The Trouble with Tom (9 page)

I cross over Fleet Street and pause before a building at the corner of Bouverie, where a sign proclaims FUZZY'S GRUB: A MORE CIVILIZED BREAKFAST—meaning that they serve it until three in the afternoon. That
is
civilized. The smell of frying onions envelops me as I walk in.

"Sausage sandwich and brown sauce, please."

I look away as they drain the grease off my meal. Another customer stands nearby, munching his sandwich, a paperback book shoved in his jacket pocket. He has the current inhabitants to thank for the sandwich, but perhaps has the past tenants to thank for being able to read the book. For here, at this corner, was where newly freed Carlile would move in 1826 to build his most lavish Temple of Reason of all, with walls lined with banned and radical books and a nearby lecture hall of progressive reformers arguing for everything from vegetarianism to women's suffrage and atheism. Mocking the Christian Missions of William Wilberforce, Carlile lorded over what he called his "Infidel Mission," proudly watched over by a life-sized statue of Thomas Paine that one of his Fleet Street neighbors had presented to him. The sculptor, ironically enough, was actually spying on Carlile in the hope of sending him to the gallows. It amused the radical to no end to think that the government had financed his beloved statue of old Tom Paine.

But what of the
real
Thomas Paine?

"We have been repeatedly asked of late," complained the Times, "what Cobbett has done with Paine's bones?"

Indeed. Though he was stumping for electoral and debt reform as much as ever in his newspaper and in lecture halls across England, Cobbett had fallen curiously silent about the famous bones. They'd shown themselves to not be a particularly useful fund-raiser, and were shelved unceremoniously in Cobbett's digs at Bolt Court. There the shrunken remains of death lay hidden scarcely a hundred feet from where Carlile's life-sized Paine stood in fill public view. Radical attendees at birthday dinners regularly held for Thomas Paine—or "a number of vulgar persons," as the
Times
preferred to describe them-argued among themselves whether they should press Cobbett to
do
something with the increasingly awkward relics. Cobbett had always been one for half-finished plans; he was forever proposing new funds that didn't materialize, new books and magazines that never appeared. But the bones were different; his friends and enemies hadn't forgotten them, even if Cobbett himself now wanted to.

He had quite enough to contend with already. Restlessly moving for brief stretches out of London to return to farming and home-schooling his children, Cobbett kept getting tangled in politics. An attempt at running for the House of Commons terminated in a brawl outside a polling place; kicked and punched from all sides as he left the voting booth, Cobbett had to fight his way out by improvising a sort of impromptu pair of brass knuckles—"One of the sharp corners of [my] snuff-box, which struck out beyond the bottom of my little finger, did good service. It cuts noses and eyes at a famous rate." Other Cobbett supporters, attacked by knives, fared rather less well, and by the time the polls closed their candidate found himself placing dead last.

After such misadventures, he invariably returned to his shop at 183 Fleet Street, the same former auction room where Carlile had begun his reign of sedition a few years before. Cobbett's living quarters back in Bolt Court buzzed with activity, too, as he was now hosting his friends and sometime printers Mills, Jowett & Mills. Every Friday night at 11 Bolt Court he'd repair to the office of his printer Alexander Mills, where a jovial and even raucous editorial meeting was under way. Sitting around examining and arguing over manuscripts were the house compositor, Cobbett's secretary, and three or four physicians becoming increasingly merry over a bowl of rum punch. At the center of the group was a strapping young surgeon, Thomas Wakley, who delighted in having the old rebel of the house at hand as they assembled the next week's attacks on Britain's medical establishment. Back issues littering the office bore an apt title:
The Lancet.

It was fitting that Paine's bones, stored here in Cobbett's house, presided over
The
Lancet's early editorial meetings, for Thomas Wakley rivaled both Cobbett's and Paine's ability to attract trouble. Almost immediately after setting up his first surgical practice on Oxford Street, Wakley was stabbed repeatedly in his hallway in the dead of night, and his house burned down around him; the doctor, covered in blood, barely escaped the flames by crawling out a skylight and breaking into the house of a neighbor. His neighbor's servant was so astonished that, instead of giving the half-dead Wakley a cup of water, he filled it with lamp oil—which Wakley, delirious, proceeded to drink.

