An Everyday Life of the English Working Class : Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century 9781107504134, 9781107046214

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An Everyday Life of the English Working Class

This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a small English village at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing and writing the world around him, and on the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering justice from his country house Clifton Hall. Using Woolley’s voluminous diaries and Clifton’s magistrate records, Carolyn Steedman gives us a unique and fascinating account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending. Through Woolley and his thoughts on reading and drinking, sex, the law, and social relations, she challenges traditional accounts which she argues have overstated the importance of work to the working man’s understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place, and society. She shows instead that, for men like Woolley, law and fiction were just as critical as work in framing everyday life. c a r o l y n s t e e d m a n is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Warwick. Her recent publications include Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (2007) and Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (2009).

An Everyday Life of the English Working Class Work, Self and Sociability in the Early Nineteenth Century Carolyn Steedman

University Printing House, Cambridge CB2 8BS, United Kingdom Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107670297 © Carolyn Steedman 2013 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2013 Printed in the United Kingdom by Clays, St Ives plc A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Steedman, Carolyn. An everyday life of the English working class : work, self and sociability in the early nineteenth century / Carolyn Steedman. pages cm ISBN 978-1-107-04621-4 (Hardback) – ISBN 978-1-107-67029-7 (Paperback) 1. Woolley, Joseph–Diaries. 2. Working class–Great Britain–History– 19th century. 3. Working class–Great Britain–Social conditions– 19th century. 4. Nottingham (England)–Social conditions–19th century. 5. Great Britain–History–1800–1837. I. Title. HD8389.S74 2013 305.50 62094209034–dc23 2013021428 ISBN 978-1-107-04621-4 Hardback ISBN 978-1-107-67029-7 Paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of my father Ellis Kay Pilling 1904–1977

Though we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life; nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writers, who profess to disclose the revolutions of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian, who, to preserve the regularity of his series, thinks himself obliged to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing much remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable æras when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage . . . it is our purpose in the ensuing pages to pursue . . . [this] method. When any extraordinary scene presents itself, (as we trust will often be the case) we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large . . . but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy of notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. By Henry Fielding, Esq. In Three Volumes, T. Longman, B. Law & Son and 14 others, London 1792, Volume I, Book II, Chapter 1, Shewing what Kind of History this is; what it is like, and what it is not like.

Contents

List of illustrations List of tables Acknowledgements A note on texts and transcription Prologue: what are they like? 1

page viii ix x xi 1

An introduction, shewing what kind of history this is; what it is like, and what it is not like

13

2

Books do furnish a mind

29

3

Family and friends

54

4

Fears as loyons: drinking and fighting

79

5

Sex and the single man

100

6

Talking law

122

7

Earthly powers

150

8

Getting and spending

172

9

Knitting and frames

201

10

The knocking at the gate: General Ludd

225

11

Some conclusions: writing everyday

250

Bibliography Index

261 291

vii

Illustrations

Figure 1a.

Map of Nottinghamshire, from the best Authorities, engraved by J. Carey, 1805. Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. page xii Figure 1b. Rushcliffe Hundred, Nottinghamshire (detail from Figure 1a). 5 Figure 2. Joseph Woolley’s diary, entry for 23 November 1803. Nottinghamshire County Council: Nottinghamshire Archives. 59 Figure 3a. Joseph Woolley’s accounts, November 1803. Nottinghamshire County Council: Nottinghamshire Archives. 62 Figure 3b. Joseph Woolley’s accounts, November 1803. Nottinghamshire County Council: Nottinghamshire Archives. 62 Figure 4. Joseph Woolley’s diary for November 1803. Nottinghamshire County Council: Nottinghamshire Archives. 63 Figure 5. Sir Gervase Clifton’s (only) recorded magisterial business in 1803. Nottinghamshire County Council: Nottinghamshire Archives. 123 Figure 6. Clifton Hall, from Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire, by John Throsby, 1797. © British Library Board. 151

viii

Tables

Table 1. Table 2.

Incidents noted by magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, c. 1770–1815 Joseph Woolley’s expenditure in October 1801, 1803, 1804, 1809, 1813, 1815

page 128 190

ix

Acknowledgements

Professor Stanley Chapman of Southwell, Nottinghamshire read my transcription of Joseph Woolley’s diaries and illuminated them by his deep knowledge of Nottinghamshire’s hosiery and knitwear industry and stocking-making communities. Above all I value his view that the Woolley diaries constitute an extraordinary document of ordinary life at the turn of the English nineteenth century. He was more than generous with his time and his thinking. I am deeply grateful to him. Professor Jeremy Gregory (Manchester) helped me (yet again) understand what I needed to know about the established church in the long eighteenth century – its lay personnel this time. My warmest thanks. Professor Margot Finn (UCL), Dr Emma Griffin (UEA), and Dr Laura Schwarz (Warwick) read an almost-there draft of this book for me. There is such . . . shamelessness in asking friends and colleagues to undertake such heavy, time-consuming labour. But I did ask, and they undertook. By their acute comments, much criticism, and the disagreements among them about the relative weight to be given to Joseph Woolley over Gervase Clifton, they made it a much better thing than it was. It was very late in the day indeed that I understood contradictory advice as the most fertile ground for writing. I appreciate their interventions; I am very much in their debt. I am very grateful indeed to Joanna Innes, from whose interventions this book has also much benefited. Two anonymous readers helped me shape a final version. Only they will know how very much I owe them – how they saved me from myself.

x

A note on texts and transcription

There is discussion of Joseph Woolley’s and Sir Gervase Clifton’s notebooks throughout. The fullest account of Woolley’s is in Chapter 11. All quotations from their writing retain original spelling, punctuation, and capitalisation. I have not preserved original line endings. Ellipses indicate my omissions; square brackets enclose my additions, which are restricted to an occasional correctly spelled word or date, and [?] to indicate uncertainty about the texts. I have, however, imposed uniformity on the monetary values recorded by both. So when Woolley wrote ‘hair cuting 1 0’, I have always used ‘1s 0d’. I have attempted clarity with a magistrate, a clergyman, and a village all called ‘Clifton’.

xi

Figure 1a. Map of Nottinghamshire, from the best Authorities, engraved by J. Carey, 1805

Prologue: what are they like?

This book concerns two men, a stockingmaker and a magistrate, who both lived in a framework-knitting village just south of Nottingham at the turn of the nineteenth century. It focuses on Joseph Woolley the stockingmaker, on his way of seeing, and on the way he framed his own experience in writing. His experience included the activities of magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, administering summary justice (and other kinds of justice too) from his country house, Clifton Hall, which stood close by the village in which Woolley worked his knitting frame. Both men wrote, but produced very different kinds of writing. Woolley’s private diaries and accounts total nearly 100,000 words; from the 1770s onwards Clifton kept much briefer records of his work as a magistrate. Their writing coincides for six years between 1800 and 1815. In this book, the magistrate’s writing is used to contextualise and confirm what the working man had to say about everyday life and labour, men and women, sex, love, and the law, in early nineteenthcentury Nottinghamshire. Joseph Woolley’s diaries have been in the public domain since 1992, when they were deposited in Nottinghamshire County Record Office. Twenty years before that, a local historical society had borrowed them from a surviving Woolley family member; members discussed and transcribed the diaries between 1973 and 1977, though the Clifton Society transcription (and others, apparently produced in the 1980s and 1990s by local historians) were not made available to the public.1 So Joseph Woolley’s (untranscribed) writing made its first public appearance on the deposition of his diaries in Nottinghamshire Archives, in a period when interest in labour and working-class history was on the wane among academic historians working and writing within the frame of

1

Nottinghamshire Archives (hereafter NA) DD 1979/1, Clifton Historical Society Minutes, 1973–7. Also Family History UK, Nottinghamshire, www.forum. familyhistory.uk.com/showthread.php?t=4861

