DISSENT is a misleading term. It covers so many sects, so many conflicting intellectual and theological tendencies, finds so many different forms in differing social milieux. The old dissenting groups, Quakers, and Baptists – show certain similarities of development after the Glorious Revolution. As persecution gave way to greater toleration, the congregations became less zealous and more prosperous. Where the clothiers and farmers of the Spen Valley had met, in 1670, in secret and at night, in a farmhouse called ‘Ye Closes’ or ‘in the barn near Chapel Fold’, 100 years later we find a sturdy church with a prosperous deacon, Joseph Priestley, who confided in his devotional diary such entries as this:
The world smiles. I had some agreeable engagements by this post. What shall I render my Lord, was my language when I went to Leeds. I determined to give four or five loads of wheat to Christ’s poor. Had much reason to complain this day that I did not set God before me in all my thoughts. Find it difficult in the hurry of business…
And the next week:
This morning I… dined with a company of officers who all appeared to be ignorant of the way of salvation. I had some pleasure in reading 45th Isiah…. Ordered brother Obadiah to give a load of wheat among Christ’s poor.1
This Priestley was still a Calvinist, albeit a somewhat guilt-stricken one. (No doubt ‘brother Obadiah’ was a Calvinist too.) But his younger cousin, also a Joseph Priestley, was at this time studying at the Daventry Academy, where he sadly disappointed his kinsmen and church by being touched by the spirit of the rational enlightenment, becoming a Unitarian, a scientist, and a political reformer. It was this Dr Priestley whose books and laboratory were destroyed by a ‘Church and King’ mob in Birmingham in 1791.
That is a thumb-nail sketch of one part of the Dissenting tradition. Their liberty of conscience tolerated, but still disabled in public life by the Test and Corporations Acts, the Dissenters continued throughout the century to work for civil and religious liberties. By the mid-century many of the younger educated ministers prided themselves on their broad-minded rational theology. The Calvinist self-righteousness of the persecuted sect was left behind, and they gravitated through Arian and Socinian ‘heresy’ towards Unitarianism. From Unitarianism it was only a further step to Deism, although few took this step until the 1790s; and even fewer in the second half of the eighteenth century wished or dared to make a public avowal of scepticism – in 1763 the seventy-year-old schoolmaster, Peter Annet, was imprisoned and stocked for translating Voltaire and for publishing ‘free-thinking’ tracts in popular form, while shortly afterwards the sceptical Robin Hood debating society was closed down. It was from Socinian or Unitarian positions that liberal principles were argued: the famous figures are Dr Price, whose Observations on Civil Liberty (1776) at the time of the American War achieved the remarkable sale of 60,000 within a few months, and who lived to enrage Burke by his sermon in welcome to the French Revolution; Dr Priestley himself; and a score of lesser figures, several of whom – Thomas Cooper of Bolton and William Frend of Cambridge – took an active part in the reform agitation of the 1790s.1
So far the story seems clear. But this is deceptive. These liberal notions prevailed widely among dissenting clergy, teachers, and educated city communities. But many of the ministers had left their congregations behind. It was the Presbyterian Church, in which the impulse to Unitarianism was most strongly felt, which was declining in strength most markedly in relation to other dissenting groups. In the mid-eighteenth century the Presbyterians and the Independents (taken together) were strongest in the south-west (Devonshire, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Hampshire, Somerset, Wiltshire), in the industrial north (notably Lancashire, Northumberland and Yorkshire), in London, and in East Anglia (notably Essex and Suffolk). The Baptists contested some of these strongholds, and were also well-rooted in Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Kent, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. Thus the Presbyterians and Independents would appear to have been strongest in the commercial and wool manufacturing centres, while the Baptists held ground in areas where petty tradesmen, small farmers and rural labourers must have made up a part of their congregations.1 It was in the greatest of the older woollen centres, the West Country, that the broad-minded, ‘rational’ religion which tended towards the denial of Christ’s divinity and to Unitarianism both made its most rapid advances and lost it the allegiance of its congregations. In Devonshire, by the end of the eighteenth century, more than twenty Presbyterian meeting-houses had been closed, and the historians of Dissent, writing in 1809, declared:
Devonshire, the cradle of arianism, has been the grave of the arian dissenters; and there is not left in that populous county a twentieth part of the presbyterians who were to be found at the time of her birth.2
But elsewhere the story was different. In matters of church organization the dissenting sects often carried the principles of self-government and of local autonomy to the borders of anarchy. Any centralized authority – even consultation and association between churches – was seen as ‘productive of the great anti-christian apostasy’,
An apostasy so fatal to the civil and religious liberties of mankind, and particularly to those of the brave old puritans and nonconformists, that the very words synod and session, council and canon, yet make both the ears of a sound Protestant Dissenter to tingle.1
Where the Calvinist tradition was strong, as in parts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, the congregations fought back against the drift towards Unitarianism; and stubborn deacons, trustees and Obadiahs tormented the lives of their ministers, investigating their heresies, expelling them or breaking away to form more righteous sects. (Thomas Hardy gained some of his first experiences of organization in the factional struggles of the Presbyterian congregation in Crown Court, off Russell Street.) But what of ‘Christ’s poor’, to whom Dr Price offered enlightenment and Deacon Priestley loads of wheat? The Spen Valley lay at the centre of a thickly populated and expanding manufacturing district – here one might have expected the dissenting churches to have reaped at last the reward for their endurance in the years of persecution. And yet ‘Christ’s poor’ seemed little touched by either the Established Church or old Dissent. ‘A wilder people I never saw in England.’ John Wesley noted in his Journal, when he rode through near-by Huddersfield in 1757; ‘the men, women, and children filled the street as we rode along, and appeared just ready to devour us.’
The rational Christianity of the Unitarians, with its preference for ‘candour’ and its distrust of ‘enthusiasm’, appealed to some of the tradesmen and shopkeepers of London, and to similar groups in the large cities. But it seemed too cold, too distant, too polite, and too much associated with the comfortable values of a prospering class to appeal to the city or village poor. Its very language and tone served as a barrier: ‘No other preaching will do for Yorkshire,’ John Nelson told Wesley, ‘but the old sort that comes like a thunderclap upon the conscience. Fine preaching does more harm than good here.’ And yet old Calvinism had erected its own barriers which inhibited any evangelistic zeal. The persecuted sect only too easily made a virtue of its own exclusiveness, and this in turn reinforced the hardest tenets of Calvinist dogma. ‘Election,’ ran one article of the Savoy Confession (1658), ‘was not out of the corrupt lump or mass of mankind foreseen.’ ‘Christ’s poor’ and the ‘corrupt lump’ were of course the same people: from another aspect the ‘wildness’ of the poor was a sign that they lived outwith the bounds of grace. The Calvinist elect tended to narrow into a kinship group.
