The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

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

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

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

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

  SHREDDED LETTUCE.

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

  Workpermit.com

  Registered Immigration Advisors

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It was all a splendid plan—except, Cobbett wrote glumly a few days later, "Envy, hatred, malice, revenge, fear; but above all, Envy, mean black, dastardly Envy interfered to prevent the triumph of reason and of truth." And the cause of the downfall of Reason and Truth? Well . . . the pub. "The Landlord refused us his house," Cobbett reported. Exasperated, he moved his dinner at the last minute. But, walking down Fleet Street when the great day arrived, Cobbett might have noticed some rather bad omens. People were suddenly dressing in black; flags were lowered; church bells were tolling. And by the time he made it to the dinner, Cobbett would have known that he'd picked quite possibly the worst day of the entire nineteenth century to celebrate the birth of King George's greatest enemy. As if in one last act of spite against his old enemy, mad old King George had died that very morning.

  It was not exactly a propitious occasion to be publicly railing at the monarchy, and attendance at the dinner was muted indeed. Instead of the saint's relics that would incite a revolution, Cobbett was quickly finding himself stuck with a dead body in his house. Caricatures mocked him, showing Paine's ghost hovering over Cobbett in his bedroom, demanding, "Give me back my pilfer'd bones," and the Times now made sure to always preface any mention of their favorite villain as "the bone-grubber Cobbett." Writing to his son, Cobbett complained that "no one dared to move a pen or tongue in my defence . . . Former friends, or pretended friends, shrugged up their shoulders, and looked hard in my face, as if in wonder that I was not dismayed."

  Cobbett could take some small comfort as he gazed up the street from here that at least he was not in jail alongside Paine's publisher. But Carlile's sufferings, he warned the government, would only backfire on them. "Is this the best way of checking the progress of Mr. Carlile's, or, rather, Mr. PAINE's principles?" he asked pointedly in the Register. 'Was it ever known that man was cured of an error by punishment of any sort? . . . Punish a man for any matter of opinion and you gather round him a crowd of converts." This should have sounded like wishful thinking: after all, the government had even checkmated Mrs. Carlile. It might have been expected that the tenacious Jane Carlile would, just as she had done before, take up where her husband had left off. But with the loss of their bookshop's lease and stock, any prospects for another comeback were grim indeed.

  Oh, and one other thing: she was pregnant.

  Jane Carlile kept up a brave face with her husband in jail, but theirs was not a relationship that augured great things. The two had been growing apart, in fact. Her manic behavior around the house left him in fear of his life at times, and they'd already quietly agreed to divorce. But Jane believed in a free press as passionately as her husband did, so they decided that they would wait awhile to divorce—many years, if need be—the better to deny any satisfaction to their persecutors.

  But then there was the baby. Surely she couldn't start a shop again now?

  Yet that, as her neighbor Cobbett and the rest of London watched in amazement, is just what she did. Supporters rallied in every major English city, sending money in dribbles and in torrents, from a few well-to-do sympathizers with a liberal bent and from many angry unemployed working men alike. Within months, the Temple of Reason at 55 Fleet Street was back—MART FOR BLASPHEMY AND SEDITION read one sign in its windows—and rather than a temple it was now beginning to distinctly resemble a hornet's nest.

  Mrs. Carlile was promptly hauled before a judge for selling The Age of Reason to an undercover informant. She lashed out at the court, listing egregious violations upon the freedoms of the press and electoral reformers, right down to the murders at Peterloo and the imprisonment of her husband: "If all these things do not constitute tyranny," she snapped, "then the word is but a word of sound, and Dionysus, Draco, Torquin, Nero, and Caligula, have been falsely libeled."

  Did she not have a newborn now? she was asked. Indeed she did.

&nbs
p; You were warned, her judge ruled. Send the baby to jail too.