Some thought it was a gang's assassin mistaking his target; in any case, Wakley soon had many enemies who were not mistaken at all about the threat he posed. The young surgeon was impatient with the rampant nepotism of the Royal College of Surgeons and horrified by the badly botched operations hidden behind their establishment's code of silence. Medicine, he decided, needed the same scrutiny that Cobbett's courtroom and parliamentary reporting brought to politics. Under the heading "Hospital Reports," The Lancet provided withering eyewitness accounts of malpractice, such as a lithotomy botched by an inept surgeon who kept his un-anesthetized dying patient strapped down for three hours of useless incisions. Correspondents were barred from operating theaters, and in a near-riot Wakley was thrown bodily out of a meeting of the Royal Society. But his
Lancet
was hitting its mark and draining the profession of pustulence and corruption. Nobody else on Fleet Street could claim to have as much influence over the very bodies of Londoners as
The Lancet
. Nobody, that is, except for the radical across the street: Richard Carlile.

Not long after Carlile was sprung from jail, he and Cobbett dined together and raised toasts to each other's health; Carlile even announced that he now planned to write a biography of Cobbett. But when his would-be subject picked up Carlile's latest pamphlet just a few weeks later, he was utterly appalled to see what his friend—with some quiet help from the young John Stuart Mill—had written during his final days in prison.
Every Woman's Book
, it proclaimed. Introduced by a plate of a naked and unashamed Adam and Eve captioned 'What Is Love?"—a line from a poem by Thomas Paine—Carlile's guide immediately got down to business:

If love were made the matter of sedate and philosophical conversation, the pleasures arising from it could be greatly heightened, desire would never be tyrannically suppressed and much misery and ill-health would be avoided. Parents would explain its meaning, its uses and abuses, to their children, at the proper time; and all ignorance, and what is worse, all hypocrisy, which leads to so many disasters, would be avoided.

Sex was, Carlile insisted, clean and healthy—"of the very first importance as to the health and happiness through life." So why was it not discussed openly? Like stamp taxes on newspapers and blasphemy bans, he believed the concept of "obscenity" exerted control on an underclass: in this case, women. "Restraints, here, operate precisely as they operate in cases of excessive taxation," he snapped, "they destroy the revenues sought and produce the evils of smuggled and more disastrous intercourse as a defiance."

Carlile was going to change that. "Equality between the sexes is the source of virtue," he proclaimed. after reading Walking Stewart, he'd decided that women had surely put up with the wages of sex for long enough: "Stewart . . . stated as his opinion that a time would come when intelligent women would not submit to the pain and perils of childbirth." And yet experience showed that men and women still desired sex. Carlile's answer to this conundrum took only one sentence buried deep in the text, but it was one that startled the nation.
"If, before sexual intercourse," he wrote, "the female introduces into her vagina apiece of sponge as large as can be pleasantly introduced, having previously attached a bobbin or a bit of narrow riband to withdraw it, it will, in most cases, be found a preventative to conception."

In less than fifty words, Richard Carlile had changed women's lives.

It was the first time in the English language that specific contraceptive advice had been openly published. Throughout 1826, and for years afterward, copies of Every Woman's Book flew off the shelves, sometimes at the rate of fifty a day Carlile's press could barely keep up. But Cobbett was appalled by the book's popularity. "
Obscene
," he declared in his
Political Register
—which,naturally, helped send the book's sales through the roof. Given Cobbett's reaction, one can scarcely imagine that of Carlile's enemies.
Every Woman's Book
was burned—once, during a debate, right before the author's eyes as a crowded lecture hall applauded wildly—and he was pilloried as vile, lecherous, a corrupter of morals. But, quietly, his book hidden in women's sewing baskets and under mattresses, he was read with intense interest. One follower even suggested that he raise money for his cause by selling decks of sedition cards: the kings would be Carlile, Cobbett, Paine, and Franklin; and the queens Mrs. Carlile, her shop assistant Susannah Wright, and the feminist writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Marie Jeanne Roland.