And there were other reasons for this process. Some go right back to the defeat of the Levellers in the Commonwealth. When the millennial hopes for a rule of the Saints were dashed to the ground, there followed a sharp dissociation between the temporal and spiritual aspirations of the poor man’s Puritanism. Already in 1654, before the Restoration, the General Association of the General Baptists issued a manifesto (aimed at the Fifth Monarchy men in their midst) declaring that they did not ‘know any ground for the saints, as such, to expect that the Rule and Government of the World should be put into their hands’ until the Last Judgement. Until such time it was their portion ‘patiently to suffer from the world… than anywhere to attain the Rule of Government thereof’.1 At the end of the Commonwealth, the rebellious tradition of Antinomianism ‘curved back from all its claims’. Where the ardent sectaries had been zealous – indeed, ruthless – social gardeners, they were now content to say: ‘let the tares (if tares) alone with the wheat…’2 Gerrard Winstanley, the Digger, helps us to understand the movement of feeling, turning away from the ‘kingdom without’ to the ‘kingdom within’:
The living soul and the creating spirit are not one, but divided, the one looking after a kingdom without him, the other drawing him to look and wait for a kingdom within him, which moth and rust doth not corrupt and thieves cannot break through and steal. This is a kingdom that will abide, the outward kingdom must be taken from you.3
An understanding of this withdrawal – and of what was preserved despite the withdrawal – is crucial to an understanding of the eighteenth century and of a continuing element in later working-class politics. In one sense, the change can be seen in the different associations called up by two words: the positive energy of Puritanism, the self-preserving retreat of Dissent. But we must also see the way in which the resolution of the sects to ‘patiently suffer from the world’ while abstaining from the hope of attaining to its ‘Rule and Government’ enabled them to combine political quietism with a kind of slumbering Radicalism – preserved in the imagery of sermons and tracts and in democratic form of organization – which might, in any more hopeful context, break into fire once more. We might expect to find this most marked among the Quakers and the Baptists. By the 1790s, however, the Quakers – who numbered fewer than 20,000 in the United Kingdom – seem little like a sect which once contained such men as Lilbourne, Fox and Penn. They had prospered too much: had lost some of their most energetic spirits in successive emigrations to America: their hostility to State, and authority had diminished to formal symbols – the refusal to swear oath or to bare the head: the continuing tradition, at its best, gave more to the social conscience of the middle class than to the popular movement. In the mid-century there were still humble congregations like that which met in the meeting-house in Cage Lane, Thetford – adjoining the gaol, with its pillory and stocks – where young Tom Paine received (by his own avowal) ‘an exceeding good moral education’. But few Quakers seem to have come forward when Paine, in 1791, combined some of their own notions of service to humanity with the intransigent tone of Rights of Man. In 1792 the Yorkshire Quarterly Meeting of Friends urged on its members ‘true quietude of mind’ in the ‘state of unsettlement which at present exists in our nation’. They should not unite in political associations, nor should they promote ‘a spirit of disaffection to the King and to the Government under which we live and enjoy many privileges and favours which merit our grateful subjection thereto’.1
Their forebears had not accepted subjection, nor would they have admitted the word grateful. The tension between the kingdoms ‘without’ and ‘within’ implied a rejection of the ruling powers except at points where coexistence was inevitable: and much nice argument had once turned on what was ‘lawful’ to the conscience and what was not. The Baptists, perhaps, showed the greatest consistency: and they remained most Calvinist in their theology and most plebeian in their following. And it is above all in Bunyan that we find the slumbering Radicalism which was preserved through the eighteenth century and which breaks out again and again in the nineteenth. Pilgrim’s Progress is, with Rights of Man, one of the two foundation texts of the English working-class movement: Bunyan and Paine, with Cobbett and Owen, contributed most to the stock of ideas and attitudes which make up the raw material of the movement from 1790–1850. Many thousands of youths found in Pilgrim’s Progress their first adventure story, and would have agreed with Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, that it was their ‘book of books’.1
‘I seek an inheritance incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away… laid up in heaven, and safe there… to be bestowed, at the time appointed, on them that diligently seek it. Read it so, if you will, in my book.’ Here is Winstanley’s kingdom which ‘moth and rust doth not corrupt’, here is the other-worldly millennium of the Saints, who must ‘patiently suffer from’ this world. Here is the ‘lamentable cry’ – ‘What shall I do?’ – of those who lost at Putney, and who had no share in the settlement of 1688. Here is Old Man P O P E, whom Christian feels that his forebears have tamed, and who has now ‘grown so crazy and stiff in his joints’, that he can do little but sit in his cave’s mouth, saying to the pilgrims – ‘You will never mend till more of you be burned’ – ‘grinning… as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.’ Here is the inner spiritual landscape of the poor man’s Dissent – of the ‘tailors, leather-sellers, soap-boilers, brewers, weavers and tinkers’ who were among Baptist preachers 2 – a landscape seeming all the more lurid, suffused with passionate energy and conflict, from the frustration of these passions in the outer world: Beelzebub’s Castle, the giants Bloody-man, Maul, and Slay-good, the Hill Difficulty, Doubting Castle, Vanity Fair, the Enchanted Ground; a way ‘full of snares, pits, traps, and gins’. Here are Christian’s aristocratic enemies – ‘the Lord Carnal Delight, the Lord Luxurious, the Lord Desire of Vain Glory, my old Lord Lechery, Sir Having Greedy, with all the rest of our nobility’. And here is the Valley of Humiliation in which Bunyan’s readers were to be found: ‘a Valley that nobody walks in, but those that love a pilgrim’s life’. It is MERCY who says:
I love to be in such places where there is no rattling with coaches, nor rumbling with wheels; methinks, here one may, without much molestation, be thinking what he is, whence he came, what he has done… here one may think, and break at heart, and melt in one’s spirit, until one’s eyes become like ‘the fishpools of Heshbon’.
And it is GREAT-HEART who replies, with the spiritual pride of the persecuted and unsuccessful: ‘It is true… I have gone through this Valley many a time, and never was better than when here.’
