The Trouble with Tom (7 page)

Local doggerel scribblers were even faster out of the gate. Under a picture of Cobbett bearing a coffin on his back came one broadside: 'This is WILL COBBETI', with Thomas Paine's bones / a bag full of brick-bats, and one full of stones," it chanted, ". . . Tis Cobbett the changeling, worthless and base /Just arrive'd from New York, with his impudent face." A printer on Threadneedle Street merrily issued
Sketches of the Life of Billy Cobb and Death of Tommy Pain
, with a cover depicting both Satan and Paine's vengefully reanimated skeleton grabbing Cobbett at the graveside and choking him: 'Up THOMAS jumped, (and Satan too) / And caught him by the pipe / In which the wind keeps passing through . . ."

Even Lord Byron descended briefly from his empyrean realm of poetry to take a swipe at him:

In digging up your bones, Tom Paine,
Will Cobbett has done well
You visit him on earth again,
He'll visit you in hell.

Cobbett had not even issued his first call for donations yet, and money was already pouring in . . . to booksellers. But hanging over them all year had been the real question—he belling of the cat. It had been a quarter of a century since anyone had openly sold the treasonous books of Cobbett's martyr. Who would now dare to reprint the works of Thomas Paine?

The Bone Grubbers

JUDGE BAILEY EMERGED from the chambers, stern in his robe and wig, and sat high in his chair overlooking the defendant. The latest case in his docket had become an utter headache. Just blocks away, copies of Cobbett's
Political Register
were being hawked with news of the return of Thomas Paine. How could one have imagined such nonsense? And delivered on the day of sentencing? The awful timing of Paine's return was now threatening to turn what should have been a straightforward blasphemy prosecution into a cause celebre. It was bad enough that the defendant was a notorious local seller of Cobbett's
Register
. But the slight and defiant-looking young man standing in the docket, one Richard Carlile of 55 Fleet Street, had done something more, something that made him a match waiting to be thrown into a tinderbox.

"The crime of blasphemy is one of the most serious offenses known to our law," Bailey began his pronouncement. "The sentence of the court upon you, Richard Carlile, is that, for publication of Paine's
Age of Reason
, you pay a fine to the king of El000 and be imprisoned for two years in the county gaol of Dorset, in the town of Dorchester; and that for the second offence, the publication of Palmer's
Principles of Nature
, you pay a further fine to the King of E500, and be further imprisoned for one year in the said gaol in Dorchester." The judge rambled on with his sentence-more fines, more crushing sureties required upon release-and the young man bowed his head.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. Carlile came from a God-fearing family, and his mother and older sister couldn't fathom what had brought their misguided Richard to this place. One of his earliest boyhood memories, after all, was of gathering kindling with other village children to burn Thomas Paine in effigy—"Scouring the hedges for miles around," Carlie mused, "from daylight till dark, to gather a faggot wherewith to burn the effigy of 'old Tom Paine,' my now venerated political father!"

Then again, Richard
needed
a father. He'd lost his own in 1794, when he was but four years old. "Having no father to guide me," he recalled, "I must say that, until twenty years of age, I was a weed left to pursue its own course." He learned his letters from a local schoolmistress with the delightful name of Cherry Chalk, but by age twelve he'd dropped out of school altogether. His youth was squandered in miserable apprenticeships to a druggist and then a tinsmith; they ran him ragged on minimal food and five hours of sleep a night. But any resentment that he had was vague and unfocused. He knew a few bookbinder's apprentices who, passing around forbidden books, avowed themselves followers of Paine, but Carlile never paid them much heed.

In 1811 he moved to London to get married and seek a living as a journeyman tinsmith. It was hard to make ends meet—and even harder once Britain suffered a recession. Paine's warning seemed to be coming true: by 1816, with the nation stumbling under a bad harvest and a massive accumulated debt from endless foreign wars, the economy was becoming dire. It was a year, Carlile mused, "that opened my eyes." Scores of banks failed, and wages plummeted nationwide. Worse still was the feeling of powerlessness, as voter qualifications were rigged so that a tiny and well-to-do wealthy portion of the population determined parliamentary elections. Barely employed journeymen and apprentices near Carlile's home on Holborn Hill grumbled among themselves, passing around Cobbett's
Political Register
and contraband copies of Paine's
Rights of Man
. The grinding of poverty sharpened the edge of their complaints, Carlile recalled—"In the manufactories nothing was talked of but revolution." Trapped since childhood in a rigid class system and under a church and state that he vaguely resented without really knowing why, Paine's work at last brought Carlile's inchoate anger into focus. Why
did
the government have to be like this? Why
not
reform it? When a new and vehement radical paper called
Black Dwarf
fell into his hands, it found the tinsmith ready to drop everything for the cause.

