by Lona Manning
Shelley nodded vigorously. “I do not imagine there will be any difficulties. I shall arrange for the lawyer to be my proxy in all matters, and he shall write me under the name of Mr. Jones, concerning her welfare. I can retrieve the letters at the post office without alarming Mary. But if, as I say, some mischance befalls me—who knows, better than I, the tragic turns fate can take!—I shall be reassured, knowing that you know of this child’s existence, that she will have some friend in the world.”
The poet placed his hand upon his heart. “My dear Mrs. Robinson, my one motive, you may be sure, is to protect my wife from any further distress. We have lost little Clara, we have lost our boy William” —tears sprang to his eyes— “her spirits have been exceedingly low. I do not think of myself—for myself, any prospect of happiness in life is fled, but it is a sacred consideration with me to preserve my wife’s tranquillity and peace of mind.”
“As you say, Shelley.”
Chapter 24: Manchester,
Summer 1819
Mrs. Price intended for her son Charles to become an apothecary, like his brother Tom, but Price chafed at his indentures, first in Portsmouth and then in Huntingdon.
Every day Charles fetched and carried, cleaned and swept, fixed labels upon bottles of foul-smelling tinctures. He was still a boy with a boy’s feelings, and he felt more disgust than pity when the thin, pale, trembling men and women slid into the shop every day to purchase their laudanum. But even if Charles could have persuaded himself the medicines he sold were actually beneficial, he still would have longed to escape.
He liked his new master even less than his old, and most of all, he missed the cheerful, steady companionship of his older brother Tom, back in Portsmouth. His complaints to his mother went unheeded— “if you don’t care for hard work, remember that it should have gone harder for you, Charles, if I had let you go to sea, as you wanted! You must attend to your work and then Mr. Smith would not berate you as he does.” Charles hoped to find an advocate in Fanny, or his brother Sam, but he did not.
“You will at least have a profession, Charles,” Sam told his younger brother. “What do I have? Nothing. I have tramped all through London, and got nothing, and Fanny had to send me the monies to come here. I ought to be the one taking care of the family. You must get a trade, and if you break your indentures, no-one will take you as apprentice elsewhere.”
July was drawing to a close when Sam called again upon Charles at the apothecary shop to bid him farewell and announce his determination to journey to Manchester, for a great meeting to be called among the labouring people, on the subject of universal suffrage and reform.
“‘Orator’ Hunt will be speaking, Charles,” said Sam. “He is something astonishing. And we are to get up a great petition to carry to London, to demand our rights.”
Charles begged Sam to take him along. But Sam was obdurate. Though he felt for his brother, he trusted Charles would one day understand it was for the best. How well he managed to persuade his brother will be seen, for Saturday was a half-holiday, and the boy left the shop promptly at 1:00. He was not to be seen all of Sunday. When he failed to appear at work on Monday morning, Mr. Smith sent word to Mrs. Price’s house. The apothecary threatened to discharge Charles for running away, and it was very doubtful whether he might be persuaded to forgive him, even if the boy were found and promptly returned.
Mrs. Price was exceedingly perturbed by the intelligence, and lamented anew the loss of her husband. “If only your father was still alive, or William was here! What am I to do if Charles is thrown back on my hands?” Charles might be faulted for neglecting the feelings of an affectionate mother, but in fact, he had slipped a note under her door. The note, unfortunately, lay unnoticed on the floor of the entry-hall, and the housemaid (a most unsatisfactory local girl) only discovered it on Tuesday. The note read simply, “Gone to Manchester.”
Fanny’s brother William was half way to London with his convoy of coal ships, entirely unable to be of service in the present emergency. A few hours of reflection convinced Fanny that she herself should, and could, pursue Charles to Manchester, and another few hours completed her preparations—she took only a small valise, and reckoning that Charles was making the journey on foot, determined to follow him by mail coach, and make enquiries at the inns along the way. Once in Manchester, she would find Sam, and together they would take Charles back to resume his indentures.
Mrs. Price made no objections to the plan. To her credit, she did bid Fanny to be very careful, and expressed herself alarmed on her behalf, but Fanny was not a young girl and had travelled without an escort before; she had no great apprehensions on that score.
* * * * * * *
In fact, Charles had almost emptied his slender purse for an outside seat on the coach to Peterborough, the better to put distance between himself and any pursuers. Thereafter he walked or cadged rides from obliging farmers.
The boy revelled in his freedom, and was amazed at the variety of landscapes and modes of speech he encountered, only a few days from his home.
He sometimes rested during the heat of the day, and travelled early in the morning and late at night. His shoes were well-worn by the time he reached Sheffield. There he hoped to fall in with other men intending to go to Manchester for the great meeting, for only two days remained and he feared he could not reach Manchester in time.
In Sheffield he learnt, however, that the Manchester officials had suppressed the meeting, and declared it illegal, and so, much disheartened, he went to sleep hidden away under the portico of a church, very tired and not knowing what to do or where to go.
But with the new day came heartening intelligence: a new meeting was planned for the 16th, which left him ample time to reach Manchester.
The bearer of this excellent information was a man Charles happened to meet in a grimy workingman’s tavern, near a factory that was belching coal smoke into the air.