But the world of the spirit – of righteousness and spiritual liberty – is constantly under threat from the other world. First, it is threatened by the powers of the State: when we encounter APOLLYON we seem to be in a world of fantasy:
He was clothed with scales, like a fish (and they are his pride), he had wings like a dragon, feet like a bear, and out of his belly came fire and smoke…
But when this monster turns upon CHRISTIAN (‘with a disdainful countenance’) he turns out to be very like the perplexed country magistrates who tried, with alternating arguments and threats, to make Bunyan promise to desist from field-preaching. APOLLYON, opens his mouth – which was ‘as the mouth of a lion’ – for a very muted roar: ‘I am willing to pass by all, if now thou wilt yet turn again and go back.’ Only when persuasion has failed does he straddle ‘over the whole breadth of the way’ and declare: ‘I swear by my infernal den, that thou shalt go no further.’ And it is APOLLYON’S subtlety which enables him to find allies among CHRISTIAN’S own company and fellow pilgrims. These – and they are by far the most numerous and deceptive – are the second source of threat to CHRISTIAN’S incorruptible inheritance; one by one, Bunyan brings forward all the slippery arguments of comfort and compromise preparing the way for an accommodation between APOLLYON and Dissent. There is Mr By-ends of Fair-Speech: and Mr Hold-the-world, Mr Money-love, and Mr Save-all, all pupils of ‘a schoolmaster in Love-gain, which is a market town in the county of Coveting, in the north’. It is Mr By-ends who condemns those ‘that are righteous overmuch’:
BY-ENDS: Why, they… rush on their journey all weathers; and I am for waiting for wind and tide. They are for hazarding all for God at a clap; and I am for taking all advantages to secure my life and estate. They are for holding their notions, though all other men are against them; but I am for religion in what, and so far as the times, and my safety will bear it. They are for religion when in rags and contempt; but I am for him when he walks in his golden slippers, in the sunshine, with applause.
MR HOLD-THE-WORLD: Aye, and hold you there still, good Mr By-Ends…. Let us be wise as serpents; it is best to make hay when the sun shines…
MR SAVE-ALL: I think that we are all agreed in this matter, and therefore there needs no more words about it
MR MONEY-LOVE: No, there needs no more words about this matter, indeed; for he that believes neither Scripture nor reason (and you see we have both on our side), neither knows his own liberty, nor seeks his own safety.
It is a splendid passage, foreshadowing so much in the development of eighteenth-century Dissent. Bunyan knew that in a sense Mr By-end’s friends did have both Scripture and reason on their side: he worked into his apologia the arguments of security, comfort, enlightenment and liberty. What they have lost is their moral integrity and their compassion; the incorruptible inheritance of the spirit, it seems, could not be preserved if the inheritance of struggle was forgotten.
This is not all that Pilgrim’s Progress is about. As Weber noted, the ‘basic atmosphere’ of the book is one in which ‘the after-life was not only more important, but in many ways also more certain, than all the interests of life in this world’.1 And this reminds us that faith in a life to come served not only as a consolation to the poor but also as some emotional compensation for present sufferings and grievances: it was possible not only to imagine the ‘reward’ of the humble but also to enjoy some revenge upon their oppressors, by imagining their torments to come. Moreover, in stressing the positives in Bunyan’s imagery we have said little of the obvious negatives – the unction, the temporal submissiveness, the egocentric pursuit of personal salvation – with which they are inseparably intermingled; and this ambivalence continues in the language of humble Nonconformity far into the eighteenth century. The story seemed to Bamford to be ‘mournfully soothing, like that of a light coming from an eclipsed sun’. When the context is hopeful and mass agitations arise, the active energies of the tradition are most apparent: Christian does battle with Apollyon in the real world. In times of defeat and mass apathy, quietism is in the ascendant, reinforcing the fatalism of the poor: Christian suffers in the Valley of Humiliation, far from the rattling of coaches, turning his back on the City of Destruction and seeking the way to a spiritual City of Zion.
Moreover, Bunyan, in his fear of the erosion of the inheritance by compromise, added to the forbidding Puritan joylessness his own figurative portrayal of the ‘straight and narrow’ path, which emphasized the jealous sectarianism of the Calvinist elect. By 1750 those very sects which had sought to be most loyal to ‘Christ’s poor’ were least welcoming to new converts, least evangelistic in temper. Dissent was caught in the tension between opposing tendencies, both of which led away from any popular appeal: on the other hand, the tendency towards rational humanitarianism and fine preaching – too intellectual and genteel for the poor; on the other hand, the rigid Elect, who might not marry outside the church, who expelled all back-sliders and heretics, and who stood apart from the ‘corrupt mass’ predestined to be damned. ‘The Calvinism of the former,’ Halévy noted, ‘was undergoing decomposition, the Calvinism of the latter petrification.’1
Even Bunyan’s Baptists were deeply divided in this way, the ‘Arminian’ General Baptists losing ground to the zealously Calvinist Particular Baptists (with their strongholds in Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire) whose very Calvinism, however, prevented the progagation of the sect.2 It was not until 1770 that the Particular Baptists began to break out of the trap of their own dogma, issuing a circular letter (from Northamptonshire) which offered a formula by which evangelism and the notion of election might be reconciled: ‘Every soul that comes to Christ to be saved… is to be encouraged… The coming soul need not fear that he is not elected, for none but such would be willing to come.’ But the revival was slow; and it was competition with the Methodists, rather than an inner dynamic, which drove the Baptists back to the poor. When, in the 1760s, Dan Taylor, a Yorkshire collier who had worked in the pit from the age of five and who had been converted by the Methodists, looked around for a Baptist sect with an evangelistic temper, he could find nothing that suited. He built his own meeting-house, digging the stone out of the moors above Hebden Bridge and carrying it on his own back;3 then he walked down from the weaving township of Heptonstall (a Puritan stronghold during the Civil War) to Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, making contact with restive Baptist groups, and finally forming (in 1770) the Baptist New Connexion. Travelling in the next years 25,000 miles and preaching 20,000 sermons he is a man to be remembered by the side of Wesley and Whitefield; but he came from neither the Particular nor the General Baptist societies: spiritually, perhaps, he came from Bunyan’s inheritance, but literally he just came out of the ground.