1

2

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post-structuralism and cultural studies.2 The historiographical timing of the diaries’ deposition may account for the little attention paid them by historians interested in the history of emotion, masculinity, sexuality, violence, and the everyday life of the English working class. They are, on the other hand, widely known among local historians and genealogists of the East Midlands, and among historians of the hosiery and knitwear manufacture. (Though ‘very useful on the everyday life of working people in the period . . . not a lot on framework knitting’, notes Denise Amos at the Nottinghamshire Heritage Gateway website.3) Joseph Woolley’s volumes of accounts and anecdotes do indeed allow unprecedented access to ordinary, everyday, working-class life in the era of Luddism. But there was a time, right at the beginning, when I first started work on his diaries, when I felt ambivalent about the stockingmaker. I was used to mixed feelings when writing about lives lived in historical time. I found the campaigning socialist journalist Margaret McMillan (1860–1931) one of the most irritating people I have ever encountered, though I still think that her political project was impeccable (or as impeccable as – say – Keir Hardie’s) and her analysis of the relationship between nutrition and culture in working-class life, quite profound.4 In the case of the radical policeman and soldier John Pearman (1819–1908) I felt a deep respect and admiration for a working-class man who kept his political opinions to himself through his quarter-century as a policeman, and who possessed such original powers of analysis in regard to the imperialism he had earlier served as a soldier in India. Whilst I spent much of my time when transcribing his memoirs and tracking down the radical literature he read thanking God that I wasn’t married to him (there is enough about Rose Pearman in his ‘Memoir’ to suggest that life with him was a rather dispiriting affair) I also frequently exclaimed: Yes! You are so right! (in your analysis of class and imperialism). I learned a good deal from John Pearman. I understand that a lot of my early trouble with Joseph Woolley was to do with ways in which, in my imagination, he fell short of the measure set by Pearman. And John Pearman’s ‘Memoir’ was much easier to work with than were Joseph Woolley’s diaries. It was shorter (6,000 words as opposed to 100,000), it was written in a very short space of time, and it was

2 3 4

David Feldman and Jon Lawrence (eds.), Structures and Transformations in Modern British History, Cambridge University Press, 2011. Denise Amos, ‘Framework Knitters’, www.nottsheritagegateway.org.uk/people/ Carolyn Steedman, Childhood, Culture and Class in Britain: Margaret MacMillan, 1860– 1931, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1990.

Prologue: what are they like?

3

focused on ideas. Pearman was concerned to relate his experience as a member of the uniformed working class to what he had learned about the British imperial state. He read widely in the free-thought and radical press, and though he did not name his sources, they were easy enough to find. It was easy to measure his growing republicanism, his atheism, and his socialism against imperial events of 1880–3, and to follow him as he reinterpreted his role as agent of the British military state in its annexation of the Punjabi territories after the Sikh Wars (1845–9). He did not write about his drinking, or about fighting – or about his work as policeman (or as the sawyer and railway worker he had been before he enlisted). He did not write about the sex life of his locality. He did not write anything at all about his friends and neighbours, whilst Woolley’s writing pullulates with them. Pearman did not write a diary; he wrote what he said he wrote: a memoir. It was short enough for a publisher to think a book largely made up of literal transcription of it a good idea. My intervention in Pearman’s writing was restricted to an introduction and some detailed annotation. The feeling of having behaved as honourably as a historian can – of really letting Pearman ‘speak for himself’ – was deeply gratifying. I still think it the most satisfying work I have ever done.5 It is not possible to proceed in this way with Joseph Woolley’s diaries – because of their length and their arbitrary detailing of the minutiae of everyday life. Many pages are taken up with his accounts. The Woolley diaries are not sustained by the articulation of one main idea as was Pearman’s writing (‘Oh John Bull you are a great rouge [rogue]’).6 Here I have tried to compensate for my position as reluctant gatekeeper of Woolley’s words by quoting as much as I think a reader (and my prose) can bear. This confession is provoked by the recent ethical turn in historical studies. There are questions now about the historian’s responsibilities to the dead and gone that were not asked – that were not conceptualised – in the 1980s. Beyond the post-structural, cultural, linguistic, subjective, and archival ‘turns’ in historical studies, and beyond historiographical questions asked from the postcolony about the West as the Subject, or ‘I’, of historical writing, historians have started to question their relationship to their subjects, asking juridical questions to do with rights, duties, obligation, and ownership.7 Who owns history? Who has the 5 6 7

Carolyn Steedman, The Radical Soldier’s Tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908, Routledge, London, 1988. Steedman, Radical Soldier’s Tale, p. 206. See the 21st International Congress of the Historical Sciences (Amsterdam, August 2010), Panel on ‘Who Owns History?’ (especially Anton de Baets, ‘Posthumous Privacy’), and Panel on ‘The Rights of the Dead’. www.ichs2010.org/home.asp

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right to speak for the dead? For particular categories of the dead?8 New protocols of imagining and writing have emerged from Holocaust history and sociology – from the event that ‘resisted . . . long-standing frameworks of historical reasoning, development, and emplotment . . . Who can claim the moral ground to consider the meaning . . . of the lives and deaths of others?’9 Some argue that Holocaust history and sociology underpin both the subjective and ethical turns in historical studies. ‘I have not always written [personally]’ says Leo Spitzer, discussing historical representations of the Holocaust. He explains that academic historians like him tend to avoid the personal voice: ‘a seamless narrative and impersonal, omniscient, historical voice’ usually masks ‘the constructed nature of historical inquiry and writing’. He wanted ‘to show how the historian is invested in the construction of a historical account – how he or she shapes and constructs it as an embodied being, with a subjectivity and personal history that need to be taken into account’; he started to resist the conventions of historywriting.10 Perhaps I was trained in the production of seamless narratives and to use an impersonal historical voice (though I do not remember such training). Rather, I was schooled to understand historical research and writing as a form of political thinking, from my earliest days in a perfectly ordinary South London girls’ grammar school. At twelve I was asked to write about whether or not (having taken all arguments into consideration) I would have signed the death warrant for Charles I in 1649; at fourteen to discuss my relationship to the Jacobite cause and the rebellion of 1745. These were history lessons founded on the injunction to know which side you’re on. I cannot be on any side of Sir Gervase Clifton (I am indifferent to him, rather than disliking him); but I evidently do believe myself to be on Joseph Woolley’s side. I ought to have liked him, right from the beginning. Why did I not? Was I disappointed at his not being (or not appearing to have been) a Luddite? But comfortably placed university historians have no right to disapprove of those who had not the wherewithal to

8

9 10

Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (eds.), Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in Historiography, Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main (distributed by the University of Chicago Press), 2010. Daniel William Cohen, ‘Memories of Things Future: Future Effects in “The Production of History”’, in Jobs and Lüdtke (eds.), Unsettling History, pp. 29–49; this quotation p. 43. Julia Baker, ‘A Conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’, in Christina Guenther and Beth A. Griech-Polelle (eds.), Trajectories of Memory: Intergenerational Representations of the Holocaust in History and the Arts, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2008, pp. 3–12.

Prologue: what are they like?

5

Figure 1b. Rushcliffe Hundred, Nottinghamshire (detail from Figure 1a)

become working-class heroes (or heroines). Neither did I have the right to feel offended at his apparent misogyny, or to be bored by his interminable narratives of drunken nights out and pub-yard fights. I knew all of that. I should have been simply grateful to him for allowing unprecedented access to the everyday of an early nineteenth-century Midlands county. I was grateful, right from the start, that he did not come with a story of suffering as his passport to the historical record: he was not an abject child-labourer, child-murdering maidservant in the condemned cell, pauper pleading for relief before a magistrate, for whom I must feel the diminishing, subordinating impulse of

6

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sympathy.11 I did not have to (or want to) rescue this ‘poor stockinger . . . from the enormous condescension of posterity’.12 When I finally understood that my relationship with him did not have to be shaped by my superior sentiments of sympathy, I began to like him a lot more. And then I transcribed. I copied out, in my own writing, Joseph Woolley’s words, slowing my reading to the pace at which he had put them on the page. Transcription makes you read very thoroughly indeed – for the spaces and absences, the intended ironies, the literary allusions, the jokes. You discard your earlier presumptions and assumptions; a man is revealed as no misogynist at all, but as a writer who empathised with the difficulties of many women’s lives, who noticed violent and deeply unhappy sexual relationships and recorded them, who wrote about women as if they were the same kind of creatures as men. Someone read through the window of transcription becomes – a writer. Thinking of the eighteenth-century British philosophes and friends with whom he spent time when working on Enlightenment, Roy Porter said that he found their company and their conversation congenial: ‘I savour their pithy prose, and feel . . . in tune with these warm, witty, clubbable men.’13 But I never could have looked forward to an evening with Joseph Woolley down the Coach and Horses. Nor he to one with me, for that matter. Joining him in the Clifton public house would have been far too much like meeting my father for a drink in the Horse and Groom, Streatham High Road, c. 1967, friends and I, all of us home from university for Christmas. An old charmer with an authentic working-class background and a fund of stories about Up North, he charmed them all. Many years later the stories would turn out to have 11

12 13

Leora Auslander discusses the power of historians and archivists of post-Shoah memory to make immortal ordinary people whose stories of suffering are a passport to the historical record in a way their everyday life would not have been. Being victim or survivor of ‘a world-historical cataclysm changed [their] relation to history; it both generated far more detailed documentary traces than would otherwise have existed, and made people, who would have otherwise have [sic] gone unnoticed, noticeable’. ‘Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies’, in Jobs and Lüdtke (eds.), Unsettling History, pp. 127–48; pp. 129–30. One origin of the social-history mission to ‘rescue’ historical subjects is ‘doing empathy’ as described by Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. By Adam Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, A. Millar, London and A. Kincaid and J. Bell, Edinburgh, 1759. Also Jules Michelet, ‘Préface de l’Histoire de France’ (1869), in Oeuvres complètes, Tome IV, Flammarion, Paris, 1974, pp. 11–127. Susannah Radstone discusses related issues in ‘Trauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics’, Paragraph, 30:1 (2007), pp. 9–29. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [1963], Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 13. Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, Allen Lane at the Penguin Press, London, 2000, p. 6.

