Adjacent Cultures and Political Jugglery

Churms, Stephanie Elizabeth

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04810-5_3

Stephanie Elizabeth Churms⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print ((PERCP))

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Abstract

In a period of intense political upheaval and uncertainty, many turned to the village conjuror for predictions, protection and a sense of stability and continuity. On a national level, Edmund Burke, alarmed by the political theology of Richard Price’s radical sermon of 1789, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, characterised the dissenting preacher as a conjuror who entranced his congregation with revolutionary rhetoric. Thomas Paine’s rejoinder was to accuse Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France itself of political jugglery in the form of Burke’s use of transformative metaphor. This chapter investigates the discourses of the Revolution Controversy, revealing how both revolutionaries and reactionaries armed themselves with a discourse that denoted their rivals’ proximity to popular magic.

A version of the material in this, and the following, chapter was published as an article, as follows: Stephanie Churms, ‘“There was One Man at Llyswen that could Conjure”: John Thelwall – Cunning Man’, Romanticism, Vol. 19, No. 2 (2013), 197–206.

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Notes

1.
Thomas Carlyle ‘Miscellanies II’, The Collected Works of Thomas Carlyle in 16 Volumes (London: Chapman & Hall, 1857), IV, 259.
2.
Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 13.
3.
Marilyn Butler, Burke , Paine , Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2.
4.
See Paton-Williams, Katterfelto; Lydia Syson, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed (Surrey: Alma Books, 2008); Iain McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro (London: Arrow Books, 2004).
5.
Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 295.
6.
Ibid., 295.
7.
The Freemasons claimed to be loyalist and, while Baron Swedenborg may have inspired radically-minded individuals, his own visions were of a spiritual rather than political import. See Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 321–6.
8.
Abbé Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. Robert Clifford (London: T. Burton, 1798), II, 48.
9.
John Robison, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies (London: T. Cadell, 1798), 269.
10.
Kleber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 321.
11.
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Oxford: Oxford World Classics, 2009).
12.
See, for instance, Alison Winter, Mesmerised: Powers of mind in Victorian Britain (London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 119.
13.
See Kléber Monod, Solomon’s Secret Arts, 305–13 and Mike Jay, The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and his Visionary Madness (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 146–53.
14.
Jay, The Air Loom Gang, 146.
15.
See McCalman, The Seven Ordeals of Count Cagliostro.
16.
See Paton-Williams, Katterfelto, 175–89 for a detailed itinerary of Katterfelto’s provincial tours. A minister in Grantham had linked Katterfelto’s arrival in Lincolnshire with a falling meteor, and The Chester Chronicle of January 1791 reported the views of those who believed that he was guilty of conjuring inclement weather: ‘such is the potency of the great Dr. Katterfelto’s magic that many continue to charge him with having raised the late winds’. The Cumberland Pacquet of 1790 stated that ‘many of the lower class of people, who have seen his exhibition, will have it that he is the DEVIL’. See Paton-Williams, Katterfelto, 85.
17.
Breslaw’s Last Legacy or the Conjuror Unmasked (J. Barker: London, 1794), iii. As a magician, Breslaw may have dismissed popular magic, but his Last Legacy contains advice on fortune-telling. His claim that the divinations he describes are ‘innocent’ and ‘much better than for a young woman to tell her secrets to a fortune-teller, who can inform her no better, if she pays a shilling for the intelligence’ suggests that he was sceptical of practitioners, rather than of future-telling itself. See 104.
18.
Report from the Committee of Secrecy, of the House of Commons in Ireland, as Reported Aug. 21, 1798, quoted in Barruel, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, IV, 604.
19.
See J. F. C Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism 1780–1850 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 3–4.
20.
In a letter of late October 1794 Southey stated that ‘tomorrow I am to be introduced to a prophet!’ Clarke Garrett has argued that ‘the prophet was almost certainly William Bryan’. See Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and French Revolution in France and England (London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1975), 175.
21.
William Bryan, ‘A Testimony of the Spirit of Truth Concerning Richard Brothers’, Prophetical Passages, Concerning the Present Times, in which the Person, Character, Mission &c. &c. of Richard Brothers, is Clearly Pointed at as the Elijah of the Present Day, the Bright Star to Guide the Hebrews (London: G. Riebau, 1795), 5–6.
