A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama Read Free Book Online Page A

women, both genteel and middle class, and even domestic servants who were said to sit in the back rows of Dr Richard Price’s meeting house on Newington Green in London.
    That parliament needed reform was obvious. The electorate was actually 3 per cent smaller than it had been before the Civil War; there were rotten boroughs, like Old Sarum with an electorate of seven, which still returned a member. ‘Placemen’ bought their seats on the understanding that they would vote with the government; and the newly populous towns were grossly under-represented. But was the unreformed parliament beyond redemption? The first and most intensely felt complaint was the narrowness with which the Act of Toleration enacted in 1689 had been construed. The Dissenters wanted more than just to be allowed to worship; they wanted full civil equality – the abolition of the Test Acts, which denied them access to public office. (The Tory view was that Toleration had only been granted in the first place on condition that that was all that would be given.) But the reformers were forced to concede that there were occasions when ‘Old Corruption’ could be moved to act on their urgent appeals, especially when the issue was moral rather than political. In response to the campaign for climbing boys (which inspired Blake’s poem ‘The Chimney Sweeper’, 1789), an act was passed in 1788 prohibiting the employment of children under the age of eight and sending them up a lit chimney. It also stipulated that they should be washed at least once a week. But the Act was largely unenforced, and for those people who were most concerned about the fate of the poor, it was not nearly enough. Attempts to reform poor relief based on the system adopted by the Berkshire parish of Speenhamland, which, in an effort to keep paupers from the workhouse, linked a wage supplement, funded from the parish rates, to the price of bread, depended entirely on the goodwill of local communities. To the critics, this was just sending the problem back to the consideration of those most likely to ignore it.
    When Thomas Bewick began work as an engraver’s apprentice in Newcastle, he smoked pipes and drank ale with well-read, articulate young men who had no hesitation in sounding off about the wicked indifference of the high and mighty. The most radical of all was the diminutive, pugnacious school-teacher Thomas Spence, whom Bewick described as ‘one of the warmest philanthropists in the world. The happiness of mankind seemed with him to absorb every other consideration. He was of a cheerful disposition, warm in his attachment to his friends, and in his patriotism to his country; but he was violent against people whom he considered of an opposite character.’ In the spirit of the Diggers of the 1650s, Spence had become convinced that all modern ills emanated from the original evil of ownership of land. He declaimed his communism at a debating society (one of thousands formed all around the provinces in this period, including some in London, expressly for women) that held its sessions in Spence’s schoolroom on the Broad Garth. Although he evidently warmed to Spence’s enthusiasm and to his ‘sincere and honest’ concern for the unfortunate, Bewick believed his ideas dangerously Utopian, fit for some ‘uninhabited country’ but shockingly wrong in presuming to ‘take from people what is their own’. On one day the argument got over-heated and the two moved from angry words to cudgels. ‘He did not know that I was a proficient in cudgel playing, and I soon found that he was very defective. After I had blackened the insides of his thighs and arms, he became quite outrageous and acted very unfairly, which obliged me to give him a severe beating.’
    But while property for Bewick remained very definitely sacred, there was much else about the self-satisfaction of the ruling order that angered him. For those meeting and debating the present and several ills of the country at