Prologue: what are they like?

7

been about . . . leaving (the North, other women besides my mother, a child along the way – and us: the pathetic family of his middle years). But the stories were so bound up in secrets that even their shape was uncertain.14 They still aren’t known; will never be known.15 Then, at the end of his tale, high on audience appreciation, my father cracks a joke, politically incorrect you’d call it now, that silences all of us. And I – in shame and embarrassment – protective of him, defensive – retort silently, defiantly to my friends (I did not say this): ‘Yeah. Well. You want working-class? That’s what you get.’ The added embarrassment of being down the Coach and Horses with Joseph Woolley in October 1801 would have been the unmerciful teasing of his friends, and that some woman, for a laugh, would have emptied a hat full of piss over my head.16 (He and I could always have talked about the books we’d read, as Chapter 2 of this book relates.) My assumption in reading and accounting for Joseph Woolley’s diaries has been not that I have a right to speak for working-class men (dead or alive) out of my superior and experiential knowledge, but that they – my father; Joseph Woolley – will keep their secrets. Most of us round the pub table in 1967 were students of history, currently being schooled in a Thompsonian account of the English working class. Had we known about Joseph Woolley, we would probably have wanted him to be a different kind of working man from the one he actually was. He lived in Nottinghamshire, at the epicentre of the machine breaking crisis of 1811–13, but he does not appear to have been a Luddite. We could not have imagined him thronging the pages of Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, turning experience of labour relations in the stocking trade and the relationships of everyday life into class consciousness (or something like it). We could not have employed him to fill out the contours of ‘the radical artisan’. Ten, twenty years on, there were to be many nineteenth-century workers to occupy our historical imagination, who were not as the workers ought to have been. After Jacques Rancière’s publication of La Nuit des prolétaires in 1981 (translated as Nights of Labor in 1989) there was much agonistic discussion among Anglophone historians (particularly the British) about the book’s artisans, who did not define themselves in relation to their work or their trade, but in 14

15 16

‘Gracious exterior, but the rooms are small and mean / and so papered over with secrets that even their shape / is uncertain, but it is the shape of the past.’ John Ashbery, ‘The Ridiculous Translator’s Hopes’, in Ashbery, And the Stars Were Shining, Cancarnet, Manchester, 1994, p. 16. Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, Virago, London, 1986, pp. 48–61. For teasing, see below p. 255, n. 15; for the hat incident, p. 111.

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relation to a world of ideas.17 Rancière’s workers wrote, but not accounts of their social and labour struggles, not about the making of class; they produced poetry and romantic reveries of childhood. Rancière announced his poets and dreamers in 1979 at a Ruskin History Workshop when he described ‘an important literary movement among French workers in the mid-nineteenth century . . . they wrote poetry . . . gain[ed] their identity through other means than history and memory’.18 A severe difficulty for historians of the British working class was the story Rancière told of their intention, not to ameliorate working conditions and social relations, not (as in some strictly Marxist version of the tale) to organise for a world turned upside down, but rather to read and write themselves into men worthy of the respect of their betters; by writing, to become full citizens of the republic of letters. Rancière was to call ‘into question the projections of proletarian authenticity only recently constructed by social historians around the figure of the radical artisan’.19 The historical story of the radical artisan, the one we were in the process of acquiring in 1967, would be undone by a ‘philosopher-historian . . . question[ing] the significance of workplace changes, skill loss, trade unionism as response, and more deeply . . . [casting] doubt upon the conceptual verities that have been associated with the word “artisan”’.20 But those were historiographical developments of the twenty years after our night in the Horse and Groom. And Joseph Woolley was not even a man like them: he was not like Rancière’s worker-writers. He wrote a diary and account book, not 17

18

19 20

La Nuit des prolétaires: archives du rêve ouvrier, Fayard, Paris, 1981; The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans. John Drury, intro. Donald Reid, Temple University Press, Philadelphia PA, 1989. Jacques Rancière, ‘“Le Social”: The Lost Tradition in French Labour History’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp. 267–72. Geoff Eley, A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005, p. 162. ‘Book Reviews’, Oral History Review, 20:1/2 (1992), p. 124. For skilled labour / the labour aristocracy in relation to the historiography of organised labour: Geoffrey Crossick, ‘The Labour Aristocracy and its Values: A Study of Mid-Victorian Kentish London’, Victorian Studies, 19 (1976), pp. 301–28; H. F. Moorhouse, ‘The Marxist Theory of the Labour Aristocracy’, Social History, 3:1 (1978), pp. 61–82; Joe Melling, ‘Aristocrats and Artisans’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 39 (1979), pp. 16–22; Robbie Grey, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850–1900, Macmillan, London, 1981; John Breuilly, ‘The Labour Aristocracy in Britain and Germany: A Comparison’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 48 (1984), pp. 58–71; John Rule, ‘The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meaning of Work, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 99–118; Keith McClelland, ‘Some Thoughts on Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan” in Britain, 1850–1880’, Gender and History, 1 (1989), pp. 164–77; Derek Matthews, ‘1889 and All That: New Views on the New Unionism’, International Review of Social History, 36 (1991), pp. 24–58.

Prologue: what are they like?

9

poetry, not une rêve d’enfance, not an entry ticket to the republic of letters. Neither did he produce the kind of personal narrative that might be appropriated to the genre of ‘working-class autobiography’, to be read in the 1980s and 1990s as a text of self-formation and identity. He appears not to have shared his writing with anyone else (a wise precaution, given that so many of his 100,000 words concern the sex life of his friends and neighbours) and he did not write for publication. Certainly, in the way of the Nights of Labor artisans, Woolley’s work was not the focus of his emotional life: he did not love his knitting frame, and an artisanal identity was just what came with, and was useful, for the job. He too spent his nights drinking, but with drink and talk the end in view, not intoxication with the written word. His proletarian nights were spent in the Coach and Horses, talking about who was doing what with whom (or, strictly speaking, his Saturday, Sunday, and Monday nights were spent this way; like the majority of stockingmakers working in an outputting system, he earned his living from a very intense four-day week). He was in Luddism, as later chapters of this book will argue (you could not be in Nottinghamshire in 1811–12 and not be in Luddism), but he was not ‘a Luddite’, in the way that its historians have written the Luddites. If you want to account for Joseph Woolley, you must write against many accreted historical assumptions about men like him. Joseph Woolley structured his many character assessments and annals of bad behaviour in South Nottinghamshire, c. 1800–15 by means of the modern comic form ‘What are you/what am I/ like?’ These are rhetorical questions asked of someone who has done something stupid or ridiculous, the answer (usually unspoken) being quite obvious – they are like that. It is also, when asked of oneself, a question that craves an indulgent smile: you know me; I’m just playing my usual part; be tolerant. The interlocutor is not asked to judge, but rather to provide affirmation of another’s traits and peculiarities of behaviour. It is not a serious question; the laugh is embedded: you ask it of having just put the teapot in the fridge – ‘what am I like?’ – or running your car into a gatepost, not of running over a child. In Joseph Woolley’s time and place it was a way of knowing that existed in conjunction with more formal judgements of men and women like him, issued by their social betters. Handbooks to the common law told magistrates what the common people were like: about their habits, manners, and perpetual tendency to noisy violence. Newspaper reporters, novelists, and pamphleteers developed techniques of writing to tell readers what working people were like. These are sometimes all we have, two hundred years on, for the historical interpretation and understanding of the poorer sort. But because Joseph Woolley was a