But Cobbett no longer quite fit in with the rest of the radical deck. As the 1820s came to a close he was becoming, well, almost respectable. Perhaps the constant sight of Paine's bones warned him of his own fate as a writer, for Cobbett was becoming more thoughtful as he edged toward eternity. His most lasting work came from these years: Rural Rides, a tour on horseback with his son that elegiacally memorialized the old English countryside before it disappeared altogether. He kept running for Parliament, and though he was still mocked about Paine when he gave stump speeches—"Old bones! Old bones!" crowds jeered—with each election he came closer to winning until, one day in 1832, to his astonishment . . . he won.

Carlile in the meantime was frenetically spinning out ideas and reforms and sliding into incoherence. By the 1830s, amid his multitude of crusades for women's rights, he publicly separated from his wife and took up a new lover with an alacrity that scandalized his family and friends; he loudly converted to Christianity and then back to atheism again; and he began holding lectures on some strange German theories about how the shape of one's head determined behavior. His eccentricity becomes a little more understandable when you read in one of his many writings upon medical reform that "Crude Mercury approaches as near to a panacea as any thing can, or as any thing will, approach." Indeed, he recommended it heartily for children, and had become rather fond of taking it himself : "In a quantity of about 2 drachms daily, or about the ordinary size of a pill . . . [it] has gone gradually through every part of the system, unfelt other than as a stimulant, which I always feel in a balsamic glow even at my finger ends." Thus glowing and stimulated, the slightly mad proprietor of the Temple of Reason was thrown back in jail again in 1831, for a three-year stint. His crime this time was a refusal to pay local church taxes. His defense was not much helped when he exhibited an effigy of the devil in his storefront, then one of a bishop, and then—in a wry flash of inspiration—he'd linked the two arm in arm, as if out on a stroll.

Cobbett wasn't faring much better in an institutional setting. The Peter Porcupine of yore had been at his best as a reformer attacking from the outside; as an inexperienced and outnumbered MP, he flailed ineffectively. The biggest reaction Cobbett ever received was when the crusty radical inadvertently referred to "my proposed revolution" instead of "my proposed resolution"; the chamber rang out with knowing laughter from other MPs. Soon he'd had enough of London; in 1833 he had his secretary Ben Tilly pack up his belongings from Bolt Court, and he moved back to Surrey—back to that stretch of land between the Hog's Back and Christmas Pie, back to farming the soil that he'd never really wanted to leave.

The young boy was fascinated, like the old man had once been, by the soil and stones of the land. But the thoughts of a local boy traipsing about on Normandy Farm had turned to something else that had been buried in the land.

"Is it true," he asked the ailing farmer, "you keep the bones of Tom Paine, the infidel?"

The old man leaned on his cane and regarded the boy before him.

"What do you know about Tom Paine?" he snorted.

But soon he relented. Leading the boy back through his house crammed with books, and scattered manuscripts that he and his faithful secretary continued toiling on even as his health failed, William Cobbett led him upstairs in his farmhouse. The old man produced a wooden box, and as the boy watched, the lid was opened.

Inside were bones . . . human bones.

The box was put away, and the boy sent on his way to contemplate what he'd seen. Cobbett himself hardly needed a reminder of mortality; since coming home to Surrey, he'd been growing weaker and weaker, and by the spring of 1835 was wracked by coughs and suffering a throat infection that simply wouldn't go away. His faithful Ben Tilly was there to help him, though, as he struggled to keep writing. He tended to his corn when he could, and delighted in hearing the blackbirds and cuckoos whistling across his fields. But his own voice was failing altogether. At a parliamentary debate in late May on the malt tax, he struggled to speak, but went unnoticed by the House as he rasped helplessly and unheard: his words were dying in his throat. He returned to his farm enfeebled, and his condition worsened. His body weakened and bedridden, Cobbett decided he had one last wish. He asked his sons to carry him outside to his fields so that he might check on his plantings.

"As he was carried to see the fields," his son wrote, "a little boy in a blue smock-frock happened to come by us, to whom my father gave a laughing look . . . He seemed refreshed by the sight of the little creature, which he had once precisely resembled, though now at such an immeasurable distance." Cobbett was carried back to bed. And there, closing his eyes in sleep, he never opened them again.