thomas Hardy D. Vincent (Ed), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians 1790–1885, London, 1976, 45–46. Equiano was in fact revising his memoirs for a new edition. LCS, vol. 2, 280. LCS, vol. 2, 11–28. See D. Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic, Dublin, 1998. For a recent politicised articulation of the memory of the Scottish Martyrs see Adam McNaughten’s song ‘Thomas Muir of Huntershill’ recorded by Dick Gaughan on Redwood Cathedral, Greentrax CDTRAX 158, for lyrics see: http://www. dickalba.demon.co.uk/songs/texts/thommuir.html J. Epstein, ‘Our Real Constitution’: trial defence and radical memory in the age of revolution, in: J. Vernon (Ed), Re-reading the Constitution, Cambridge, 1996, 29. A. Koschnik, The democratic societies of Philadelphia and the limits of the American public sphere, circa 1793–1795, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series 58 (2001) 618. For accounts of London’s subaltern politics which make little or no reference to these multi-ethnic networks see R. Porter, London: A Social History, London, 1996; N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain, Oxford, 1998. C. Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, London, 1992, 39. J.G. Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend &c, London, 1796, 91. N. Rodgers, Equiano in Belfast: a study of the anti-slavery ethos in a northern town, Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997) 75. See O. Equiano, in: V. Carretta (Ed), The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, London, 1995, 25–26. N. Rodgers, Equiano in Belfast: a study of the anti-slavery ethos in a northern town, Slavery and Abolition 18 (1997) 73–89. See J. Allen (Ed), The Drennan-McTier Letters, 1776–1793, vol. 1, Dublin, 1998, 386. K. Whelan, The Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism and the Construction of Irish Identity 1760–1830, Cork, 1996. K. Kenny, Diaspora and comparison: the global Irish as a case study, Journal of American History 135 (2003) 135, 137. LCS, vol. 2, 265. See Selections, 134. See LCS, vol. 1, 139–188, 226, LCS, vol. 2, 49. P. Linebaugh, and M. Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra, London, 2000, 274. P. Linebaugh, and M. Rediker, The Many Headed Hydra, London, 2000, 274. LCS, vol. 5, 175–6. J. Epstein, ‘Our Real Constitution’: trial defence and radical memory in the age of revolution, in: J. Vernon (Ed), Re-reading the Constitution, Cambridge, 1996 39.
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44. See also John Gale Jones’s condemnation of slavery in J.G. Jones, Sketch of a Political Tour Through Rochester, Chatham, Maidstone, Gravesend&c, London, 1796, 63. 45. LCS, vol. 1, 290. 46. LCS, vol. 1, 290. 47. Selections, 215. 48. Selections, 215. 49. LCS, vol. 1, 293. 50. LCS, vol. 2, 91, see also 189. 51. See LCS, vol. 1, 336. 52. T. Preston, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Preston, Patriot and Shoemaker, London, 1817. 53. J. McCalman, Radical Underworld, Oxford, 1986, 30.
David Featherstone Department of Geography University of Liverpool Liverpool UK