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writer, we can turn around historical assumptions about men like him, attempt to read the words he wrote without the accreted commentary of his social betters and his historians. That is why this book will begin with Woolley as a reader and writer before he is written as a framework knitter, or an artisan, or a worker. This is done to inscribe a mentalité before putting in place the social and cultural context that also made him what he was. And the magistrate who is the second subject of this book? What of him? What was he like? It is not a question often put by or to members of social elites, who do not need or crave the indulgence of their audiences; so for him, there is what he was. Sir Gervase Clifton, Bart (1744–1815) of Clifton Hall, Clifton, Nottinghamshire came into his Nottinghamshire estates in 1766. He returned home from London with a wife, and to appointment as Sheriff of Nottingham, becoming Deputy Lieutenant of the county in 1793.21 Entered onto the Commission of the Peace, he attended his first meeting of quarter sessions in January 1770.22 Two years later he started to record his business as a single magistrate. Like most magistrates, he spent much more time sitting as a single justice than he did in sessions. He attended twentyfour meetings of quarter sessions between 1770 and 1781, twenty-three of them before the death of his wife and a newborn baby son in 1779.23 He was absent from his estates for most of most years after 1779, so justice, or the opportunity for a good moan about the neighbours, had to be sought elsewhere by the aggrieved of Clifton, Glapton, Wilford, Barton, Ruddington, and the wider district. His notebooks proclaim his last sitting as a JP in November 1810, but Joseph Woolley’s diaries show him to have been active in February 1815, seven months before his death. Seventy-two boxes and forty-six volumes hold the Clifton family and estate papers – correspondence, deeds, manorial records, political papers, and accounts, from the twelfth to the twentieth century.24 But there are no letters, personal writings, diaries, account books, or library inventories to give access to Sir Gervase. He is hidden from view in a way that the framework knitter is not hidden, because of the survival of two very different sets of documents. For Clifton there are two surviving justicing notebooks in 21 22

23 24

Whitehall Evening Post, 29 Nov 1796. St James’s Chronicle & British Evening Post, 22 May 1766; London Chronicle, 14 Feb 1766; London Evening Post, 14 Feb 1766; Gazetteer & New Daily Advertiser, 16 Feb 1766; NA, QSM 1/29, Quarter Sessions Minute Books, Mich. 1767– Mids. 1773 (8 Jan 1770). Lloyd’s Evening Post, 10 Sep 1779; NA, QSM 1/31, Quarter Sessions Minute Books, Mids. 1778–Epiph. 1782 (21 Jan 1781). University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Clifton of Clifton.

Prologue: what are they like?

11

which he recorded (some of) his activity as a magistrate over a forty-year period.25 When the two men’s records coincide, Woolley’s suggest how incomplete were Clifton’s own records of the law he administered. A little after Woolley’s and Clifton’s time, French historian Jules Michelet named History as a Magistrate. All the dead, he said, have left something behind, which is a memory. Some magistrate or other must extend his duty of care for the living to the friendless and disregarded dead. For the dead, for all the lost, miserabiles personae of the past, the law is a much more certain thing than the tears posterity sheds for them. Historians are Michelet’s magistrates; they provide for the dead: ‘Cette magistrature, c’est l’Histoire.’26 In the French legal system, a magistrate is a higher legal position than in the English. English magistrates, then and now, are lay practitioners – really, just administrators – of the law. They used to be without legal training. They do not make law. They are not judges. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the English common law judges made law, by consulting precedent (sometimes by consulting the statutes), and making a new statement about it. The judges’ determinations in the high courts were written up, to be consulted and referred to by magistrates in their everyday administration of the law. That is what a magistrate like Gervase Clifton did: administer the law, largely for the miserabiles personae of his neighbourhood. Joseph Woolley and his neighbours understood all of this; they knew the difference between what a magistrate might do sitting alone, and gathered with his colleagues in quarter sessions; and what the last could not do, and the remit of the ambulatory, high court judges at the county assizes. They told stories about what happened in Clifton’s justicing room. Woolley often used law’s language to produce character assessments and to determine the meaning of the stories he told. The law was a way of understanding how the world worked. Through Woolley’s words, rather than those 25 26

NA, M8050, M8051, Notebooks of Sir Gervase Clifton JP, 1772–1812, 1805–1810. ‘Oui, chaque mort laisse un petit bien, sa mémoire, et demand qu’on la soigne. Pour celui qui n’a pas d’amis, il faut que le magistrat y supplée. Car la loi, la justice est plus sure que toutes nos tendresses oublieuses, nos larmes si vites séchées. Cette magistrature, c’est l’histoire. Et les morts sont, pour dire comme le Doit romain, ces miserabiles personae dont le magistrat se préoccuper. Jamais dans ma carrière je n’ai pas perdu de vue ce devoir de l’historien . . . (Yes, every one who dies leaves behind a little something, his memory, and demands that we care for it. For those who have no friends, the magistrate must provide. For the law, justice, is more certain than all our tender forgetfulness, our tears so swiftly dried. This magistracy, is History. And the dead are, to use the language of Roman law, those miserabiles personae with whom the magistrate must preoccupy himself. Never in my career have I lost sight of that duty of the historian.) Jules Michelet, ‘Jusqu’au 18 Brumaire’ [1872–4], in Oeuvres Complètes, Tome XXI, Flammarion, Paris, 1982, p. 268.

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of magistrate Clifton, we can gain some insight into how the law framed everyday life in a Midlands county at the turn of the nineteenth century. For Michelet, History was produced by a Magistrate (a magistrate/historian). Here in what follows, one of the miserabiles personae provides. By the end of this book this reversal of roles will allow something to be said about the practice and writing of history in the modern period.

1

An introduction, shewing what kind of history this is; what it is like, and what it is not like

Yes; it is arch – affected, indeed – to use the voice of Henry Fielding to introduce this book. But its primary subject, the Nottinghamshire framework knitter Joseph Woolley, actually read Tom Jones (1749).1 He bought it – probably the 1792 edition – and the evidence of his diaries is that it framed his account of many events that took place in his native village of Clifton, the surrounding area, and at Clifton Hall, the country house of the local magistrate. In modern accounts of selfhood and subjectivity, much depends on novel reading. It is said that the modern autobiographical subject could only have emerged – towards the end of the eighteenth century, in England – ‘after reading, writing, and first-person discourse had coalesced into the peculiar matrix of the novel’.2 Moreover, the law shaped much of Joseph Woolley’s writing – its content and its form – and Tom Jones is about the law. Fielding’s ‘legal training can be seen colouring the whole book . . . has a legal flavour: legal metaphors are constantly employed, and throughout . . . Fielding is presenting cases, hearing witnesses, evaluating evidence, and giving judgement. We are reminded that he was an admirable magistrate,’ says one of Fielding’s modern editors.3 The second subject of this book, the local magistrate, also knew Tom Jones. Joseph Woolley recorded Sir Gervase Clifton quoting from it as he castigated a local wife-beater in his justicing room.4 Tom Jones introduces one topic of this book: the framing of everyday life by legal ideas and language, as recorded by 1

2

3

4

The epigraph to this book is taken from The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. By Henry Fielding, Esq. In Three Volumes, T. Longman, B. Law & Son and 14 others, London 1792, vol. I, pp. 44–5. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self. Autobiography and Self -Identity in England, 1591–1791, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 42–3. Here the autobiographical ‘I’ appears precisely in 1791, with the publication of James Lackington’s Confessions. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones [1749], ed. and intro. R. P. C. Mutter, Penguin, London, 1966, p. xxvi. Not the most up-to-date opinion: admirable fellow says John Barrell, but, as a magistrate, promulgator of law and order for a ‘very nasty party’. ‘Something for Theresa May to Think About’, London Review of Books, 34:11 (7 Jun 2012), pp. 31–3. Below, p. 108, and Fielding, Tom Jones (1966), p. 57.

