The Poetry and the Politics: Radical Reform in Victorian England by Gregory James & James Gregory

Author:Gregory James & James Gregory [James, Gregory & Gregory, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Great Britain, History, Europe, General
ISBN: 9780857724953
Google: 1eeKDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-10-10T12:12:18+00:00

In late April 1849 Duncan’s presence was reported in the Northern Star, at the Chartist journalist Edmund Stallwood’s lecture on the writings of Thomas Paine at the Assembly Rooms, 21 Golden-lane, Cripplegate, supporting a motion of thanks to the lecturer, and reciting an ode in memory of Paine, who had died in 1809.78 Paine, part of the inheritance of metropolitan radicalism, gave his name to one metropolitan Chartist ‘locality’, and was the subject of a lecture by Thomas Cooper in aid of the Chartist victim fund, in early 1849, an anonymous poem in the Northern Star, a biography published by William James Linton, and a birthday festival at John Street Institute.79 An anonymous poem, but written by William Edmonstone Aytoun, entitled ‘The Golden Age’, which was published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in 1852, recalled: ‘With gibbering glee the ghost of Thomas Paine | Heard the old watchwords thrill the streets again, and eager Chartists murmured as they ran | “The Age of Reason and the Rights of Man!”’ (the poet also mentioned the London minstrels, ‘shrining’ the ‘foul Megaera’ in their lays).80

On 23 July 1849 Duncan attempted to address a meeting at the London Tavern in Bishopsgate Street in the City, a popular venue for public meetings, which was intending to consider the ‘present condition of Hungary’: Richard Cobden, Lord Nugent, Lord Dudley Stuart and other Liberal MPs, were on the platform, to respond to the ‘interference of a neighbouring power with an independent nation’. Unfortunately, Duncan, and the Chartist leader and writer G.W.M. Reynolds, decided to interrupt and interfere with this meeting – Reynolds to discuss the political divisions in Britain, Duncan to mount the platform – and the chairman, Reynolds, and Duncan in vain endeavoured to obtain a hearing together. The Era declared it ‘the most turbulent meeting’ ever held in the City of London. It was, in fact, ‘a complete bear garden from beginning to end,’ with Cobden, the Liberal MP Ralph Bernal Osborne and others, leaving the meeting at the height of the disturbance.81

Duncan was absent from the newspapers for several months after that – perhaps involved in the production of his journal The Divinearian. Then, in 14 January 1850 he was again causing disarray at an evening meeting, this time the first metropolitan gathering of the National Charter Association at the London Tavern: the venue filled with working men and their wives (‘carrying in their arms infants of tender years’) and, ‘to judge by their bearded visages, … a few foreign sympathizers,’ with Feargus O’Connor taking the chair.82 After various addresses were given, by Reynolds, Philip M’Grath, William John Vernon (the forty-year-old lecturer in mesmerism and phrenology imprisoned in 1848, who had just been released83), George Julian Harney and Samuel Kydd, Duncan had leapt up on his chair in front of the platform, perhaps stimulated by Harney’s sanguine comments on French red republicanism (Harney launched the journal Red Republican in that year), ‘and with his arms thrown out and his eyes staring wildly over an

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