Wilson The Laughter of Triumph

William Hone and the Fight for the Free Press
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31721-9
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 464 Seiten

Satirist William Hone is the forgotten hero of the British press. In 1817 he was forced to defend himself against a censorious government, in what amounted to a show trial pitting a self-educated Fleet Street journalist against the Lord Chief Justice and a hand-picked jury. Hone's crime was to ridicule the powers that be. Through Hone's life, Ben Wilson looks at the history of the struggle for free expression against repressive law.

Ben Wilson was born in1980 and studied history at Pembroke College, Cambridge - both as an undergraduate and postgraduate. His first book, THE LAUGHTER OF TRIUMPH: WILLIAM HONE AND THE FIGHT FOR THE FREE PRESS, was published by Faber in 2005 to universal accalim. This was followed in 2007 by DECENCY AND DISORDER: THE AGE OF CANT 1789-1837.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Ben

Leseproben

1

The Fatal Bookcase Childhood, 1780–1800

From books you can gain more amusement than you can get from all the toys you have ever seen, and more instruction than you have had from all the people you have ever talked with. After you begin to read you will soon be able to understand many things which you now only wonder at, and speedily be convinced of this grand Truth, delivered by one of our greatest philosophers, that ‘Knowledge is Power’.

William Hone, from a letter to his foster-child, John L’Ouverture, 1810

… I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people’s thoughts. I dream away my life in others’ speculations. I love to lose myself in other men’s minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

Charles Lamb

Hone felt that he was qualified to represent the views and interests of the middle classes. He had risen from an isolated, austere and unlearned background, educated himself, and made money and a name by personal sacrifices. Like many of his contemporaries, Hone received only the most rudimentary schooling; his achievements as a writer he saw as a vindication of autodidactic culture. His journalism displayed a wealth of knowledge and depth of reading, and he was convinced that self-education and improvement were a duty placed upon members of society before they had a right to claim a voice in the government of their country. Hone was always painfully conscious that his enemies saw him as a Grub Street hack, a ruffian who propagated ill-considered opinions and unreliable facts among a credulous public. The called him ‘a wretch, as contemptible as he is wicked’ and ‘a poor illiterate creature’.1

Hone was compelled to defend his journalism, arguing that he put as much effort into his work as most academics. When he was researching his scholarly work, in the 1820s, he told his public: ‘I went daily to the British Museum, chiefly for the purpose of consulting the King’s collection of pamphlets … I attended there every day as soon as the doors were open, nor left the reading or print room till they closed.’2 The research gleaned in the British Museum or from his own extensive library enriched his more populist writing. Hone’s political journalism was always set within its historical context, and the style derived much from the pamphleteers and political language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even his satires stood within an ancient tradition of parodic literature. When called upon to defend himself in 1817, Hone’s learning and knowledge of English literature rivalled that of his university-educated prosecutors. But he was always dogged by a sense of inferiority. As he said to friend from the world of academe: ‘You dons at Cambridge, with letters after your names, scorn all poor fellows who have not been to school.’3

Notwithstanding the lack of a formal education, and the occasional feeling of shame it brought, Hone was always anxious to assert the honourable status of a self-taught writer. His life, he believed, was the story of victory over ignorance and superstition. ‘Prone to inquiry from my childhood, and knowledge in other languages being to me as a “fountain sealed”, I could only obtain it on my own,’ Hone wrote in the 1820s, explaining his addiction to learning as a child: ‘All books that fell in my way, no matter on what subject, I read voraciously, and appetite increased with indulgence.’4

He was born in Bath in 1780, but the family moved to the outskirts of London soon after. His father, a lawyer’s clerk, had led a dissolute youth in the company of itinerant actors, before converting and settling down to a life of religious contemplation. Mr William Hone senior was a loving father but a very serious and humourless man. He avoided worldly pleasures and dedicated his life to his religion and his job. ‘Humility and patience were his practise,’ the son remembered. ‘Temperate in personal requirements, and plain in dress, he often pointed out the Quakers as examples of uprightness in gait and in mind.’ The Hones lived in a house to the west of Tottenham Court Road, in a suburban hamlet. ‘All beyond Warren Street, which had been lately commenced,’ Hone reminisced, ‘was open meadow land and dairy-farms as far as the eye could see …’