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one of its early nineteenth-century readers, Joseph Woolley. And Fielding has something to say to modern historians accounting for the life and writing of a man like Joseph Woolley, when he points up the difference between ‘nothing much remarkable’, and ‘the extraordinary’ – ‘the revolutions of countries’; and then, laughing, ignores the distinction, or makes them one and the same, through a thousand pages. What follows here concerns two turn-of-the-nineteenth-century men who lived in a Nottinghamshire framework knitting (stocking-making) village. The experience of one of them (surprisingly, perhaps, that of the baronet rather than that of the framework knitter) is actually rather difficult to retrieve, so it focuses on the working man, as it simultaneously interrogates the concepts of ‘experience’, and ‘everyday life’ in order to determine their usefulness for historians’ reconstruction of the past. This inquiry is made possible by the unique conjunction and survival of two sets of records concerning the same time, place, and (sometimes) the same sequence of events. Sir Gervase Clifton, Bart (1744–1815) of Clifton Hall, Clifton, near Nottingham, kept notes of his work as a justice of the peace from about 1770 until 1812. Two bound volumes contain accounts (many of them fragmentary and incomplete) of about 250 pieces of magisterial business.5 Joseph Woolley (c. 1773–1840) framework knitter (stockingmaker, or stockinger) of Clifton village also kept records of a working life. Six volumes of his diaries survive; there may well have been more.6 The number of stocking shapes he knitted, the price he received for them, his expenditure on seaming, the oil he purchased for the maintenance of his machine, the candles he bought and traded in . . . are the consistent thread of his writing, recorded at the end of every working week. But the hundred thousand or so words he wrote also constitute a unique account of working-class living and loving, and getting and spending, at the turn of the nineteenth century. Joseph Woolley recorded his reading and his drinking; he wrote about social relations and their breakdown in the many fights (between men, between women, and between sexual partners) he witnessed or heard tell. His diaries are a fine source for understanding sexual behaviour and sexual attitudes among the poorer sort in early nineteenth-century England, and for discerning one working man’s understanding of himself, as a creature of time, place, and society. By way of marked contrast with magistrate Clifton’s working notebooks, Woolley’s diaries are copious, personal, and revelatory. The two sets of notebooks could be read separately, 5 6

NA, Notebooks of Sir Gervase Clifton JP, M8050 (1772–1812), M8051 (1805–1810). NA, DD 311/1–6, Diaries of Joseph Woolley, framework knitter, for 1801, 1803, 1804, 1809, 1813, 1815.

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and Clifton’s two volumes added to a growing list of magisterial records from the long eighteenth century which have been retrieved, transcribed, and published.7 As with these, Clifton’s notebooks could be made to yield some insight into the local operation of the law and its meaning for the varieties of people who used it.8 Woolley’s much more extended diaries – were they to be published – could be added to the growing corpus of retrieved working-class writing from this period.9 Woolley’s and Clifton’s are both interesting and revealing documents; read separately, each would confirm something of what we already know about social relationships in the long eighteenth century. But their significance is greatly enhanced by reading them together. It is their unique conjuncture as records that makes them the focus of this book. The law – the idea of the law – what it meant (particularly what it meant to the framework knitter and his community) is a tie that binds the two together. Between 1801 and 1815 Joseph Woolley wrote about Gervase Clifton operating in his justice room and outside it. He described hearings, justice-room incidents, and proceedings that the magistrate did not himself record. Woolley’s diaries provide a fuller account of Clifton’s activities as a justice of the peace than do the magistrate’s own notebooks. In the theatre of Woolley’s imagination, the magistrate is made to perform the law for the interest and entertainment of the framework

7

8 9

Alan F. Cirket (ed.), Samuel Whitbread’s Notebooks, 1810–11, 1813–14, Bedfordshire Historical Record Society, Ampthill, 1971; Elizabeth Silverthorne (ed.), The Deposition Book of Richard Wyatt, JP, 1767–1776, Surrey Record Society, Guildford, 1978; Elizabeth Crittall (ed.), The Justicing Notebook of William Hunt, 1744–1749, Wiltshire Record Society, Devizes, 1982; Michael McGarvie (ed.), The King’s Peace: The Justice’s Notebook of Thomas Horner, of Mells, 1770–1777, Frome Society for Local Study, 1997; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton (eds.), The Justicing Notebook (1750–64) of Edmund Tew, Rector of Boldon, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. 205, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2000. Peter King, ‘The Summary Courts and Social Relations in Eighteenth-Century England, Past and Present, 83 (1984), pp. 125–83. For the many sites of plebeian ‘autobiography’ in the eighteenth century, see Alannah Tomkins, ‘“I mak Bould to Wrigt”: First-Person Narratives in the History of Poverty in England, c. 1750–1900’, History Compass, 9:5 (2011), pp. 365–73; James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe, Stanford University Press, 1998. Poetry-making is a current focus of attention. See Tim Burke, William Christmas and Bridget Keegan (eds.), English Labouring-Class Poets, 1700–1900, 3 vols., Pickering and Chatto, London, 2003; Susanne Kord, Women Peasant Poets in EighteenthCentury England, Scotland, and Germany: Milkmaids on Parnassus, Camden House, New York, 2003; Corey E. Andrews, ‘“Work” Poems: Assessing the Georgic Mode of Eighteenth-Century Working-Class Poetry’, in Sandro Jung (ed.), Experiments in Genre in Eighteenth-Century Literature, Academia Scientific, Ghent, 2011, pp. 105–33. For an economics of writing and the linguistic knowledge that made it more likely for eighteenth-century working people to write poetry rather than prose narrative, Carolyn Steedman, ‘Poetical Maids and Cooks Who Wrote’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39:1 (2005), pp. 1–27.

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knitter and his friends. Here is a textual reversal of the most common part given to the workers in eighteenth-century fiction, jokes, jest books, and on the theatrical stage. The amusing antics of low mechanicals structured much eighteenth-century comedy, and there was cultural theory to show why misapprehension across the boundaries of status and class was so very funny. Eminent linguist and critic James Beattie thought that a limited constitutional monarchy like England’s, ‘where persons of all ranks, and those ranks so very different, often meet in society, and the public welfare depends on their living on good terms . . . each within the sphere of his own prerogative’, was the most ‘favourable to every species of comic writing’. In Britain, as opposed to France, ‘the manners of individuals, and more outward circumstances of life . . . supply the materials for wit and humour . . . [because] more diversified’.10 Novelist Maria Edgeworth thought that class-based material for comedy was also used in the realm of high politics. In her novel Patronage (1814) a lord chief justice and a barrister discuss ‘French laws of criticism, which prohibit the descending to allusions to arts and manufactures’. In France, before the Revolution, says one, ‘the strong line of demarcation formerly kept between the nobility and the citizen had influenced taste in writing and eloquence’; but England’s ‘more popular government not only admitted allusions to the occupations of the lower classes – but required them’. Allusions to the common people were found in parliamentary proceedings and in election speeches – Edgeworth gave Edmund Burke’s as an example – for politicians ‘must speak so as to come home to the feelings and vocabulary of constituents’.11 So the lower classes here turn out to be enfranchised men, of whom there were not many in early nineteenth-century England.12 Edgeworth’s point was about the lower orders as figures in the political imagination and writing of an elite. Joseph Woolley’s diaries demonstrate that the figurative traffic also went the other way. Sir Gervase played a part in Woolley’s narrative – he strode the stage of Woolley’s writing – whilst Woolley does not appear in the magistrate’s much briefer records. Woolley watched the magistrate, and wrote him up. In this relationship Woolley intermittently had the power of the pen, or at least the 10

11 12

See James Beattie, ‘On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. Written in the Year 1764’, in Essays. On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind. On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. On the Utility of Classical Learning. By James Beattie, LL. D. Professor of Moral Philosophy and Logic in the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen, William Creech, Edinburgh, and E. & C. Dilly, London, 1778, pp. 321–486. Maria Edgeworth, Patronage [1814], Sort of Books, London, 2011, pp. 283–4. On the eve of the Great Reform Act (1832) there were possibly 500,000 enfranchised men in a total population of about 14 million.

