Abstract
The interest in rural communities with which this book is concerned, began with the revolutionary controversy of the 1790s. Prominent contributors to the controversy from across the political spectrum agreed that rural communities were in crisis. This chapter will consider the ways in which four polemicists, writing from very different political positions, manifested their particular interest in rural community. John Thelwall in The Peripatetic (1793), Hannah More, Thomas Spence and Arthur Young were primarily interested in the living conditions of the semi-independent cottager, and in political, social and economic structures within small rural communities. This aspect of their work demands attention because of the acknowledged importance of 1790s polemic as background to the poetry and fiction of the Romantic period.1 The questions they pursued and the issues these raise provide a useful point of entry for understanding the central concerns of this book.
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Notes
See Marilyn Butler, ‘Introductory Essay’, in Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolutionary Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 1–17.
John Thelwall, The Peripatetic, ed. Judith Thompson (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), p. 140. All future references will be to this edition, and will appear within parentheses in the text.
The Politics of English Jacobinism: Writings of John Thelwall, ed. Gregory Claeys (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 165. The Tribune was a periodical published by Thelwall between March 1795 and April 1796, when it was suppressed by the government, and mainly consisted of his own political lectures.
See Joseph Massie, Calculations of Taxes for a Family of Each Rank, Degree or Class for One Year (London: Printed for Thomas Payne, 1756), pp. 34–45.
See Liza Picard, Dr Johnson’s London: Life in London 1740–1770 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), pp. 55–7.
For an analysis of the political importance of this passage see Andrew McCann, Cultural Politics in the 1790s: Literature, Radicalism and the Public Sphere (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 83–106.
See Iain McCalman and Maureen Perkins, ‘Popular Culture’, in An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 221.
See Stephen Daniels, Humphry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 52–3 and 127–8.
John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 224.
Thelwall continued to be exercised about the removal of cottages to make way for grander dwellings and larger farms. In the journal of his 1797–98 walking tour, he noted of Amesbury: ‘There are three or four individuals in this neighbourhood, who rent to the amount of 1000l. a year each: that is to say, so many agricultural canibals, who have devoured their eight or ten families a piece’ (‘A Pedestrian Tour Through Several Parts of England and Wales, During the Summer of 1797’, Monthly Magazine, 9:57 (1800), 228–30 (229)). For a discussion of Thelwall’s journal see Robin Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 35–7.
See Mona Scheuermann, In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), pp. 135–6
and Jonathan Wordsworth, ‘Introduction’, in Hannah More, Village Politics, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth (Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1995), p. 4.
Kevin Gilmartin, Writing Against Revolution: Literary Conservatism in Britain, 1790–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 67.
Christine L. Krueger, The Reader’s Repentance: Women Preachers, Women Writers, and Nineteenth-Century Social Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 94–7.
Alannah Tomkins, The Experience of Urban Poverty, 1723–82: Parish, Charity, Credit (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 239–40.
See John Barrell, ‘Sportive Labour: The Farmworker in Eighteenth-Century Poetry and Painting’, in The English Rural Community: Image and Analysis, ed. Brian Short (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 121–31.
See Susan Pedersen, ‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth Century England’, Journal of British Studies, 25 (1986), 84–113 (91).
Robert Hole, ‘Introduction’ in Selected Writings of Hannah More, ed. Robert Hole (London: William Pickering, 1996), p. vii.
David Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry Stated and Considered (Fairfield, NJ: Augustus M. Kelley, 1977), p. 56.
See Iain McCalman, ‘Ultra-Radicalism and Convivial Debating-Clubs in London 1795–1838’, English Historical Review, 102 (1987), 309–33
and David Worrall, Radical Culture, Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), pp. 89–96.
Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 45.
Thomas Spence, A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, Being the History of Crusonia, or Robinson Crusoe’s Island (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Printed and Sold by T. Saint, 1782) in Modern British Utopias 1700–1850, Vol. 4, ed. Gregory Claeys (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1997), p. 115.
Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 73.
See Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 7–25.
See Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 93–109.
J.H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain: The Early Railway Age 1820–1850, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930), p. 117.
J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Rights, Enclosure and Social Change in England 1700–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 80.
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© 2013 Simon J. White
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White, S.J. (2013). The Cottager and 1790s Political Polemic. In: Romanticism and the Rural Community. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137281791_2
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