"On March 9,1817, I borrowed a pound note from my employer and went and purchased 100
Dwarfs
," Carlile later recalled from his jail cell. The date of his visit to the paper's publisher still stood clear in his mind. "The
Dwarf
was then at an almost unprofitable [circulation] number, and it was a question about giving it up. However, I traversed the metropolis in every direction to find new shops to sell them . . . I persevered, and many a day traversed thirty miles for a profit of eighteen-pence." Carlile stopped showing up at work much, which was easy for his boss to overlook; the economy was so dreadful that there was little to do there anyway. Within weeks he gave up any pretense of still being a tinsmith: each morning he rose and reported directly to an abandoned auctioneer's storefront at 183 Fleet Street. He was now Richard Carlile, Publisher and Bookseller.

It didn't take long for him to make his mark. Alongside newspapers urging the reform of a parliamentary election which barely any citizens could either qualify to run for or vote in, Carlile also lashed out at the clergy. Upon hearing that publisher William Hone's parody of the Liturgy had been banned by the government, Carlile hoisted placards in his shop window announcing to astonished Londoners that now
he
would publish it. Even Hone was surprised, since he hadn't given Carlile permission. But Carlile didn't care: to him, his duty was to the book, not to the government or even the author.

"I believe that I am right when I say that this was the first time that ever an individual bade defiance to the veto of the Attorney-General upon any publication whatsoever," Carlile proudly claimed. The astounded head of the local Society for the Suppression of Vice, William Wilberforce, demanded that the blasphemous bookseller be prosecuted. Scarcely five months from the fateful day he borrowed a pound from his old employer, Carlile was sent on his first stretch in prison.

He kept publishing.

To the amazement of the authorities, now
Mrs
. Carlile ran the shop at 183 Fleet Street. And she just kept on selling Hone's parodies as impudently as ever. It was so blatantly defiant that nobody quite knew what to
do
. When Jane Carlile's husband was finally let out of jail after a four-month term, the married couple simply carried on with their insolence. More indictments: more books and newspapers. They even moved into larger quarters at 55 Fleet Street. Richard Carlile just kept contemptuously laughing off the government penalties: he didn't care.

But soon he came to care a great deal about the heavy hand of the government. In August 1819, while Cobbett was still sitting in a Long Island cottage and pondering when best to dig up his old enemy, Carlile was sharing a stage in Manchester with other reformist speakers gathered together for a massive rally. Upwards of fifty thousand Manchester workers turned out on St. Peter's Fields to hear them. It was a joyous day: noisemakers and impromptu instruments sang out as the workers marched in, carrying aloft handsome blue and green banners reading SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL and LIBERTY AND FRATERNITY. Another demanded EQUAL REPRESENTATION OR DEATH.

The government chose the latter. Carlile watched in horror as the cavalry made a charge upon the crowd, slashing and stabbing with their sabers in a melee that left eleven dead and hundreds injured. A woman in front of Carlile, clutching a newborn infant, was "sabred over the head, and her tender offspring drenched in its mother's blood." Carlile barely escaped with his life from what was quickly dubbed "Peterloo"; hiding incognito in a carriage omnibus filled with right-thinking stouthearted Englishmen, he found himself having to pass around a flask and join in a toast heartily damning himself, praying as he drank his shot that nobody would recognize him. His blistering account of Peterloo, published upon returning to London, accused the government of nothing less than cold-blooded and calculated murder to terrorize the populace. "Every stone was gathered from the ground on the Friday and Saturday previous to the meeting," he bitterly reported, "by the scavengers sent there by the express command of the magistrates, that the populace might be rendered more defenseless."