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power of observation; the power of those who watch, and are not watched. But he did not publish his writing as did some eighteenthcentury working people, so the discomfort of Elizabeth Hands’ readers for example, as they saw themselves made objects of ridicule by the pen of a serving maid, was not experienced by Clifton.13 It was, in any case, a rare experience for an elite person like Clifton to see himself through the eyes of one of the low. One significant conjuncture between the two sets of notebooks is what they show about the meaning of the law to a working man and his neighbours. The law organised Woolley’s experience: it was a schema of interpretation, a way of understanding what he had witnessed and heard told. The law provided Woolley with a frame, or a way of seeing. Embodying the law, Sir Gervase Clifton was thus much more important to Woolley in his apprehension and analysis of the world than Woolley was (or any man like Woolley could possibly be) to the magistrate. He did not have to have stood in Clifton’s parlour, as deponent or witness, poacher or poor law supplicant, for this to have been the case. The law was a source of Woolley’s thinking. Legal ideas and proceedings, the drama of the justice’s parlour, the daily, grinding operation of the poor law, all gave Woolley the means to frame and fashion himself – in a way that a magistrate, a landlord, and landowner had no need to do. Thus Woolley – his consciousness, his writing of it – can become a frame for understanding the relationship between the self and the social in early nineteenth-century England. The law was one of the frames for Joseph Woolley’s active reflection on his own experience. But he also, and literally, worked a frame. ‘Frame working’ was the process that produced a worsted or cotton stocking shape on a knitting loom. (Though ‘loom’ is misleading. Looms are set for warp and weft, and fabric is woven out of separate lengths of yarn. Knitting is the production of fabric from a continuous thread.) Woolley sat – for perhaps fourteen hours a day, perhaps four days a week – at a wooden structure which held needles set for the production of different varieties of stocking. The wooden bench at which he sat was built into the frame. The machine was operated by hand and foot; most of the power came from the movement of his feet on the treadles beneath. In literal terms, the stocking frame could be looked through, though a knitter’s line of vision was obscured by carrier, sinkers, and pressure bar.14 13 14

Steedman, ‘Poetical Maids’, pp. 1–27. Marilyn Palmer, Framework Knitting, Shire Publications, Princes Risborough, 1984, pp. 11–15; Gravenor Henson, The Civil, Political and Mechanical History of the Framework Knitters in Europe and America, Sutton, Nottingham, 1831, pp. 257–425.

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Of course this nomenclature – what the machine and the worker were called – invoked the ‘framing’, and ‘frame theory’ now discussed.15 If sociological inquiry and social-theory construction need metaphors, then so too does historical analysis.16 In this book the guiding metaphor for analysis is made in two ways: out of all the real and figurative frames of the long eighteenth century, including the one Woolley worked, and out of the twentieth-century metaphor used in sociological frame theory itself. Long before they became analytic devices in sociological theory, ‘frame’ and ‘framing’ were figures of speech used for the better apprehension and interpretation of the world, as when someone formed an idea of it in the mind, conceived, or imagined it. In the eighteenth century ‘to frame’ also had strong connotations with making, as with builders erecting the frame of a house, or more abstractly, with God’s framing or shaping of His creatures. A pictorial and theatrical analogy was well established by the eighteenth century: scenes (natural, painted, theatrical) were understood to be visually framed by some other part of the landscape, or in the case of the theatrical stage, by the plot, or the device of the prologue; many representations could be viewed as if in a frame. Sociological uses of ‘frame’ after the 1960s embedded this common notion of ‘framing’ even more deeply into everyday language and cognition. But to understand cognitive and perceptual processes and ways of knowing in the past, might it be better to use terms less freighted with modern meaning? Windows and window frames are material things that have attracted some historiographical attention in recent years.17 The great, who possessed many windows, often had themselves painted in front of their glittering mansions, each pane of light signalling status and wealth of domicile, but the workers did not for the main part look out of a window, for a room with a view was not often to be had in their dwelling-places, where apertures might be made opaque by screenings of linen soaked in linseed oil, or strips of horn, or stuffed up with rags. Joseph Woolley mentioned windows quite a lot in his diaries. Windows 15

16 17

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Doubleday, New York, 1959; Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience, Harvard University Press, 1974; Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2010, pp. 6–7. Charles Turner, Investigating Sociological Theory, Sage, London, 2010, pp. 79–111. H. J. Louw, ‘The Development of the Window’, in Michael Tutton and Elizabeth Hirst (eds.), Windows: History, Repair and Conservation, Donhead Publishing, Shaftesbury, 2007, pp. 7–96; Rachel Ramsay, ‘The Literary History of the Sash Window’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 22:2 (2009–10), pp. 171–94; Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Yale University Press, London and New Haven CT, 2009, pp. 30, 167, and references to ‘curtains’, passim.

An introduction, shewing what kind of history this is

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were the access for housebreakers; people in Clifton village undertaking home improvements frequently added, moved, or blocked up windows; windows in Nottingham’s Broad Street were decorated for a victory parade; a maidservant almost fell out of a window whilst cleaning an upper chamber at Clifton Hall.18 On 30 April 1801 Mr Topley of Puck Lane ‘jumped out of a window 2 storeys high and broak his Legs he was out of his mind’.19 Woolley may not have recorded looking out of a window (even though his six volumes are witness to a determined looking at the social world); but windows (and doors and gates) functioned to relate the everyday to the extraordinary in early nineteenth-century social and cultural theory, as windows continue to function in modern accounts of this period of European history. In an imagined eighteenth century, on the eve of the Terror, a modern novelist has Camille Desmoulins look out from his window, see ‘the rue des Cordeliers, his neighbours busying about, life going on in its achingly usual way; heard the printing presses in the Cour du Commerce, saw women stopping to chat on the corner, tried hard to imagine any other kind of life or any kind of death’.20 Quite apart from the differences between a Desmoulins imagined in 1992 and an actual Desmoulins who left traces in many revolutionary archives, there are bound to be arguments about whether or not an actually existing historical subject could have felt this emotion on a July morning in the 1790s.21 Desmoulins longs for what is in front of his eyes, on the other side of a pane of glass, as if it were already lost. In the figure ‘Desmoulins’, the novelist’s and the historian’s knowledge of what happened next, or afterwards, is in play. The novelist, the historian, and the reader may also know that the Revolution itself is said to have made ordinariness, or the everyday, subject to regret and nostalgia.22 The bittersweet longing for the scene in the street and the sounds of everyday life are to do with the lost past – the past that never was – and with the might-have-been. If this passage provokes tears – as the ‘if-only’ is supposed to do – it is because of the disjuncture between what we know was (what actually happened) and what might have been. This disjuncture is the deep structure of

18 19 20 21

22

NA, DD 311/1, 24 Feb, 20 Jun, 12 Oct, 7 Sep 1801. NA, DD311/1, 30 Apr 1801. Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, Viking, London, 1992, p. 443. Tamara S. Wagner, Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740–1890, Associated Universities Press, Cranbery NJ, 2010, pp. 11–32; Peter W. Graham, ‘Byron and Expatriate Nostalgia’, Studies in Romanticism, 47:1 (2008), pp. 75–90. Also Frederic Jameson, ‘Nostalgia for the Present’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 88:2 (1989), pp. 527–60. Peter Fritzsche, Stranded in the Present: Modern Times and the Melancholy of History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 2004, pp. 55–91.

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melodrama and nostalgia, both of which are said to have emerged as structures of feeling at the turn of the nineteenth century.23 Frederic Jameson once said that ‘a history lesson is the best cure for nostalgic pathos’, as if the ‘true’ story of the Terror or – closer to home and Joseph Woolley and Gervase Clifton – the true story of the Luddite Rebellion in times of war, dearth, and counter revolution in England might dispel nostalgia. Yet here is a historian-narrator who provokes nostalgic pathos.24 Here is a narrator who, like her readers, knows what has happened, and what will happen. The nostalgia (if that’s what it is) is ours, born of our historical knowledge, not the knowledge of the fictional or real Desmoulins. Yet briefly, this passage from A Place of Greater Safety escapes the dictates of historical knowledge. It escapes grammatically, in the continuous present tense of ‘neighbours lounging about’ and ‘life going on’; and it escapes historically by Desmoulins’ inability to imagine anything but what he sees. It escapes – this is its art – by what many historians, including Mantel, have come to ‘know’ of this time and place, which is inflected by the story of the months, years, and centuries that followed. Mantel has her character unable to imagine what will come to be known about the Terror (‘any other kind of life’) and about his own execution in 1795 (‘any kind of death’). And yet that knowledge is there, embedded in the text, in the figure of Camille Desmoulins standing at a window. The aching ordinariness that Mantel’s Desmoulins sees through a window is contrapuntal to a great revolutionary drama already being played out. This kind of disjuncture between the everyday and the extraordinary was explored by at least one early nineteenth-century critic and theorist. Peter Linebaugh has recently furthered historical understanding of the Luddite and machine-breaking crises of c. 1810–17 by reference to an essay of Thomas De Quincey, first published in 1823.25 Here De Quincey formulated a relationship between the extraordinary and the everyday. He began by describing the perplexity he had felt as a child – and still felt – at watching performances of Shakespeare’s Macbeth: ‘the knocking at the gate, which succeeds the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account . . . I never could see why it should produce such an effect.’ 23 24 25

Steve Neale, ‘Melodrama and Tears’, Screen, 27:6 (1986), pp. 6–22. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, p. 156. Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’, London Magazine, new series 8 (Oct 1823), pp. 353–6; Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: MachineBreaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12, PM Press, Oakland CA, 2012.