We should remember both Dr Price and Dan Taylor; and we should recall that they did enjoy liberty of conscience, they were not threatened by the Inquisition or the dungeon of the ‘Scarlet Whore of Babylon’.1 The very anarchy of Old Dissent, with its self-governing churches and its schisms, meant that the most unexpected and unorthodox ideas might suddenly appear – in a Lincolnshire village, a Midlands market-town, a Yorkshire pit. In the Somerset woollen town of Frome (Wesley noted in his Journal in 1768) there was ‘a mixture of men of all opinions, Anabaptists, Quakers, Presbyterians, Arians, Antinomians, Moravians and what not’. Scottish tradesmen and artisans brought other sects into England; in the last decades of the eighteenth century the Glasites or Sandemanians made a little headway with their zealous church discipline, their belief that the ‘distinctions of civil life [were] annihilated in the church’ and that membership implied some community of goods, and – in the view of critics – their inordinate spiritual pride and ‘neglect of the poor, ignorant, perishing multitude’.2 By the end of the century, there were Sandemanian societies in London, Nottingham, Liverpool, Whitehaven and Newcastle.
The intellectual history of Dissent is made up of collisions, schisms, mutations; and one feels often that the dormant seeds of political Radicalism lie within it, ready to germinate whenever planted in a beneficent and hopeful social context Thomas Spence, who was brought up in a Sandemanian family, delivered a lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775 which contained in outline his whole doctrine of agrarian Socialism; and yet it was not until the 1790s that he commenced his serious public propaganda. Tom Paine, with his Quaker background, had shown little sign of his outrageously heterodox political views during his humdrum life as an exciseman at Lewes; the context was hopeless, politics seemed a mere species of ‘jockeyship’. Within one year of his arrival in America (November 1774) he had published Common Sense and the Crisis articles which contain all the assumptions of Rights of Man. ‘I have an aversion to monarchy, as being too debasing to the dignity of man,’ he wrote. ‘But I never troubled others with my notions till very lately, nor ever published a syllable in England in my life.’ What had changed was not Paine, but the context in which he wrote. The seed of Rights of Man was English: but only the hope brought by the American and French Revolutions enabled it to strike.
If some sect of Old Dissent had set the pace of the evangelical revival – instead of John Wesley – then nineteenth-century Nonconformity might have assumed a more intellectual and democratic form. But it was Wesley – High Tory in politics, sacerdotal in his approach to organization – who first reached ‘Christ’s poor’, breaking the Calvinist taboo with the simple message: ‘You have nothing to do but save souls.’
Outcasts of men, to you I call,
Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!
He spreads his arms to embrace you all;
Sinners alone His grace receives:
No need for him the righteous have;
He came the lost to seek and save.
Come, O my guilty brethren, come,
Groaning beneath your load of sin!
His bleeding heart shall make you room,
His open side shall take you in;
He calls you now, invites you home:
Come, O my guilty brethren, come.
There is, of course, a certain logic in the fact that the evangelical revival should have come from within the Established Church. The Puritan emphasis upon a ‘calling’ was, as Weber and Tawney have shown, particularly well adapted to the experience of prospering and industrious middle class or petty bourgeois groups. The more Lutheran traditions of Anglican Protestantism were less adapted to exclusive doctrines of ‘election’; while as the established Church it had a peculiar charge over the souls of the poor – indeed, the duty to inculcate in them the virtues of obedience and industry. The lethargy and materialism of the eighteenth-century Church were such that, in the end and against Wesley’s wishes, the evangelical revival resulted in the distinct Methodist Church. And yet Methodism was profoundly marked by its origin; the poor man’s Dissent of Bunyan, of Dan Taylor, and – later – of the Primitive Methodists was a religion of the poor; orthodox Wesleyanism remained as it had commenced, a religion for the poor.
As preachers and evangelists, Whitefield and other early field-preachers were more impressive than Wesley. But it was Wesley who was the superlatively energetic and skilful organizer, administrator, and law-giver. He succeeded in combining in exactly the right proportions democracy and discipline, doctrine and emotionalism; his achievement lay not so much in the hysterical revivalist meetings (which were not uncommon in the century of Tyburn) but in the organization of self-sustaining Methodist societies in trading and market centres, and in mining, weaving, and labouring communities, the democratic participation of whose members in the life of the Church was both enlisted and strictly superintended and disciplined. He facilitated entry to these societies by sweeping away all barriers of sectarian doctrines. In order to gain admission, he wrote, Methodists
do not impose… any opinions whatever. Let them hold particular or general redemption, absolute or conditional decrees; let them be Churchmen or Dissenters, Presbyterians or Independents, it is no obstacle…. The Independent or Anabaptist [may] use his own mode of worship; so may the Quaker, and none will contend with him about it…. One condition, and one only, is required, – a real desire to save their souls.1
But once within the Methodist societies, the converted were subjected to a discipline which challenges comparison with the more zealous Calvinist sects. Wesley wished the Methodists to be a ‘peculiar people’; to abstain from marriage outside the societies; to be distinguished by their dress and by the gravity of their speech and manners; to avoid the company even of relatives who were still in ‘Satan’s kingdom’. Members were expelled for levity, for profanity and swearing, for lax attendance at class meetings. The societies, with their confessional band-meetings, classes, watch-nights and visiting, made up a lay order within which, as Southey noted, there was a ‘spiritual police’ constantly alert for any sign of relapse.1 The ‘grass roots’ democracy, by which the societies were officered by tradesmen and working people, extended not at all to matters of doctrine or Church government. In nothing did Wesley break more sharply with the traditions of Dissent than in his opposition to local autonomy, and in the authoritarian rule of himself and of his nominated ministers.
And yet it was often in areas with a long Dissenting tradition – Bristol, the West Riding, Manchester, Newcastle – that Methodism made most rapid headway among the poor. In the 1760s, two miles from Heckmondwike, where Deacon Priestley and Obadiah were still supporting a church of Calvinist Independents, John Nelson, a Birstall stone-mason, was already drawing great congregations of clothing workers and miners to hear the new message of personal salvation. On his way to work at the quarry Nelson would pass the old Dissenting minister’s house, exchange texts, and argue the doctrines of sin, redemption by grace and predestination. (Such disputations became more rare in later years as orthodox Methodist theology became more opportunist, anti-intellectual, and otiose.) Nelson had been converted while in London, when hearing John Wesley preach in Moorfields. His Journal is very different from that of Deacon Priestley:
One night… I dreamed that I was in Yorkshire, in my working clothes going home; and as I went by Paul Champion’s, I heard a mighty cry, as of a multitude of people in distress…. All on a sudden they began to scream and tumble over one another; I asked, what was the matter; and they told me, Satan was let loose among them…. Then I thought I saw him in the shape of a red bull, running through the people, as a beast runs through the standing corn, yet did not offer to gore any of them, but made directly at me, as if he would run his horns into my heart. Then I cried out, ‘Lord, help me!’ and immediately caught him by the horns, and twisted him on his back, setting my right foot on his neck, in the presence of a thousand people…
From this dream he awoke perspiring and exhausted. On another night ‘my soul was filled with such a sense of God’s love, as made me weep before him’:
I dreamed I was in Yorkshire, going from Gomersal-Hill-Top to Cleckheaton; and about the middle of the lane, I thought I saw Satan coming to meet me in the shape of a tall, black man, and the hair of his head like snakes;… But I went on, ript open my clothes, and shewed him my naked breast, saying, ‘See, here is the blood of Christ.’ Then I thought he fled from me as fast as a hare could run.