The stranger’s accent proclaimed him to be a native of the North. He had a thick head of straw-coloured hair which reminded Charles of thatch on a farmhouse roof, and one of his eyes had a disconcerting habit of roaming off in a different direction than the other. He insisted upon paying for Charles’s breakfast, learned his name, the name of his master, and questioned him closely about his journey and his reasons for making it. In truth, Charles was mostly on the road for the adventure, for the joy of leaving a job he detested, and out of admiration for a much-loved elder brother. Of politics he thought little and knew less, but his new companion was much better informed. Walker spoke with warmth against the government, against toiling like a slave for starvation wages, of justice and freedom, and Charles began to be truly interested in the objects of the meeting.
Benjamin, for so the man named himself, offered to travel together with Charles, and help him find his brother. Charles readily joined with him—they would be sure of arriving at Manchester in time, and what a surprise it would be for Sam!
* * * * * * *
Fanny, meanwhile, reached the village of Stockport, near Manchester, on the evening of her third day and took a room at the White Lion Inn for the night, intending to travel into Manchester in the morning. She had met with no success in overtaking her brother on the journey and moreover, she discovered that inn-keepers were extraordinarily uninterested in recalling whether they had seen a boy who looked like a thousand other boys.
The owner of the White Lion rebuffed her enquiries in the same fashion, though when she extracted some monies and asked for a room, his manner improved. He could only offer her a shared room with some other another single lady, a teacher at a girl’s school. She was leaving Manchester in the morning, she was arriving, which perplexed and alarmed him.
“You should know there is a lot of talk about this gathering tomorrow, miss. The working men have been drilling like soldiers in the fields and commons all around these parts for weeks. We have often had trouble in the past—riots, burning, looting. There’s a set of radicals in Manchester, Mis
s, and they’ve set about agitating the common folk and making them restless and dissatisfied. With so many people gathering tomorrow, there’s bound to be trouble, as there has been before. I would advise you to be very cautious in town tomorrow.”
“But surely the authorities will keep good order?,” Fanny returned.
“There isn’t but a handful of constables in all of Manchester,” returned the inn-keeper, pitying her ignorance. “There is nobody to ‘keep order,’ which is why my militia company has been called up. I joined the Cheshire company when it looked like Napoleon might pay us a visit. Instead I am obliged to watch over a parcel of bug-eyed revolutionaries. Hallelujah! Nobody will have to work, and chicken and ale for all!”
Fanny went up to her room anxious for the following morning, but she anticipated a restless night and not merely because she shared her bed with a snoring schoolmistress.
She drifted in and out of troubled dreams, and shortly after dawn, the rhythmic sounds of her bedpartner were augmented by other strange noises she could not identify. The strange sound drew her from the bed and she pulled open the curtains. The trees were dark silhouettes against a faint sunrise. She thought she heard singing—perhaps some unusual bird? But there were high voices, low voices, and she then caught some snatches of words.
These were not birds.
Fanny strained to see in the pale light of morning. She thought she could discern some movement beyond the courtyard of the inn, like a great undulating mass. The strangeness and novelty briefly gave her some alarm, until she was able to identify a shape here, a sound there—there was the outline of a flag carried on a tall staff, there was the creak of a waggon, there, visible through the darkness, was a white bonnet on a girl’s head—
The road before her was entirely filled with people—shifting and moving, talking and singing.
She realised they must be a group of local labourers assembling to walk to Manchester for the great meeting.
Having never seen so many persons gathered together in one place, and never at such an hour, Fanny was more curious than alarmed. She decided to dress quickly and descend, so as to have a better view of the unusual sight. Her bed-fellow had barely stirred by the time Fanny was washed and dressed and slipped out of the room.
Fanny had intended to hire a driver and cart to get into town, but as the road was filled with people; the thought of taking a horse in the midst of that shifting multitude now appeared to her to be difficult, if not dangerous.
Fanny wore a light travelling cloak over a simple brown dress, a relic from her days as a sewing instructor. In the half-light of morning there was little to distinguish her from the other women milling in the procession who were garbed in what was undoubtedly their best attire, their Sunday clothes.
An older man spied Fanny and said, “women in the centre columns, step lively now.”
Fanny decided to walk alongside a respectable-looking matron who was holding her young son by the hand. In answer to Fanny’s civil enquiries, she said her husband was a weaver, and although he kept at his loom from first light ‘til dark, he could not earn enough to feed their family. She had great expectations of the day to come, “for when they see so many of us poor folk together in one place, they must listen.”
The women were told to move to the front of the column, four abreast, and Fanny accepted her new companion’s invitation to stay with the party, “for there is safety in numbers, miss, so you may as well walk with us.”
Fanny saw young men carrying large staffs with banners being dispatched, with much bustling, to their various places at the head of their different divisions. The flags bore slogans such as “No Corn Laws” and “Universal Suffrage.”
Shortly after Fanny and the ladies formed their rows, there came the rattle of a drum and a cry to move “On to Manchester,” which was answered with scattered shouts of triumph. The front ranks stepped forward, the rest followed, the birds sang in the trees and the morning was still fresh and cool.