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But in 1812, having seen a landmark performance of the play, he did understand. He explained that in tragedy, for a new world to be born, another world must step in; to produce his effects the playwright must first take the murderers – Macbeth and his wife – ‘out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires’. Shakespeare cuts the murderers off from ordinary human life and the ordinary time of its purposes. The ordinary world disappears; it is ‘locked up and sequestered in some deep recess’. Audience and reader have to know this: ‘we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished . . . ’ We only apprehend the full annihilating horror of the acts committed when – quite slowly – the everyday returns. There comes a knocking at the gate (Act II, Scene 3). The porter shuffles across the stage in response; the knocking continues through his long complaint about his job of work, his fancy that he is the gatekeeper of hell, his adumbration of all the suicides and criminalised workers who may be on the other side (hard times in eleventh-century Scotland and in early nineteenth-century England: farmers hanging themselves in time of harvest failure and lowered prices; a tailor trying to carry on his trade in starving weather). In the long minutes it takes to cross the stage, the continued, insistent knocking ‘makes it known that the reaction has commenced’, says De Quincey; ‘the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish’, and ‘the goings-on of the world in which we live’ are returned. Only now are we made sensible of ‘the awful parentheses that had suspended them’. And who is to say – De Quincey did not say – whether it is the knocking itself or the workers imagined by the porter to be doing the knocking, which brings the everyday world back to us? The very least the essay does, is give some insight into how the relationship between everyday life and political terror could be imagined, in 1812. That Linebaugh employs cultural theory of the early nineteenth century to understand reactions to the Luddite disturbances is much to the purpose of this book; yet they do not feature in the writing of either Joseph Woolley or Gervase Clifton. At the peak of the Nottinghamshire crisis, in January 1812, twenty-nine stocking frames were destroyed in one night in Clifton village and neighbouring Ruddington.26 26

Malcolm I. Thomis, Luddism in Nottinghamshire, Thoroton Society Record Series no. 26, Philimore, London and Chichester, 1972; Christopher Weir, ‘The Nottinghamshire Luddites: “Men Meagre with Famine, Sullen with Despair”’, The Local Historian, 28:1 (1998), pp. 24–35; Kevin Binfield (ed.) The Writings of the Luddites, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD and London, 2004, pp. 10–14. The classic account of Luddism in Nottinghamshire and elsewhere remains

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The magistrate was not at home. He did not appear in the local press as he had during the great hunger of 1800 (when there were also disturbances near Clifton) promoting the fixing of corn prices so that the poor might have bread.27 Woolley’s diary for 1812 (if he kept one) has not survived. So on the face of it, there is no way in which the magistrate’s or the stockinger’s writing can be used to measure ordinary life against the experience of violence and rebellion. In the evidence we have, nobody looks out of the window at the everyday or at political terror: neither man bore witness to History rushing past in the street. Nothing – in their writing – for it does not exist for 1812 – flashes up in a moment of danger.28 What to do – how to proceed in research and analytic terms – when the ordinary has no opposite in the extraordinary? The Luddite Disturbances were a long-drawn-out and defining crisis in the historical tales that have been told about these years of dearth, war, revolution, and counter revolution. Knowing what we know of the crisis years 1810–17, how do we retrieve experience of Luddism from sources that are perfectly silent on Luddism? The ‘ordinary’ and the ‘everyday’ as evidenced by the framework knitter and the magistrate provide some answers to these questions. Thomas De Quincey may have been the first writer in English to use ‘ordinary life’ and ‘the ordinary succession of human affairs’ as analytic terms.29 ‘Everyday’ and ‘everyday life’ were used during the long eighteenth century, usually in a religious context, to point up a distinction between the quotidian affairs of men and the unknowable purposes of the Creator. The ‘everyday’ as a scene, or passing show (watched by an involved or disenchanted observer) was well enough established by

27

28

29

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [1963], Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, pp. 472–575. Corporation of Nottingham, ‘Corn Riots: Town Clerk’s Correspondence’, in Records of the Borough of Nottingham. Volume VII: 1760–1800, Thos. Forman, Nottingham, 1947, pp. 394–404; Lloyd’s Evening Post, Morning Herald, 12 Sep 1800; Morning Post and Gazette, 13 Sep 1800; Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 14 Sep 1800. The ‘moment of danger’ (Augenblick einer Gefahr) is from Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the practice and meaning of history in ‘Über den Begriff der Geschichte’, in Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften I, ed. Siegfried Unseld, Suhrkam, Frankfurt am Main, 1977, pp. 251–61, this quotation p. 253; trans. Harry Zohn as ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, Fontana, London, 1992, pp. 245–55, this quotation p. 247. Here articulating the past historically does not mean recognising the way ‘it really was’; it means seizing hold of a memory (whose memory?) as it flashes up in a moment of danger. De Quincey, ‘Knocking at the Gate’, p. 355. The term ‘common life’ was used analytically, notably by Samuel Johnson, to articulate that which is general in social life and human nature. See Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private and the Division of Knowledge, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2005, pp. 340–2. It connoted low, vulgar, non-elite people.

An introduction, shewing what kind of history this is

23

the 1790s for Charles Lamb to tell Coleridge that he was ‘heartily sick of the every-day scenes of life’.30 But he was contrasting the dreariness of a London summer with the pleasant prospect of a trip to Bristol and visiting friends. The conjunction of everyday and holiday are useful for interpreting Sir Gervase’s records, for the evidence is that he often wanted to be out of Clifton. ‘Want’ may not very well convey the felt obligations of property ownership, status, and the duties and demands of the London and the Bath seasons, but nevertheless, he was more often out of Clifton than in it. Our means of understanding how a working man like Woolley understood everyday life are limited by paucity of direct testimony. For the better sort like Gervase Clifton, we have the evidence of their education (in the broadest sense); of how they were actively taught to see and interpret the world (Charles Lamb for example, transliterated the first-century BCE Roman playwright Terence on the dreariness of the everyday in his letter to Coleridge) and sometimes their own active reflection on these matters. For superior kinds of craftsmen – designers, architects, painters – we have their discussion with patrons, their instructions to workers, and the finished thing – a cathedral and a sculpture are recent examples – to indicate their ways of apprehending the world. We do not have this kind of evidence from a framework knitter; and the thousand or so worsted and cotton stocking shapes he produced during his diary-keeping years are relatively mute, in a way that Bernini’s statue of St Theresa is not mute.31 In the case of men like Joseph Woolley historians have become adept at using the reports of – Alf Lüdtke’s examples – police, domestic missionaries, and social investigators, converting their voices of disapproval to find working people’s everyday life and sometimes even, their own understanding of the lives they lived.32 Perceptions of low life by the better sort were conveyed by written language and by pictorial means. There was a market for low-life literature from at least the end of the seventeenth century.33 After Henri Lefebvre devoted several volumes to elaborating the concept of ‘everyday life’ in the 1960s, it became a key concept in critical

30 31 32

33

Thomas Noon Talfourd, Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of his Life. In Two Volumes, Edward Moxon, London, 1837, vol. I, p. 30. Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 38–52, 79–95. Alf Lüdtke (ed.), The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life, trans. William Templar, Princeton University Press, 1995, ‘Introduction’, pp. 3–40; this quotation p. 17. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Sights Unseen, Cries Unheard: Writing the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis’, Representations, 118 (2012), pp. 28–71.