John Nelson was very much in earnest. He was pressed into the Army, refused to serve, he and his wife were mobbed and stoned in their work. But it occurs to one, nevertheless, that Nelson’s Satan belongs more to a world of fantasy than Bunyan’s Apollyon, for all the latter’s fire and scales. And the fantasy has undertones of hysteria and of impaired or frustrated sexuality which – along with the paroxysms which often accompanied conversion1 – are among the hallmarks of the Methodist revival. Where Bunyan disclosed the challenge of Apollyon in a world of magistrates, backsliders and worldly excuses for compromise, this Methodist Satan is a disembodied force located somewhere in the psyche, discovered through introspection or springing forward as a phallic image opposed to the feminine imagery of Christ’s love in the gusts of mass hysteria which climaxed revivalist campaigns.
From one aspect this Satan may be seen as an emanation of the misery and despair of the eighteenth-century poor; from another we may see the energies thwarted of effective outlet in social life and constricted by the life-denying tenets of Puritanism taking a monstrous revenge on the human spirit. We can see Methodism as a mutation of that tradition which reaches back to the seventeenth-century ‘Ranters’, whose cousins the Moravians so deeply influenced Wesley. But the cult of ‘Love’ was brought to a point of poise between the affirmations of ‘social religion’ and the pathological aberrations of frustrated social and sexual impulses. On the one hand, genuine compassion for ‘harlots, and publicans, and thieves’: on the other hand, morbid preoccupation with sin and with the sinner’s confessional. On one hand, real remorse for real wrong-doing: on the other, luxuriating refinements of introspective guilt. On one hand, the genuine fellowship of some early Methodist societies: on the other, social energies denied outlet in public life which were released in sanctified emotional onanism. On one hand, a religion which found a place for humble men, as local preachers and class leaders, which taught them to read and gave them self-respect and experience in speaking and in organization: on the other hand, a religion hostile to intellectual enquiry and to artistic values, which sadly abused their intellectual trust. Here was a cult of ‘Love’ which feared love’s effective expression, either as sexual love or in any social form which might irritate relations with Authority. Its authentic language of devotion was that of sexual sublimation streaked through with masochism: the ‘bleeding love’, the wounded side, the blood of the Lamb:
Teach me from every pleasing snare
To keep the issues of my heart.
Be Thou my Love, my Joy, my Fear!
Thou my Eternal Portion art.
Be Thou my never-failing Friend,
And love, O love me to the end.
In London a Jacobin engraver went to the ‘Garden of Love’ and found ‘a Chapel… built in the midst,/Where I used to play on the green’:
And the gates of this Chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door…
In the Garden were ‘tomb-stones where flowers should be’:
And Priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys & desires.
So much has been said, in recent years, of Methodism’s positive contribution to the working-class movement that it is necessary to remind ourselves that Blake and Cobbett, Leigh Hunt and Hazlitt, saw the matter differently. We might suppose, from some popular accounts, that Methodism was no more than a nursing-ground for Radical and trade union organizers, all formed in the image of the Tolpuddle martyr, George Loveless, with his ‘small theological library’ and his forthright independence. The matter is a great deal more complex. At one level the reactionary – indeed, odiously subservient – character of official Wesleyanism can be established without the least difficulty. Wesley’s few active interventions into politics included pamphleteering against Dr Price and the American colonists. He rarely let pass any opportunity to impress upon his followers the doctrines of submission, expressed less at the level of ideas than of superstition.1 His death (1791) coincided with the early enthusiasm for the French Revolution; but successive Methodist Conferences continued the tradition of their founder, reaffirming their ‘unfeigned loyalty to the King and sincere attachment to the Constitution’ (Leeds Conference, 1793). The statutes drawn up in the year after Wesley’s death were explicit: ‘None of us shall either in writing or in conversation speak lightly or irreverently of the Government.’2
Thus, at this level Methodism appears as a politically regressive, or ‘stabilizing’, influence, and we find some confirmation of Halévy’s famous thesis that Methodism prevented revolution in England in the 1790s. But, at another level, we are familiar with the argument that Methodism was indirectly responsible for a growth in the self-confidence and capacity for organization of working people. This argument was stated, as early as 1820, by Southey:
Perhaps the manner in which Methodism has familiarized the lower classes to the work of combining in associations, making rules for their own governance, raising funds, and communicating from one part of the kingdom to another, may be reckoned among the incidental evils which have resulted from it…
And, more recently, it has been documented in Dr Wearmouth’s interesting books; although readers of them will do well to remember Southey’s important qualification – ‘but in this respect it has only facilitated a process to which other causes had given birth’.1 Most of the ‘contributions’ of Methodism to the working-class movement came in spite of and not because of the Wesleyan Conference.
