Read Online The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Paul Collins
Ads: Link
husband was finally let out of jail after a four-month term, the married couple simply carried on with their insolence. More indictments: more books and newspapers. They even moved into larger quarters at 55 Fleet Street. Richard Carlile just kept contemptuously laughing off the government penalties: he didn't care.
But soon he came to care a great deal about the heavy hand of the government. In August 1819, while Cobbett was still sitting in a Long Island cottage and pondering when best to dig up his old enemy, Carlile was sharing a stage in Manchester with other reformist speakers gathered together for a massive rally. Upwards of fifty thousand Manchester workers turned out on St. Peter's Fields to hear them. It was a joyous day: noisemakers and impromptu instruments sang out as the workers marched in, carrying aloft handsome blue and green banners reading SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL and LIBERTY AND FRATERNITY. Another demanded EQUAL REPRESENTATION OR DEATH.
The government chose the latter. Carlile watched in horror as the cavalry made a charge upon the crowd, slashing and stabbing with their sabers in a melee that left eleven dead and hundreds injured. A woman in front of Carlile, clutching a newborn infant, was "sabred over the head, and her tender offspring drenched in its mother's blood." Carlile barely escaped with his life from what was quickly dubbed "Peterloo"; hiding incognito in a carriage omnibus filled with right-thinking stouthearted Englishmen, he found himself having to pass around a flask and join in a toast heartily damning himself, praying as he drank his shot that nobody would recognize him. His blistering account of Peterloo, published upon returning to London, accused the government of nothing less than cold-blooded and calculated murder to terrorize the populace. "Every stone was gathered from the ground on the Friday and Saturday previous to the meeting," he bitterly reported, "by the scavengers sent there by the express command of the magistrates, that the populace might be rendered more defenseless."
Public outrage over Peterloo was still palpable when Cobbett arrived back with his infamous box of bones. Like an unexploded bomb, Paine's ideas were now newly unearthed and ready to detonate, and they had to be kept out of the hands of the citizenry. Carlile had been the most outrageous instigator of allâeven having the gall to read all of Paine's Rights of Man aloud as evidence, in a clever attempt to be able to publish it againâyet again !âunder the guise of a courtroom transcript. And this from a man who by his own admission had already sold nearly five thousand copies of this pernicious book. Judge Bailey decided to make an example of Carlile: it was time to throw the book at the bookseller.
". . . 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 thenâhe 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
But soon he came to care a great deal about the heavy hand of the government. In August 1819, while Cobbett was still sitting in a Long Island cottage and pondering when best to dig up his old enemy, Carlile was sharing a stage in Manchester with other reformist speakers gathered together for a massive rally. Upwards of fifty thousand Manchester workers turned out on St. Peter's Fields to hear them. It was a joyous day: noisemakers and impromptu instruments sang out as the workers marched in, carrying aloft handsome blue and green banners reading SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL and LIBERTY AND FRATERNITY. Another demanded EQUAL REPRESENTATION OR DEATH.
The government chose the latter. Carlile watched in horror as the cavalry made a charge upon the crowd, slashing and stabbing with their sabers in a melee that left eleven dead and hundreds injured. A woman in front of Carlile, clutching a newborn infant, was "sabred over the head, and her tender offspring drenched in its mother's blood." Carlile barely escaped with his life from what was quickly dubbed "Peterloo"; hiding incognito in a carriage omnibus filled with right-thinking stouthearted Englishmen, he found himself having to pass around a flask and join in a toast heartily damning himself, praying as he drank his shot that nobody would recognize him. His blistering account of Peterloo, published upon returning to London, accused the government of nothing less than cold-blooded and calculated murder to terrorize the populace. "Every stone was gathered from the ground on the Friday and Saturday previous to the meeting," he bitterly reported, "by the scavengers sent there by the express command of the magistrates, that the populace might be rendered more defenseless."
Public outrage over Peterloo was still palpable when Cobbett arrived back with his infamous box of bones. Like an unexploded bomb, Paine's ideas were now newly unearthed and ready to detonate, and they had to be kept out of the hands of the citizenry. Carlile had been the most outrageous instigator of allâeven having the gall to read all of Paine's Rights of Man aloud as evidence, in a clever attempt to be able to publish it againâyet again !âunder the guise of a courtroom transcript. And this from a man who by his own admission had already sold nearly five thousand copies of this pernicious book. Judge Bailey decided to make an example of Carlile: it was time to throw the book at the bookseller.
". . . 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 thenâhe 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
Similar Books