22.
Jon Mee, ‘Anxieties of Enthusiasm: Coleridge, Prophecy and Popular Politics in the 1790s’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 60 (1997), 179–203, 184. For a more detailed explanation of Enthusiasm and its political role during the 1790s, see Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation, and Dangerous Enthusiasm.
23.
Ecce Homo. Critical remarks on the infamous publications of John Parkins of Little Gonerby near Grantham (Grantham, 1819).
24.
Harrison, The Second Coming, 54.
25.
Curry, Prophecy and Power, 116.
26.
Harrison, The Second Coming, 47.
27.
Val Lewis, Satan’s Mistress: The Extraordinary Story of the 18th Century Fanatic Joanna Southcott and her Lifelong Battle with the Devil (Middlesex: Nauticalia, 1997), 66.
28.
Lewis, Satan’s Mistress, 21–2.
29.
Ibid., 53.
30.
The Richards also looked to Southcott for healing charms in the 1790s. Written parchments were to be placed inside the bonnet of the afflicted and worn until the aliment – in Mrs. Richard’s case, a migraine – was alleviated. See Lewis, Satan’s Mistress, 21–2 and 66.
31.
Joanna Southcott, A Dispute Between the Woman and the Powers of Darkness (London, 1802).
32.
James K. Hopkins, A Woman to Deliver her People: Joanna Southcott and English Millenarianism in an Era of Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 27.
33.
Joanna Southcott, The Second Book of Wonders Marvellous and True (London: Marchant and Galabin, 1813), 108.
34.
Harrison, The Second Coming, 50.
35.
Sibly, A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences, 54.
36.
Parkins, Universal Fortune Teller, xiv.
37.
Ibid., 115.
38.
Perhaps drawn by John Nixon. See David Duff, ‘Burke and Paine: Contrasts’, The Cambridge Companion to British Literature of the French Revolution, ed. Pamela Clemit (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2011), 57–8.
39.
The Life and Mysterious Transactions of Richard Morris , 36.
40.
Draper Hill, Mr Gillray the Caricaturist (London: Phaidon Press, 1965), 42.
41.
Davies, Popular Magic, .25.
42.
Burke, Reflections , 130.
43.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Vindications, ed. D. L. Macdonald & Kathleen Scherf (Essex: Broadview Press, 2001), 67.
44.
Richard Price, ‘A Discourse on the Love of Our Country’, Burke , Paine , Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 23–32, 29.
45.
Burke, Reflections , 253.
46.
Frans De Bruyn, The Literary Genres of Edmund Burke : The Political Uses of Literary Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 141.
47.
Burke, Reflections , 155, (my emphasis).
48.
Ibid., 260, (my emphasis).
49.
Butler, Burke , Paine , Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, 24.
50.
Burke, Reflections , 224.
51.
Ibid.
52.
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London: J. Dodsley, 1767), 317.
53.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 405.
54.
Steven Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event (London: Brown University Press, 1988), 61–2.
55.
Tom Furniss, Edmund Burke ’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 105.
56.
Furniss, Burke ’s Aesthetic Ideology, 103.
57.
Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language, 103.
58.
Ibid., 68–9.
59.
Ibid., 101.
60.
Ibid., (my emphasis).
61.
Tom Furniss, ‘Rhetoric in Revolution: The Role of Language in Paine’s Critique of Burke’ Revolution and English Romanticism: Politics and Rhetoric, ed. Keith Hanley and Raman Selden (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), 23–48, 24.
62.
Butler, Burke , Paine , Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, 109.
63.
Marilyn Butler’s introduction to Paine’s Rights of Man queries the number of copies sold as estimated by several scholars, but the approximate figure for parts I and II lies between one and two hundred thousand; an impressive number.
64.
Thomas Paine, Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 62.
65.
Paine, Political Writings, 125.
66.
Phillips, D. Rhys, History of the Vale of Neath (Swansea: D.R. Phillips, 1925), 582–3, quoted in Davies, Popular Magic, 22.
67.
Paine, Political Writings, 89.
68.
Ibid., 137.
69.
Davies, Popular Magic, 70.
70.
Blakemore, Burke and the Fall of Language, 72.
71.
Furniss, ‘The Role of Language in Paine’s Critique of Burke’, 29.
72.
Butler, Burke , Paine , Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, 179.
73.
Hannah More, ‘Village Politics’, Burke , Paine , Godwin and the Revolution Controversy, ed. Marilyn Butler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 179–84, 183.

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Stephanie Elizabeth Churms

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Churms, S.E. (2019). Adjacent Cultures and Political Jugglery. In: Romanticism and Popular Magic. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04810-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04810-5_3
Published: 17 January 2019
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