Until he was a teenager William would lead a very secluded life; his parents were terrified that he would be corrupted by urban vice. The spires of London were within sight, the sounds of the busy city ever-present, but its labyrinthine streets and alleys, its great buildings and crowds remained a mystery to the boy until he was much older. London was, for Mr Hone, modern Babylon; living on its threshold was as great a compromise he was prepared to make. Yet the sights and sounds of the city were impossible to escape. William could only watch as the diverse crowds of Londoners made weekend trips to the meadows and gravel pits near his house. The spectacle hinted of the unknown metropolis:

On Sundays London poured towards the country a populous tide of individuals … youths walking on crutches or with one crutch, girls suffering under disorders of the hip-joint, rickety children, with jointed iron-straps on their legs – at least one-tenth of the passers-by were crippled or diseased … [T]radesmen or respectable journeymen and their wives were profusely powdered. Men wore scarlet coats and long-flapped, figured waistcoats; cocked hats, with their hair behind in long or large clubbed pigtails, and the sides in large stiff curls; silver or plated buckles, curiously wrought or bespangled, on their shoes.

Sometimes Hone was allowed to stay with some cousins of his mother, who lived in Belsize, on the heights north of London. He built a tree house in an old mulberry tree, from which he could look down on the mysterious, unexplored city, and hear the hourly chimes of the clock of St Paul’s Cathedral and the evening chapel bell of Lincoln’s Inn. In later life, when he had the liberty to do so, Hone fell in love with London, its taverns, public buildings, narrow courts and its legends; he also became a famous city personality. As he once wrote, ‘London is familiar to me, I know every street and turning in the city, have walked over half the metropolis when the land covered with houses and churches was green fields.’5

Hone was a Londoner through and through – if not by birth, certainly by emotional attachment – but his love of the city was conditional upon the ability to escape from the buzz and whirl of Fleet Street to the Arcadia of Islington, Pentonville, or Hampstead. From his boyhood adventures in the fields and groves of north London, he wrote, ‘I derived a love for quiet and the country which has yearned in me throughout life, and has frequently detached me from alluring society and busiest occupations to bury myself awhile in rural solitude and nourish peaceful thoughts “far from the haunts of careworn men”.’ During his spells in prison, he would miss London’s villages and fields more than any other freedom. In the 1820s, when the property developers were poised to build over these favourite spots, Hone wrote books which preserved the memories of the villages, woods and streams where he spent his youth as a memorial to a feature of London life that was about to be lost for ever.

‘Nature was my first book,’ Hone wrote. But when he learnt to read, his first love was supplanted by the written word. Before he was six, the boy was sent to the home of an old lady (a so-called ‘dame school’) to learn the rudiments of reading and writing. Mrs Bettridge’s school was a joy: ‘There, on low wooden benches, books in hand, sat her little scholars. We all loved her, I most of all, and I was often allowed to sit on a little stool by her side. I was happier there than anywhere.’

But one ‘dark day’, the child was not allowed to go to Mrs Bettridge’s school; he was gloomy and tearful all day. He awoke the next morning, but was deprived of the chance to read once again: ‘It was my first sorrow.’ He was so anxious that a servant took him to see Mrs Bettridge in her basement apartments. She was on her deathbed. William remained with her, until he heard that John Wesley was coming to visit her. His father had spoken of Wesley – the founder of the Methodists – as ‘the Old Devil’, and Hone had ‘a most terrific idea of this satanic personage’. The thought of actually meeting him was too much.

I turned and gazed in stupor at my poor Dame, until the sound of his footsteps startled me to attempt instant escape, but before I could reach the door I saw the black legs, and great silver buckles, coming down the stairs, and there came into the room a venerable man, his long, silvery hair flowing upon his shoulders, his countenance cheerful and smiling and ruddy as a youth’s, and his eyes beaming kindness.

He knew that appearances could be deceptive, that this was no doubt ‘Satan coming as an angel of light’. But John Wesley brought tranquillity to the old lady, and the ‘room seemed illuminated by his presence’. Young William was overcome when they began to pray: ‘my tears flowed, and then I dropped upon my knees weeping, but feeling happy, I knew not why’. When he came to leave, Wesley put his hand on the trembling boy’s head and said, ‘My child, God bless you, and make you a good man.’ ‘I wondered was this “the Old Devil”?,’ Hone said. It was a formative...