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ABSTRACT
Thomas Spence, arguably one of the most important radical thinkers of the 1790s, was adept in his use of literary forms. Arising from the conviction that private property in land is the source of most inequities in society, his central idea was that land ownership should be vested in parochial government, with each household paying rent but no taxes, and receiving a return on the portion of the rents not used for public services. Throughout his career, especially from 1793 to 1803, he wrote as a strong satirist and utopian thinker in a stream of pamphlets advancing his plan. This essay discusses the satiric strategies Spence employed against large landholders and aristocrats—violent rhetoric, inversion of biblical accounts, and undermining of conventional forms through parody. It concludes by considering parallels between Spence’s satiric and utopian thought and that of William Morris a century later.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Lynette Cawthra and the Working Class Movement Library for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this essay, as well as to Mihoko Suzuki and Franklyn Ellis for helpful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Downey explores the personal, political, and publishing connections between Spence and Eaton in “Literary Networks and Connections.”
2. “Important Trial of Thomas Spence,” Political Works, 93. Further citations from this edition appear in the text in the form (PW 93).
3. McCalman, Radical Underworld, 63–68. For information in this and the following paragraphs on the political contexts of Spence’s thought and writings, I draw on McCalman; Worrall, Radical Culture; on Spence and the Despard conspiracy, Linebaugh, Red Round Globe; and on Spence’s influence on Blake, Makdisi, Impossible History.
4. Parsinnen emphasizes the extent to which Spence abandoned his original plan for a peaceful transformation of society and adopted the rhetoric of a millenarian revolutionary in the 1790s. “English Land Nationalization,” 135–41.
5. See Wood, Radical Satire, 64–90; and Mee, “Spence and the London Corresponding Society,” 56–57.
6. For an understanding of narrative satire as a form that is dialogical, leveling, and parodic, see Palmeri, Satire in Narrative, 1–18.
7. “Further Spensonia,” in Pig’s Meat, 83. Further citations from this edition appear in the text in the form (PM 83).
8. Eaton’s satiric violence in Politics for the People does not reach the extreme level of Spence’s, but it can be striking and effective nonetheless. For example, in a parodic Te Deum thanking Pitt rather than the divinity for the nation’s successes, Eaton prays twice that Pitt will be hanged along with his followers, for the good of the people.
Thou art the King of Shufflers, O Pitt … .
We believe thou shalt come: to speedy punishment.
We therefore pray thee release the people: by following the wise Ahithopel’s [sic] example … .
Dispose of thy friends the same way: & lift them up forever … .
O Pitt, fix thyself six feet above the earth: as our trust is thou wilt. (II, 24, 370)
9. John Marangos discusses Spence’s political use of animals—e.g., the worm who pays no rent, the cat who lives free, and the pig who tramples on the symbols of Church and State—in “Economic Ideas of Spence,” in Bonnett and Armstrong, Poor Man’s Revolutionary, 84–85.
10. On the view that satire is a form of therapy for miscreants, see Randolph, “Medical Concept.”
11. Matilde Cazzola argues, in “Spence as Atlantic Thinker,” that Spence’s voice was an important one in the Haitian Revolution and throughout the Caribbean, as well as in anti-imperial discourse generally.
12. Eaton frequently satirizes English political structures through parodies of liturgical texts. On the first page of the second volume of Politics for the People, he prints a parodic credo for the corrupt aristocracy:
I believe in one K—g, the head of all things, Maker of Peers in England and Ireland, and of all Knights, visible and invisible … he left Town in the Summer, & in a few weeks returned again, according to the Newspapers, … and sitteth on the right hand of Billy P—, the ruler,—who shall judge what is right and wrong, and whose Taxes shall have no end … . And I believe in Ed—d Bur-e, the Protector of Aristocracy, … and I look forward to hope of Promotion, and expect new Honors in the Peerage to come.—Amen. (II, 1; emphases in original)
Other parodies of religious forms in Politics for the People include “Prayer to the Devil” (II, 5) and the “New Litany” (II, 21). However, Eaton’s parodies of religious forms do not, like Spence’s, involve reinterpretations and reversals of judgment concerning religious figures such as Samson.
13. Rousseau, Second Discourse, 170.
14. See Palmeri, State of Nature, Stages of Society, 1–18.
15. Although Eaton’s parodies do not critique the presumptions of the forms they use, they can still be sharp and successful. For example, in volume 1 of Politics for the People, he parodies a bookseller’s catalogue raisonné, or list of books to be sold with a short description of their contents. He lists such titles as: “Algernon Sydney, on Government; Locke, on Government,” and “The Rights of Englishmen, with Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, &c,” and in the facing column places the description: “These works having formerly been much read, are consequently rather soiled, in consideration of which, & their being now out of fashion, they will be sold exceeding cheap, and must of course be articles worthy the attention of Trunkmakers, Pastry Cooks, &c” (I, 128; emphasis in original). Hammersley provides a detailed and extensive analysis of continuities between Harrington’s and Spence’s proposals for a utopian republic in “Spence’s Property in Land Every One’s Right”; and Bonnett and Armstrong, Poor Man’s Revolutionary, 45–50.
16. Cazzola analyzes Spence’s thought in relation to high political thought, especially the work of Hobbes, Locke, Harrington, Rousseau, and Paine, in Political Thought, 57–68, 73–78, and 90–101. As this and similar passages indicate, Spence also had a close knowledge of utopian writers such as Plato and More, and of republicans such as Machiavelli.
17. Spence’s print depiction of himself accentuating his physical unattractiveness may allude to Socrates’s notorious ugliness. See .
18. Eaton’s commitment to his radical ideas equaled Spence’s. He was arrested seven times, once for publishing in Politics for the People a fable (borrowed from Thelwall) of a royal rooster whose flesh proves to be rank and stringy once his head is cut off by the farmer. After being charged twice in 1796, Eaton fled the country, was outlawed, and lived in America for more than three years. He was imprisoned in 1802–03 and for eighteen months in 1812–13 for publishing the third part of Paine’s Age of Reason. He was one of the most important publishers of radical texts from 1793 until his death in 1814. On Eaton, see Wood, Radical Satire, 89–93.
19. Ashcraft breaks down the distinction between political philosophy and political “pamphleteering” in Revolutionary Politics.
20. Fifty years after Spence, Marx’s conception of life in a communist society goes further than Spence’s utopian vision, but resembles it in tone: communist society “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” German Ideology, 53.
21. On the afterlife and legacy of Spence, see Chase, People’s Farm, 78–121; McCalman; Worrall; Janowitz, Lyric and Labor, 133–95; Claeys, “Four Roads,” in Bonnett and Armstrong, Poor Man’s Revolutionary, 27–34; and Cazzola, “Spence as Atlantic Thinker.”
22. Chase, “Paine, Spence, Chartism,” 23.
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Frank Palmeri
Frank Palmeri is Professor of English and Cooper Fellow in the Humanities, Emeritus, at the University of Miami. He is the author of Satire in Narrative: Petronius, Swift, Gibbon, Melville and Pynchon; Satire, History, Novel: Narrative Forms, 1660–1815; and State of Nature, Stages of Society: Enlightenment Conjectural History and Modern Social Discourse. This essay will form part of his current book project, “The Persistence of Radical Satire in Nineteenth-Century Britain.”