A Pandemic Peripatetic

A Pandemic Peripatetic April 2021

Well, I am alone, self-isolating,

And here I must remain,

This kitchen window my prism,

Reflecting and refracting the sunlight,

But also, the past, present and future,

In a virtual peripatetic.

I start my imaginary journey

In Old yet New Corruption London,

Walking the words of Citizen John:

‘Thou, Commerce, too, monopolizing fiend!’,

Filling ‘The public streets with want’s afflictive plaint’,

Making my way to the Tower and the Old Bailey,

Picturing John Thelwall with his quill in Newgate:

‘Within the Dungeon’s noxious gloom

The Patriot still, with dauntless breast,in conscious virtue

The cheerful aspect can assume –

And smile - in conscious virtue blest!’

But, now ‘Let’s all go down the Strand!’,

To catch the words of Citizen John

(Study a poem and hear a Thomas Spence song, too),

‘I use the term Jacobinism simply to indicate a large and comprehensive system of reform, not professing to be built upon the authority and principle of the Gothic customary’ …

While ‘The whole nation’ would be unified,

‘combined in one grand political Association or Corresponding Society from the Orkneys to the Thames, from the Cliffs of Dover to the Land’s End’.

Where to next on this dreamtime peripatetic?

Derby and past football visits to ‘Pride Park’?

What would Citizen John have made of a name like that?

As he was attacked by ‘loyalist’ mobs:

‘Sailors, armed associates … and dragoons’;

Or sitting, justifiably paranoid,

About spies and strangers and informants

In coffee house and wayside tavern:

‘Some strange but well-dressed man would seat himself on the opposite side of my box’ …

The sun has set now but William Pitt’s spies

Are still awake; pursuing Thelwall

Across the wilds of Salisbury Plain;

Citizen John, hoping for ‘philosophic amity’

With Coleridge in Nether Stowey,

Before sojourning just down the road

From this darkening kitchen window

In the summer of 1797:

‘… ye pleasant haunts! Brakes, bourns,

And populous hill, and dale, and pendant woods;

And you, meandering streams, and you, ye cots,

And hamlets, that, with many a whiten’d front,

Sprinkle the woody step; or lowlier stoop,

Thronging, gregarious, round the rustic spire …

Therefore I love, Chalford, and ye vales

Of Stroud, irriguous …

Yet must I leave

Your social haunts …’

The next day was bright and welcoming,

And so, I continued my imaginary

John Thelwall lockdown peripatetic

With a ramble and a couple of pints

At ‘the 3 Cocks in the Road to Hay’:

To glimpse Citizen John in the corner,

Composing a letter for Thomas Hardy

And London Corresponding Society colleagues;

Watching him pick up the correspondence

Untouched by Pitt’s spies and myrmidons,

Before making my imagined way to Llyswen,

To the mirror image of STC’s

‘Lime tree bower’,

Where the ‘political lecturer of Beaufort Buildings’

Works hard at ‘one end of our orchard’,

Where ‘flows a pretty little brook

Bubbling through a small romantic dingle to empty itself into the Wye; in which with hobbyhorsical industry I have built a cascade … and am making a rude hermitage (a sequestered summer study) in the dingle beneath.’

And so, to Llyswen and a virtual Excursion,

Courtesy of William Wordsworth:

‘A narrow, winding entry opened out onto a platform …

Enclosed between an upright mass of rock

And an old moss-grown wall: a cool recess,

And fanciful! For where the rock and walls

Met at an angle, hung a penthouse, framed

By thrusting two rude staves into the wall

And overlaying them with mountain sods …

and stooping down, drew forth

A book, that, in the midst of stones and moss

… swoln

With searching damp’;

And after that imagined tableau,

It was time to return to London’s old haunts:

Bloomsbury, 40 Bedford Place, in 1806:

The Institute for Oratory and Elocution,

To glimpse ‘persons of fashion’ and

‘a crowd of scientific and literary characters’,

Before making my way to 57 Lincoln Inn’s Fields,

Where I saw copies of The Champion

Tumbling along the wind-blown pavements,

Heard lectures, recitations and concerts,

Joined the weekly ‘Historical and Oratorical Society’;

Then saw you out in the streets again,

Talking of Peterloo and Lord Sidmouth,

Joining the throng to greet Henry Hunt,

Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, lionised,

Just as you were in the streets,

Back in 1794,

When you were acquitted for treason at your trial …

(‘ATTORNEY-GENERAL [piano]. Mr Thelwall, what is your Christian name?

T. [somewhat sullenly]. John.

ATT. GEN. [piano still] … With two l’s at the end or with one?

T. With two – but it does not signify. [Carelessly, but rather sullen, or so.] You need not give yourself any trouble. I do not intend to answer any questions.

PITT. What does he say? [Darting round, very fiercely, from the other side of the room, and seating himself by the side of the CHANCELLOR.]

LORD CHANCELLOR [with silver softness, almost melting to a whisper]. He does not mean to answer any questions.’)

But I conclude this imagined peripatetic at Bunhill Fields,

Citizen John, there, in 1832,

Sole eulogiser at the funeral of Thomas Hardy,

His old LCS colleague,

With a voice that compelled 30,000

Into a silent, rapt attention,

‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’,

As the old motto for The Tribune put it,

A voice that straddled, as Thompson said,

‘The world of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields weaver’,

And a voice that still speaks to us today,

To the gig economy world

Of Amazon and Deliveroo and Uber et al:

‘Monopoly, and the hideous accumulation of capital in a few hands … carry in their own enormity, the seeds of cure … What-ever presses men together … though it may generate some vices, is favourable to the diffusion of knowledge, and ultimately promotive of human liberty. Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse.’

All still true even for those working from home,

Some atomised and alienated,

Lacking collective support and empathy,

Some facing fire and rehire and isolation,

Many losing a sense of mutuality,

Instead ploughing a lonely furrow;

But just as I pursued a peripatetic from home,

So as to reach out for the words of John Thelwall,

So, John Thelwall’s words can reach out

To those at home in the knowledge economy,

And to those at work in the gig economy.

The ‘Jacobin fox’ may have been

the most dangerous person in the country

Two hundred years ago and more,

But his is still a relevant voice today:

‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’ …

‘I affirm that every man, and every woman, and every child, ought to obtain something more, in the general distribution of the fruits of labour, than food, and rags, and a wretched hammock with a poor rug to cover it; and that, without working twelve or fourteen hours a day … from six to sixty. – They have a claim, a scared and inviolable claim … to some comfort and enjoyment … to some tolerable leisure for such discussions, and some means of or such information as may lead to an understanding of their rights …’