Indeed, throughout the early history of Methodism we can see a shaping democratic spirit which struggled against the doctrines and the organizational forms which Wesley imposed. Lay preachers, the break with the Established Church, self-governing forms within the societies – on all these questions Wesley resisted or temporized or followed after the event. Wesley could not escape the consequences of his own spiritual egalitarianism. If Christ’s poor came to believe that their souls were as good as aristocratic or bougeois souls then it might lead them on to the arguments of the Rights of Man. The Duchess of Buckingham was quick to spot this, and observed to the Methodist Countess of Huntingdon:
I Thank Your Ladyship for the information concerning the Methodist preachers; their doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their Superiors, in perpetually endeavouring to level all ranks and to do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth.2
Smollett had pointed out much the same thing, in the high comedy of a coachman, Humphrey Clinker, preaching to the London rabble. And – for their part – hundreds of lay preachers who followed in John Nelson’s footsteps were learning this in a very different way. Again and again Establishment writers voice this fear. An anti-Jacobin pamphleteer, in 1800, laid blame upon the ‘beardless boys, and mechanics or labourers’ who preached in Spa Fields, Hackney, and Islington Green. Among the preachers of the sects he found a Dealer in Old Clothes, a Grinder, a Sheep’s-Head Seller, a Coach-painter, a Mangle-maker, a Footman, a Tooth-drawer, a Peruke-maker and Phlebotomist, a Breeches-maker, and a Coal-heaver. The Bishop of Lincoln saw in this a darker threat: ‘the same means might, with equal efficacy, be employed to sap and overturn the state, as well as the church’.1
And from preaching to organization. There are two questions here: the temporary permeation of Methodism by some of the self-governing traditions of Dissent, and the transmission to working-class societies of forms of organization peculiar to the Methodist Connexion. For the first, Wesley did not only (as is sometimes supposed) take his message to ‘heathen’ outside the existing churches; he also offered an outlet for the landlocked emotions of Old Dissent. There were Dissenting ministers, and whole congregations, who joined the Methodists. Some passed through the revival, only to rejoin their own sects in disgust at Wesley’s authoritarian government; while by the 1790s Dissent was enjoying its own evangelistic revival. But others maintained a somewhat restive membership, in which their older traditions struggled within the sacerdotal Wesleyan forms. For the second, Methodism provided not only the forms of the class meeting, the methodical collection of penny subscriptions and the ‘ticket’, so frequently borrowed by radical and trade union organizations, but also an experience of efficient centralized organization – at district as well as national level – which Dissent had lacked. (Those Wesleyan Annual Conferences, with their ‘platform’, their caucuses at work on the agendas, and their careful management, seem uncomfortably like another ‘contribution’ to the Labour movement of more recent times.)
Thus late eighteenth-century Methodism was troubled by alien democratic tendencies within itself, while at the same time it was serving despite itself as a model of other organizational forms. During the last decade of Wesley’s life internal democratic pressures were restrained only by reverence for the founder’s great age – and by the belief that the old autocrat could not be far from entering upon his ‘great reward’. There were a score of demands being voiced in dissident societies: for an elected Conference, for greater local autonomy, for the final break with the Church, for lay participation in district and quarterly meetings. Wesley’s death, when the general radical tide was rising, was like a ‘signal gun’. Rival schemes of organization were canvassed with a heat which is as significant as were the matters under dispute. ‘We detest the conduct of persecuting Neros, and all the bloody actions of the great Whore of Babylon, and yet in our measure, we tread in their steps,’ declared Alexander Kilham in a pamphlet entitled The Progress of Liberty.1 And he set forward far-reaching proposals for self-government, which were canvassed throughout the Connexion, by means of pamphlets, and in class meetings and local preachers’ meetings, and whose discussion must itself have been an important part of the process of democratic education.2
In 1797 Kilham led the first important Wesleyan secession, the Methodist New Connexion, which adopted many of his proposals for a more democratic structure. The greatest strength of the Connexion was in manufacturing centres, and (it is probable) among the artisans and weavers tinged with Jacobinism.3 Kilham himself sympathized with the reformers, and although his political convictions were kept in the background, his opponents in the orthodox Connexion were at pains to bring them forward. ‘We shall lose all the turbulent disturbers of our Zion,’ the Conference addressed the members of the Church in Ireland, when accounting for the secession: ‘all who have embraced the sentiments of Paine…’ In Huddersfield the members of the New Connexion were known as the ‘Tom Paine Methodists’. We may guess at the complexion of his following from an account of the principal Kilhamite chapel in Leeds, with a congregation of 500 ‘in the midst of a dense, poor, and unruly population, at the top of Ebeneezer Street where strangers of the middle class could not reasonably be expected to go’. And in several places the link between the New Connexion and actual Jacobin organization is more than a matter of inference. In Halifax, at the Bradshaw chapel, a reading club and debating society was formed. The people of this weaving village discussed in their class meetings not only Kilham’s Progress of Liberty but also Paine’s Rights of Man. Writing forty years later, the historian of Halifax Methodism still could not restrain his abomination of ‘that detestable knot of scorpions’ who, in the end, captured the chapel, excluded the orthodox circuit minister, bought the site, and continued it as a ‘Jacobin’ chapel of their own.1
The progress of the New Connexion was unspectacular. Kilham himself died in 1798, and his following was weakened by the general political reaction of the later 1790s. By 1811 the New Connexion could claim only 8,000 members. But its existence leads one to doubt Halévy’s thesis. On Wesley’s death it was estimated that about 80,000 people made up the Methodist societies. Even if we suppose that every one of them shared the Tory principles of their founder, this was scarcely sufficient to have stemmed a revolutionary tide. In fact, whatever Annual Conferences resolved, there is evidence that the Radical groundswell of 1792 and 1793 extended through Dissent generally and into most Methodist societies. The Mayor of Liverpool may have shown sound observation when he wrote to the Home Office in 1792:
In all these places are nothing but Methodist and other Meeting houses and… thus the Youth of the Countery are training up under the Instruction of a Set of Men not only Ignorant, but whom I believe we have of late too Much Reason to imagine, are inimical to Our Happy Constitution.1
It was in the counter-revolutionary years after 1795 that Methodism made the most headway amongst working people and acted most evidently as a stabilizing or regressive social force. Drained of its more democratic and intellectual elements by the Kilhamite secession, and subjected to severer forms of discipline, it appears during these years almost as a new phenomenon – and as one which may be seen as the consequence of political reaction as much as it was a cause. 2
Throughout the whole period of the Industrial Revolution, Methodism never overcame this tension between authoritarian and democratic tendencies. It is in the seceding sects – the New Connexion and (after 1806) the Primitive Methodists – that the second impulse was felt most strongly. Moreover, as Dr Hobsbawm has pointed out, wherever Methodism was found it performed, in its rupture with the Established Church, certain of the functions of anti-clericalism in nineteenth-century France.3 In the agricultural or mining village, the polarization of chapel and Church might facilitate a polarization which took political or industrial forms. For years the tension might seem to be contained; but when it did break out it was sometimes charged with a moral passion – where the old Puritan God of Battles raised his banners once again – which secular leaders could rarely touch. So long as Satan remained undefined and of no fixed class abode, Methodism condemned working people to a kind of moral civil war – between the chapel and the pub, the wicked and the redeemed, the lost and the saved. Samuel Bamford related in his Early Days the missionary zeal with which he and his companions would tramp to prayer-meetings in neighbouring villages ‘where Satan had as yet many strongholds’. ‘These prayers were looked upon as so many assaults on “the powers of the Prince of the Air”.’ (A similar zeal inspired, on the other side of the Pennines, the notable hymn: ‘On Bradford likewise look Thou down, Where Satan keeps his seat.’) Only a few years later Cobbett had taught the weavers of upland Lancashire to look for Satan, not in the ale-houses of a rival village, but in ‘the Thing’ and Old Corruption. It was such a swift identification of Apollyon with Lord Liverpool and Oliver the Spy which led the weavers to Peterloo.