  It was a sentence which, though meant to keep mother and child from being separated, proved sensational in the hands of Carlile's partisans. A whole family sent to jail! Father, mother, and the innocent babe at her breast! The rebellion became giddy in defiance as another Carlile was arrested for selling Paine at the Fleet Street shop: this time it was Richard's younger sister Mary-Anne. Volunteers flooded in to work at the Temple of Reason as never before, and with each arrest another stepped up to the counter. The fight had spread now from Paine and Cobbett's generation to a new one of apprentices and journeymen. A third, a fourth, a fifth arrest, and still they came. Even married women stepped up: Mrs. Susannah Wright came into the docket of unrepentant defendants, and was duly imprisoned along with her infant. More ominously to prosecutors, she was promptly followed by a clever twenty-three-year-old warehouse worker named James Watson. He had studied Paine's tactics of argumentation closely, and during his trial he pointedly asked the court to produce tangible evidence for any actual injury his books had caused. They couldn't. . . and sentenced him to a year in prison anyway.

  It had only been a matter of time before this happened; Watson had long prepared for it. He'd already spent the Christmas before his arrest visiting Carlile in jail-"as foretaste," one friend wryly recalled, "of the course of instruction preparing for him in that Liberal University." The Times found these idealistic young martyrs too much to bear; one reporter, passing the Temple of Reason, scoffed at their ragamuffin appearance—"squalid, dirty, and listless"—and inveighed the young man to report to the local soup kitchen. The shop could be guarded in his absence, he archly suggested, by going to Cobbett's house up the street and borrowing Thomas Paine to hang in the doorway as a scarecrow: "Apply to old Cobbett, the resurrection-man, and request the loan of Tom Paine's body. . . It would require nothing short of the hardened courage of another resurrection-man to steal either body or books."

  Actually, by the time Watson took the Temple's counter, the shop's workers had already hit upon an extraordinary innovation to protect themselves. Arresting a bookseller for selling Thomas Paine required an informant to go in, buy a book, and to point out the defendant in a courtroom. What if, Carlile's shop assistants reasoned, you couldn't see your bookseller? Customers entering the Temple soon found themselves confronted by a sort of Automatic Blasphemy Machine: a gigantic clockwork mechanism with nary a human in sight. A dial listed the names of all the store's many illicit publications—The Rights of Man, say, or an issue of Carlile's newspaper The Republican. With the dial set to the right title, and money dropped into a slot, a book or newspaper would come clattering down into a receptacle.

  It is sobering to think that the freedom of the press once depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars. But the "invisible shopman" wasn't an entirely new concept: during a crackdown on unlicensed gin in 1737, London taxmen found themselves confounded by the disappearance of gin shops, despite the streets being as full of outrageously drunk louts as ever. It took months for taxmen to discover the existence of primitive manned vending machines called the "puss and mew." A customer coming up to one whispered "Puss," whereupon a vendor crammed inside answered "Mew." A hidden drawer popped out to receive coins, withdrew, and then slid back out with a dram of the demon drink.

  Like the puss and mew, the Temple of Reason's vending machine proved only a temporary distraction to authorities, rather like overturning a chair in the path of someone chasing you; soon they stepped around it and rounded up employees from behind the clockwork. But magistrates were starting to wonder about the wisdom of the prosecutions. The Temple of Reason was now a generation's training ground in idealism, their baptism of persecution, and radicals in other towns were emboldened to follow suit. In what one commentator aptly termed the 'War of the Shopmen," an astonishing 150 booksellers were arrested around the country in three years for selling Carrie's wares as he sat in jail. Among those joining the rebellion was a teenaged economics prodigy in Leeds, one John Stuart Mill. Paine had always been secretly circulated, after all—"Carlile ventured to do that openly which had been done surreptitiously," Mill noted—and to persecute dissenters, the budding philosopher explained, merely created more. "A Tindal produces a Leland," he wrote, "and a Paine calls forth a Watson."