Public outrage over Peterloo was still palpable when Cobbett arrived back with his infamous box of bones. Like an unexploded bomb, Paine's ideas were now newly unearthed and ready to detonate, and they had to be kept out of the hands of the citizenry. Carlile had been the most outrageous instigator of all—even having the gall to read all of Paine's
Rights of Man
aloud as evidence, in a clever attempt to be able to publish it again—yet
again
!—under the guise of a courtroom transcript. And this from a man who by his own admission had already sold nearly five thousand copies of this pernicious book. Judge Bailey decided to make an example of Carlile: it was time to throw the book at the bookseller.

". . .
And that you be imprisoned until the fines are paid,"
the judge said.

Carlie could be jailed indefinitely now, perhaps for the rest of his life. But the bookseller had his answer ready for the court: I
will not
pay.
He was led away in handcuffs. Everyone knew what his sentence meant; and after arriving at the jail, the new prisoner received a chilling farewell note from one of his supporters:

Yesterday, the news of the resurrection and transmission of the bones of the persecuted Thomas Paine to their native soil struck me very forcibly as an extraordinary, almost miraculous coincidence with the decree, in the same breath, that will probably bury you alive.

Carlile looked around his grim jail cell, and then—he waited.

SHREDDED LETTUCE.

Amid the mingled London smell of wet brick and soot, and a puddled tincture of rainwater and diesel, the emptied McDonald's boxes sit piled against the alleyway wall; their cardboard flaps move in the wind like the feathers of flightless birds. The narrow entrance of Fleet Street into Bolt Court is crammed between a Starbucks on one side and a McDonald's on the other, with a peppering of fast-food refuse in between. Walking back into its recesses, the light becomes dimmer and the roar of Fleet Street slightly muffled; in the emptied courtyard, cold metal scaffolding crawls up the whitewashed face of an old building. I pace around, searching for number 11.Projecting out from one are are what might once have been old gas lanterns, now made electric; between them and an iron railing is the sign:

Workpermit.com
Registered Immigration Advisors

A fitting enough use for 11 Bolt Court, I suppose—for Cobbett brought himself and his box of bones home to this building upon his return from abroad. Throughout the nineteenth century this courtyard echoed with the clatter of various printing presses, and teemed with apprentice printers and students at its engraving school; and for many years, too, it counted Cobbett as an occasional resident in this building. Newly arrived in London and gazing out from the entrance to Bolt Court, Cobbett could see Carlile's shuttered bookshop just up the street. He'd already visited Carlile in jail, where he found his fellow radical mooning over the country Cobbett had just left.

"Ah,"sighed Carlile, "had I been in America, they would not have thrown me in prison!"

"No,"countered Cobbett. 'They would have tarred and feathered you."

But Carlile's fate had indeed been harsh here. Within an hour of the court ruling, authorities swept into the 'Temple of Reason" at 55 Fleet Street and impounded L600 worth of books and cash; the next morning, when beadles arrived to pull down rebellious placards surreptitiously placed on the closed-down shop, they were roundly booed and jostled by an angry crowd. But eventually the crowd dispersed, and the shop kept locked up by authorities until, with its rent hopelessly due a few weeks later, Carlile's remaining family and friends had to clear out the pitiful remains of the Temple.

Cobbett had his own problems. Even before he'd arrived in London, he found himself and his box of bones being attacked incessantly in the press and Parliament speeches. 'Was there ever any subject treated with more laughter, contempt, and derision than the introduction of these miserable bones?" one member of Parliament sneered. Writing to his son, Cobbett complained how "to cry out against CARLILE, PAINE and 'blasphemy,' was the order of day amongst all enemies of freedom." But he was ready to fight back.

PAINE'S BIRTH DAY, a notice proclaimed in the January 22 issue of his Political Register: "There will be a Dinner at the Crown and Anchor, in the Strand, on Saturday the 29th." Admirers of Paine, clutching five-shilling tickets for the dinner would gather at seven P.M. to watch Cobbett ring in a new era of political reform. There might even be Paine Clubs founded in various cities. In any case, the dinner would make a fine start for his efforts to raise money for Paine's grave, and it would give Cobbett a chance to hawk his latest notion in monument fund-raising: selling gold rings containing locks of Paine's hair. Cobbett vowed that the rings would be made directly under his own supervision as he handed each lock of hair to the goldsmith, and that he would personally sign a parchment of authenticity for every ring.