Two other features of the Dissenting tradition should be noted. While neither was of great influence in the eighteenth century, both assumed new significance after 1790. In the first place, there is a continuous thread of communitarian ideas and experiments, associated with the Quakers, Camisards, and in particular the Moravians. It was in Bolton and Manchester that a ferment in a small group of dissident Quakers culminated in the departure, in 1774, of ‘Mother Ann’ and a small party to found the first Shaker communities in the United States; forty years later Robert Owen was to find encouragement in the success of the Shakers, whose ideas he popularized in secular form. 1 The Moravians, to whom Wesley owed his conversion, never became fully naturalized in England in the eighteenth century. Although many English people entered their communities at Fulneck (Pudsey), and Dukinfield and Fairfield (near Manchester), as well as the Moravian congregation in London, the societies remained dependent upon German preachers and administrators. While the first Methodist societies arose in association with the Moravian Brotherhood, the latter were distinguished from the former by their ‘stillness’, their avoidance of enthusiasm’, and their practical communitarian values; ‘the calm, soft, steady, sweet and impressive character of the service [at Fulneck] was such as appeared as a kind of rebuke to the earnestness, noise, and uproar of a [Methodist] revival meeting’. The influence of the Moravians was three-fold: first, through their educational activities – Richard Oastler and James Montgomery (the Radical poet and editor of the Sheffield Iris) were educated at Fulneck; second, through the evident success of their communities, which – along with those of the Shakers – were often cited by early nineteenth-century Owenites; and third, through the perpetuation within the Methodist societies – long after Wesley had disowned the Moravian connection – of the yearning for communitarian ideals expressed in the language of ‘brotherhood’ and ‘sisterhood’.1
The communitarian tradition was sometimes found in association with another underground tradition, that of millennarianism. The wilder sectaries of the English Revolution – Ranters and Fifth Monarchy Men – were never totally extinguished, with their literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation and their anticipations of a New Jerusalem descending from above. The Muggletonians (or followers of Ludovic Muggleton) were still preaching in the fields and parks of London at the end of the eighteenth century. The Bolton society from which the Shakers originated was presided over by Mother Jane Wardley who paced the meeting-room ‘with a mighty trembling’, declaiming:
Repent. For the Kingdom of God is at Hand. The new heaven and new earth prophesied of old is about to come…. And when Christ appears again, and the true church rises in full and transcendant glory, then all anti-Christian denominations – the priests, the church, the pope – will be swept away.2
Any dramatic event, such as the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, aroused apocalyptic expectations. There was, indeed, a millennarial instability within the heart of Methodism itself. Wesley, who was credulous to a degree about witches, Satanic possession, and bibliomancy (or the search for guidance from texts opened at random in the Bible), sometimes voiced premonitions as to the imminence of the Day of Judgement. An early hymn of the Wesleys employs the customary millennarial imagery:
Erect Thy tabernacle here,
The New Jerusalem send down,
Thyself amidst Thy saints appear,
And seat us on Thy dazzling throne.
Begin the great millennial day;
Now, Saviour, with a shout descend,
Thy standard in the heavens display,
And bring the joy which ne’er shall end.
Even if literal belief in the millennium was discouraged, the apocalyptic manner of Methodist revival meetings inflamed the imagination and prepared the way for the acceptance of chiliastic prophets after 1790. In London, Bristol and Birmingham small congregations of the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem were preparing some artisans for more intellectual and mystical millennarial beliefs.1
Although historians and sociologists have recently given more attention to millennarial movements and fantasies, their significance has been partly obscured by the tendency to discuss them in terms of maladjustment and ‘paranoia’. Thus Professor Cohn, in his interesting study of The Pursuit of the Millennium, is able – by a somewhat sensational selection of the evidence – to proceed to generalizations as to the paranoiac and megalomaniac notion of ‘the Elect’, and the ‘chronically impaired sense of reality’ of ‘chiliastically minded movements’. When messianic movements gain mass support –
It is as though units of paranoia hitherto diffused through the population suddenly coalesce to form a new entity: a collective paranoiac fanaticism.2
One doubts such a process of ‘coalescence’. Given such a phenomenon, however, the historical problem remains – why should grievances, aspirations, or even psychotic disorders, ‘coalesce’ into influential movements only at certain times and in particular forms?
What we must not do is confuse pure ‘freaks’ and fanatical aberrations with the imagery – of Babylon and the Egyptian exile and the Celestial City and the contest with Satan – in which minority groups have articulated their experience and projected their aspirations for hundreds of years. Moreover, the extravagant imagery used by certain groups does not always reveal their objective motivations and effective assumptions. This is a difficult question; when we speak of ‘imagery’ we mean much more than figures of speech in which ulterior motives were ‘clothed’. The imagery is itself evidence of powerful subjective motivations, fully as ‘real’ as the objective, fully as effective, as we see repeatedly in the history of Puritanism, in their historical agency. It is the sign of how men felt and hoped, loved and hated, and of how they preserved certain values in the very texture of their language. But because the luxuriating imagery points sometimes to goals that are clearly illusory, this does not mean that we can lightly conclude that it indicates a ‘chronically impaired sense of reality’. Moreover, abject ‘adjustment’ to suffering and want at times may indicate a sense of reality as impaired as that of the chiliast. Whenever we encounter such phenomena, we must try to distinguish between the psychic energy stored – and released – in language, however apocalyptic, and actual psychotic disorder.
Throughout the Industrial Revolution we can see this tension between the ‘kingdom without’ and the ‘kingdom within’ in the Dissent of the poor, with chiliasm at one pole, and quietism at the other. For generations the most commonly available education came by way of pulpit and Sunday School, the Old Testament and Pilgrim’s Progress. Between this imagery and that social experience there was a continual interchange – a dialogue between attitudes and reality which was sometimes fruitful, sometimes arid, sometimes masochistic in its submissiveness, but rarely ‘paranoiac’. The history of Methodism suggests that the morbid deformities of ‘sublimation’ are the most common aberrations of the poor in periods of social reaction; while paranoiac fantasies belong more to periods when revolutionary enthusiasms are released. It was in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution that the millennarial current, so long underground, burst into the open with unexpected force:
For the real Chiliast, the present becomes the breach through which what was previously inward bursts out suddenly, takes hold of the outer world and transforms it.1
Image and reality again became confused. Chiliasm touched Blake with its breath: it walked abroad, not only among the Jacobins and Dissenters of artisan London, but in the mining and weaving villages of the Midlands and the north and the villages of the south-west.