  The government found itself playing a maddening game of Whack-a-Mole: every time they hammered down one bookseller, another would pop up in the next street or the next town. And Carlile himself was gleefully getting into the act again. No longer merely a publisher, he now became a prolific writer. His dispatches were published by an army of volunteers in his weekly newspaper The Republican, and he leaped into the fray of Paine biographers with yet another Life of Thomas Paine to compete with the at least four others now jostling for public attention. Writing over a byline marked "Dorchester Gaol," Carlile shook his head at how Paine's dead bones roamed free, while his living publisher rotted in a jail cell. And it was indeed Paine's own books—and not the many Lives of Paine—that really mattered now. "When an author has passed the bar of nature," Carlile wrote, "it behooves us not to listen to any tales about who he was, or what he did, but to form our judgments of the utility of the man, by the writings he left behind him. Our business is with the spirit or immortal part of the man . . . we have nothing to do with the body that is earthly and corruptible, and passes away into the common mass of regenerating matter."

  Yet the spectacle of Cobbett—"who heaped so much abuse on him, beyond that of all other persons put together"—returning with Paine's bones struck even Carlile as wonderful in its way, as "a volume of retraction, more ample and more convincing than his energetic pen could have produced." Still, he shrugged, he didn't see why anyone else should have much to do with it: "For my own part we have his writings, I should feel indifferent as to what becomes of his bones." But that was not going to be the end of that story—not for Paine, nor for the hidden clockwork rebels within Carlile's bookshop.

  The curse—and sometimes the saving grace—of jail is that it gives endless time to recall one's past, to run it over and over and to ponder what it meant. Sitting in his cell, Carlile found himself drawn to one memory: standing in a bookstall in the Plymouth Dock Market one day in 1812, long before he'd given the faintest thought to radicalism, and noticing a well-dressed maid slipping into the stall to talk in low tones with the bookseller:

  "Pray Mr. — have you got that book for my mistress?" she asked.

  "Yes, my dear," the bookman assured her.

  Coins were produced from her person, and a book from under the counter quietly passed hands. Carlile leaned over to spy on the title as the maid cracked it open: Aristotle'sMaster-Piece, the title page read. "The girl in question looked up quite cunning," he recalled from his jail cell, "as if she had got a curious prize or a budget of something that she did not know before, and scampered away delighted."

  Carlile ran into the book again in London bookstalls. It proved to be a birth control manual—a bizarre mash of folklore and nonsense that had been around since at least 1766, having gone through scores of illicit editions in port cities. Though a few of its herbal recipes actually did work for inducing miscarriages, it was largely useless—as Carlile snapped, "a mere pack of trash that has a singular name as a smuggled book and, if freely and publicly sold, would not after a time find a customer."

  What kept true information out of the hands of women? Why, the pious local Vice Societies, such as the very one that had put the Carliles in jail. As the years passed and his open-ended jail sentence lengthened—to his full three-year term, then to four, and then five years—in 1825 Carlile penned for the first time an open letter to William Wilberforce, the minister who had spearheaded his prosecution.

  SINNER,

  Is it not odd that I have never addressed a letter to you before, distinguished as you have been as one of my persecutors? The reason is that, meddler as you have been in all sorts of sin and mischief, profound hypocri
te as you have been, you have been, really, in the aggregate, a very contemptible man . . . I have thought it time to notice you in a public letter, lest you slip through my hands, as I never follow an enemy into the next life. I hope that your body will be well and quickly dispersed, and that not two particles may keep together to form anything like a similar being . . .

  To be fair, Wilberforce is remembered rather fondly today as a key figure in the abolition of slavery in Britain. But Carlile wasn't focused on that, or even on his prison time at Wiberforce's hands; what infuriated him was how the evangelical's prudishness had imprisoned women.

  Jail changed Carlile, much as it had changed Cobbett. Imprisoned with his wife and infant son, Carlile turned his mind to the realities of child care, and pondered the lot women had been given in life. He'd begun to voraciously read Paine's odd old friend Walking Stewart, and his dispatches to radical newspapers began to speak of equal rights for women. Female readers were delighted, and affectionately sent parcels of hand-knitted garments addressed to his jail cell—so many, in fact, that by 1824 he joked that he was ready "to set up a museum of curious night-caps." It wouldn't have lasted long even if he had: tired of housing a martyr who had now served the longest sentence ever given for blasphemy, in November 1825 the authorities gladly let him go free. Emerging from his prison cell, Carlile had a new book planned—and it was, he vowed, the most important ever written in the English language.

  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.