Chatterton’s Scorcher

Abstract

Extremes of revolutionary republicanism increased as Victoria’s reign went on. The movement of radical ideas which had began 30 years before she came to the throne moved as the century progressed, from the reform club ideals of the late eighteenth century to the Jacobinical republican dreams of the French revolutionary period, on to the Spencian plotters and thence to Chartism by the middle of the century and the foreign revolutionary passions of the period 1848 to 1890. Emigré revolutionaries had arrived by packet boat and had ensconced themselves in clubs filled with tobacco smoke and vitriol in Clerkenwell or drank in the seedy backstreets off the Tottenham Court Road, simply adding to the mix of unorthodox political doctrines. Friedrich Engels, living a double life as gentleman and revolutionary, was about to publish The Condition of the Working Classes in 1848 and, on the Continent, Marx was brooding over the inevitability of the collapse of the old order in the coming revolution; The Communist Manifesto was first published in German in 1848 and was sufficiently terrifying to get its main author (the other was Engels) exiled to Britain. The Socialist International would follow the collapse of the Paris Commune and would meet in pubs on the Gray’s Inn Road, watched by the new Special Branch, Britain’s secret police force, with its eye on Irishmen, anarchists, communists and revolutionary madmen.