But in most minds a balance was held between outer experience and the kingdom within, which the Powers of the World could not touch and which was stored with the evocative language of the Old Testament. Thomas Hardy was a sober, even prosaic, man, with a meticulous attention to the practical detail of organization. But when recalling his own trial for high treason, it seemed the most natural thing in the world that he should draw upon the Book of Kings for the language which most common Englishmen understood:
The people said ‘what portion have we in David? Neither have we inheritance in the son of Jesse. To your tents, O Israel…. So Israel rebelled against the House of David unto this day.’
No easy summary can be offered as to the Dissenting tradition which was one of the elements precipitated in the English Jacobin agitation. It is its diversity which defies generalization and yet which is, in itself, its most important characteristic. In the complexity of competing sects and seceding chapels we have a forcing-bed for the variants of nineteenth-century working-class culture. Here are Unitarians or Independents, with a small but influential artisan following, nurtured in a strenuous intellectual tradition. There are the Sandemanians, among whom William Godwin’s father was a minister; the Moravians with their communitarian heritage; the Inghamites, the Muggletonians, the Swedenborgian sect which originated in a hairdresser’s off Cold Bath Fields and which published a Magazine of Heaven and Hell. Here are the two old Dissenting ministers whom Hazlitt observed stuffing raspberry leaves in their pipes, in the hope of bringing down Old Corruption by boycotting all taxed articles. There are the Calvinist Methodist immigrants from Wales, and immigrants brought up in the Covenanting sects of Scotland – Alexander Somerville, who became a famous anti-Corn Law publicist, was educated as a strict Anti-Burgher in a family of Berwickshire field-labourers. There is the printing-worker, Zachariah Coleman, the beautifully re-created hero of The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, with his portraits of Burdett, Cartwright, and Sadler’s Bunyan on the wall: ‘he was not a ranter or revivalist, but what was called a moderate Calvinist; that is to say, he held to Calvinism as his undoubted creed, but when it came to the push in actual practice he modified it’. And there are curious societies, like the Ancient Deists of Hoxton, who spoke of dreams and (like Blake) of conversations with departed souls and Angels, and who (like Blake) ‘almost immediately yielded to the stronger impulse of the French Revolution’ and became ‘politicians.’1
Liberty of conscience was the one great value which the common people had preserved from the Commonwealth. The countryside was ruled by the gentry, the towns by corrupt corporations, the nation by the corruptest corporation of all: but the chapel, the tavern and the home were their own. In the ‘unsteepled’ places of worship there was room for a free intellectual life and for democratic experiments with ‘members unlimited’. Against the background of London Dissent, with its fringe of deists and earnest mystics, William Blake seems no longer the cranky untutored genius that he must seem to those who know only the genteel culture of the time.2 On the contrary, he is the original yet authentic voice of a long popular tradition. If some of the London Jacobins were strangely unperturbed by the execution of Louis and Marie Antoinette it was because they remembered that their own forebears had once executed a king. No one with Bunyan in their bones could have found many of Blake’s aphorisms strange:
The strongest poison ever known
Came from Caesar’s laurel crown.
And many, like Blake, felt themselves torn between a rational Deism and the spiritual values nurtured for a century in the ‘kingdom within’. When Paine’s Age of Reason was published in the years of repression, many must have felt with Blake when he annotated the final page of the Bishop of Llandaff’s Apology for the Bible (written in reply to Paine):
It appears to me Now that Tom Paine is a better Christian than the Bishop.
When we see Dissent in this way we are seeing it as an intellectual tradition: out of this tradition came many original ideas and original men. But we should not assume that the ‘Old Dissenters’ as a body were willing to take the popular side. Thomas Walker, the Manchester reformer, who – a Church-man himself – had laboured hard for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts – was contemptuous of their timidity:
Dissenters… have as a body constantly fallen short of their own principles;… through fear or some other motive they have been so strongly the advocates of an Overstrained Moderation that they have rather been the enemies than the friends of those who have ventured the most and effected the most for the rights of the people.1
We see here, perhaps, a tension between London and the industrial centres. The Dissenters at Manchester, the members of the Old Meeting at Birmingham or the Great Meeting at Leicester, included some of the largest employers in the district. Their attachment to civil and religious liberty went hand in hand with their attachment to the dogmas of free trade. They contributed a good deal – and especially in the 1770s and 1780s – to forms of extra-parliamentary agitation and pressure-group politics which anticipate the pattern of middle-class politics of the nineteenth century. But their enthusiasm for civil liberty melted away with the publication of Rights of Man and in very few of them did it survive the trials and persecution of the early 1790s. In London, and in pockets in the great cities, many of the Dissenting artisans graduated in the same period from Dissent through Deism to a secular ideology. ‘Secularism,’ Dr Hobsbawm has written,
is the ideological thread which binds London labour history together, from the London Jacobins and Place, through the anti-religious Owenites and cooperators, the anti-religious journalists and booksellers, through the free-thinking Radicals who followed Holyoake and flocked to Bradlaugh’s Hall of Science, to the Social Democratic Federation and the London Fabians with their unconcealed distaste for chapel rhetoric.1
Nearly all the theorists of the working-class movement are in that London tradition – or else, like Bray the Leeds printer, they are analogues of the skilled London working men.
But the list itself reveals a dimension that is missing – the moral force of the Luddites, of Brandreth and young Bamford, of the Ten Hour men, of Northern Chartists and I.L.P. And some of this difference in traditions can be traced to the religious formations of the eighteenth century. When the democratic revival came in the last years of the century, Old Dissent had lost much of its popular following, and those artisans who still adhered to it were permeated by the values of enlightened self-interest which led on, in such a man as Francis Place, to the acceptance of a limited Utilitarian philosophy. But in those great areas in the provinces where Methodism triumphed in the default of Dissent, it nearly destroyed the democratic and anti-authoritarian elements in the older tradition, interposing between the people and their revolutionary heritage a callow emotionalism which served as auxiliary to the Established Church. And yet the Methodist rebel was marked by a special earnestness and vigour of moral concern. South and North, intellect and enthusiasm, the arguments of secularism and the rhetoric of love – the tension is perpetuated in the nineteenth century. And each tradition seems enfeebled without the complement of the other.