The procession marched in good order, with little talking and laughing amongst the women and even less among the men, as the sun rose higher in the sky. With the better light, Fanny then observed, with some consternation, some red caps dangling upon the poles of the foremost marchers—she knew the red cap to be the symbol of Jacobinism, an emblem of the French Revolution, and she wondered at the folly of those men for displaying a symbol so well calculated to alarm the authorities and inflame public opinion against the workers. It was as much as saying they wanted to tear the king off his throne.
She began to heartily regret her presence among them. Fortunately, the entire procession paused outside of the city to muster at a large commons; there was some talk of resting and waiting for another group of marchers from another village to join up with theirs.
Fanny was already weary from walking, but this interval gave her an opportunity to slip away, and murmuring the excuse that she must search for her brothers, she hastened forward alone, hoping to find the meeting-grounds which she knew were in the vicinity of St. Peter’s Church, within the town.
* * * * * * *
Manchester, August 16, 1819, 10:00 am
William Gibson descended from his room into the common-room at the Star Tavern, in hopes of obtaining some breakfast before setting out for St. Peter’s Field. He had intended, by now, to be on his way to Huntingdon and Fanny. But he needed to witness and record the immense meeting in Manchester, first proposed for the 9th of that month.
He had used the week’s delay to examine local mills and factories. The town of Manchester had grown prodigiously in size and very rapidly, as families moved from the country in search of wages. The large red brick mills and factories were seldom silent. The clanging bells summoned the ragged multitudes—men, women and children—to their posts shortly after dawn, and the same bells released them late at night, not to liberty and fresh air but to crowded, narrow streets, in smoke-blackened brick tenements.
There still existed a large open field in the midst of town where the local radicals were accustomed to hold their public meetings. Gibson had even walked about the field, defined on three sides by row-houses and on the north by Peter Street. The space was vast enough to accommodate many thousands of people—the organizers were boasting that 100,000 would be in attendance on Monday.
For the rest of the time, Mr. Gibson sat in his modest lodgings and wrote and re-wrote a long letter to Fanny, explaining himself, begging her forgiveness, and concluding with the humble request that he might call upon her at Huntingdon. He had taken the letter to the post office yesterday.
Today was the day for the great gathering, and after its conclusion he would travel to Huntingdon.
Having paid for his room and a mug of weak tea, he turned to find some place to sit, but most of the chairs were already occupied, for a meeting was in progress. He gulped down the tea and put on his hat and had almost reached the door, when he heard, “And some of my men are gathering up all the stones and bricks they can find from the field and taking them away.” He paused in the entryway, and listened:
“Where is Hunt?”
“No one has seen him yet.”
“Mr. Philips has ridden back from Stockport, he says he saw thousands of people on the march, in military fashion, and some are carrying large sticks which could easily be converted into pikes—”
“And he wet his breeches at the sight, no doubt. Every time a horse passes wind, he thinks there’s an insurrection in the offing.”
“You laugh, but the Stockport rabble include the same lawless crew who beat two constables nearly to death last week. We are sitting on a powder keg.”
“Nevertheless, we cannot arrest them today until someone has broken the law.”
“Sirs, we have reports that there is already a substantial gathering at St. Peter’s.”
“We had better go now and see for ourselves, and get up to Mr. Buxton’s house.”
Chairs scraped along the floor, the hubbub moved his way.
“I urge you again, gentlemen, we must put a stop to this before it begins. If we wait until eighty thousand people are assembled and whipped into a frenzy by that demagogue Hunt, it will be too late.”
“Very well—if you can bring us a dozen merchants who are willing to swear on their oath that they are concerned about their safety and property, we will be in a position to read the Riot Act—if we deem it to be necessary.”
“Where are the 15th Hussars?”
“They will take their position on Windmill Street.”
“Do we have runners, messengers?”
Mr. Gibson felt in his pocket for his notebook and pencil, and went out to the street to scratch a few notes. “Magistrates apprehensive of scenes of violence today.”
Manchester, August 16, 1819, 11:00 am
Sam walked along a broad thoroughfare, which, even if he had not known it to be called Peter Street, he would have understood to be the route to St. Peter’s field on account of all the labouring men walking and marching in one direction with greater energy and enjoyment than one might suppose they regularly displayed when reporting to work. They had not come to Manchester to shop or to dawdle, but to get to the meeting-place and take up an advantageous position from which to hear Mr. Hunt.
Sam paused to examine a large poster affixed to a wall: “The Boroughreeves and Constables of Manchester most earnestly recommend the peaceable and well-disposed citizens of this town to remain in their own houses the whole of this day and to keep their children and servants within doors.”
Indeed, many businesses were closed that morning; the shutters remained fastened across their windows and there were no signs of commerce in the streets.
Sam was just passing the Flying Horse tavern when, by great good fortune, he spied Mr. Hunt emerge, in company with some others. Mr. Hunt was wearing his usual white hat, with a bright green waistcoat and cream-coloured trousers. He was head and shoulders taller than the working men standing around him. He was clean and pink; they were grimy and grey, men of the North from the mills and factories.