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social theory.34 It has been given its loci in the street, the home, and the workplace. Its opposite (what is the opposite of the ‘everyday’?) is not often made clear, though recently it has been argued that whatever the uncommon, exceptional, or extraordinary may be, in modern times its borders with the quotidian have been blurred by the wide dissemination of new media, which have exploded the distinction between the two.35 For Lefebvre, the everyday was defined, conceptually and analytically, as ‘the residual’: it is ‘“what is left over” after all distinct, superior, specialized, structured activities have been singled out by analysis’.36 But whose analysis? The sociologist or the ethnographer who is in the process of determining the ways in which a society, or a community, operates? Or the analysis of those who are the subject of their theorising? For the purposes of theory construction, Lefebvre adopted the notion of ‘lived experience’ from the phenomenologists and existentialists. ‘Experience’ and ‘the Everyday’ were used to counter grand political narratives which interpreted the social world in terms of reason.37 Lefebvre said that interrogating ‘everyday life involves a critique of political life, in that everyday life already contains and constitutes such a critique: in that it is that critique’; he did not say whose perception this was. His contrast between the realm of high politics and the quotidian is one point of origin for the sociologist’s insistence that ‘experience’ is to be found in ordinary people. ‘In the social sciences we try to say “what it was like” for the participants in . . . events and processes that have been adequately reported and explained; we want to know what it was like for soldiers in World War I or for minor officials in the Austro-Hungarian Empire or for freed serfs in Russia or janissaries in the Ottoman Empire.’ This is because the objects of our inquiry had and ‘have a subjective sense of what is happening to them’.38 But the participants adumbrated here are the subaltern subjects of large-scale public and political events (war, serfdom, empire); the small-time civil servant’s subjective sense of ‘what it was like’ is figured in relation to the management of a vast empire, not his getting home at dusk for a nice cup of tea.

34

35 36 37 38

Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World [1968], Transaction, New Brunswick NJ, 1984; Critique of Everyday Life [1947–1958], 3 vols., Verso, London, 1991–2005; Michael Gardiner, Critiques of Everyday Life: An Introduction, Routledge, London and New York, 2000. Mark Poster, ‘Everyday (Virtual) Life’, New Literary History, 33:4 (2002), pp. 743–60. Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol. I, p. 94. Poster, ‘Everyday’, pp. 743–4. Charles Turner, Investigating Sociological Theory, Sage, London, 2010, p. 25.

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This was part of E. P. Thompson’s problem with the structures and schemas of class and class formation which he wrote against in 1963 in The Making of the English Working Class. Thompson objected to those who described the experience of living through the early industrial revolution in England by reference to a conceptual schema that stated the way the world was without any reference to the testimony of those who actually did the living. In the same period as Henry Lefebvre theorised ‘the everyday’ as the supplement to political life, social historians worked hard to locate it in place, time, and consciousness. They too adopted a notion of experience, making reference not to Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness as did Lefebvre, but rather to The Making of the English Working Class. A constant reference point in the socialhistory writing of the last half-century, ‘experience’ is a deeply problematic category even for (especially for) the historians who use it. This is partly because it is aligned so closely with the idea of consciousness – what people in the past can be determined to have felt and thought. Was the consciousness of a worker, with interests in common with other workers, forged by labour and a network of productive relations (setting up your stocking frame, pressing down the treadles over many hours, taking the shapes to be seamed by a local woman, walking to the hosier’s to sell the stockings)? Or was your experience of this kind of everyday only made or articulated when you talked or wrote about it? Was ‘experience’ something already there to be had, or did active cogitation make experience? These questions are still asked because of Thompson’s ‘crucial contention . . . that the emergence of the working class was a product of the complex and contradictory experience of workers in the turbulent years from 1790 to 1832’.39 William Sewell remembers being astounded on his first reading of The Making – by ‘the sheer amount of “ethnographic” detail that Thompson had collected’ in his account of ‘experience’. An ‘endless profusion’ of detail produced a narrative that was ‘long, sprawling, picaresque [and] Dickensian’. But Thompson’s ‘claims about experience as a theoretical category [were] . . . so incoherent that one is tempted to discard the term entirely’.40 But Sewell did not abandon it; in fact he urged on historians a better definition of experience – a narrower dictionary definition, of the ‘actual living through an event or events . . . actual enjoyment or

39

40

William H. Sewell, Jr, ‘How Classes are Made: Critical Reflections on E. P. Thompson’s Theory of Working-Class Formation’, in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 50–77; this quotation p. 51. Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made’, pp. 59–66.

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An Everyday Life of the English Working Class

suffering’, and the effects of these upon people’s ‘judgement or feelings’. ‘Experience’ he says, should be taken to mean that ‘the person who has enjoyed or suffered [an] event has reflected upon it’. With reference to Clifford Geertz’s Interpretation of Culture he argued that experience is ‘something construed’.41 But how construed? How worked-over, analysed, interpreted, and understood, by long-dead people? Now, many years after the arguments that Sewell evokes, we have good means for understanding what people did with what happened to them. In Writings of the Luddites Kevin Binfield discusses the public written productions of many men like Joseph Woolley. He is able to treat the texts with respect and recognise the dignity of their authors because he uses literary and stylistic analysis in reading them. He observes that ‘despite the influence of the linguistic turn upon historical and social studies, scholars typically fail to examine . . . [Luddite] writing for rhetorical qualities’.42 And not just Luddite writing. Historians are still sometimes accused of paying little attention to the writing that contains the ‘facts’ they seek: ‘Although historians do place documents within communicative contexts, they are primarily treated as monuments of past voices,’ says Jan Ifversen; ‘[historical] source criticism is not really concerned with establishing how texts produced meaning, but rather with answering questions about who said what and why.’43 But we can do this – use literary analysis as historical analysis. Stylistic analysis of all manner of text has become a commonplace item in the working historian’s toolkit. We have become better at using technical knowledge (of rhetoric, poetics, stylistics, linguistics) to extract information – past ‘experience’ – from written language, and from spoken language recorded in writing. Ben Highmore says that most social historians have used the terms ‘experience’ and ‘everyday life’ in order ‘to side with the dominated against those that would dominate . . . to invoke . . . those practices and lives that have traditionally been left out of historical accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by elites’. The term ‘everyday’ has, he says, become a ‘shorthand for voices from “below” . . . ’44 As a theoretical construct it was developed to account for lives like Joseph 41 42 43 44

Sewell, ‘How Classes are Made’, p. 64; Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture, Basic Books, New York, 1973, p. 405. Kevin Binfield (ed.), Writings of the Luddites, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD and London, 2005, p. 7. Jan Ifversen, ‘Text, Discourse, Concept: Approaches to Textual Analysis’, Kontur, 7 (2003), pp. 60–9. Ben Highmore (ed.), The Everyday Life Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2002, p. 1.

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Woolley’s rather than the life of a magistrate and landowner like Gervase Clifton. In one sense, Clifton did not belong to ‘the everyday’ as it came to be understood at the beginning of the nineteenth century; Clifton was outside the ‘the goings on of the world in which we live’ (as De Quincey put it) though he certainly existed, and acted and mattered in the everyday life of his framework-knitting neighbours and their families. In the early years of the nineteenth century parliamentary commissions of inquiry and investigative journalism set to work to understand the decline of many trades and the cultural fallout of economic depression. ‘How was it for you?’ and ‘How did you feel?’ are the distant, twentieth-century journalistic echo of those inquiries, asking the kind of question that is only ever put to subaltern subjects. Interrogations about hard times, trade dispute, riot, rebellion, and despair were designed to garner testimony from the poor. They involved questions that were and are not put to members of social elites. ‘What was it like for you? . . . for them?’. . . evolved at the same time as subjective experience and the idea of living, suffering, and enduring were articulated in relationship to working-class people.45 Of course Sir Gervase Clifton lived, thought, felt love, despair, grief, and perhaps, dutiful tedium in his justicing room. His humanity, his psychology, his subjectivity are not in question (though we have no record of them). He – his existence, his status, and what he represented – provided a frame for Woolley’s life and his understanding of it. Woolley did not matter to Clifton in the same way that Clifton mattered to Woolley. Or at all. We are attempting here to disinter ‘the everyday’, and ‘experience’, the ordinary and the extraordinary from two rather different sets of documents. One is a set of semi-official records kept by a public man. The other comprises what we have come to call self-writing, or an ego-document, or personal writing. If Woolley had appeared in Clifton’s notebooks as felon, applicant for poor relief, accused of fathering a bastard child, or as a witness in such cases involving his friends and neighbours (which he never did), then we would still be left with Clifton’s silence and the framework knitter’s verbosity on questions of life, law and labour, self and subjectivity, in early nineteenthcentury Nottinghamshire. This book is structured by an understanding of Joseph Woolley as reader and a writer. Its overall shape follows the trajectory of his 45

For the concept of ‘social suffering’ see Pierre Bourdieu, La Misère du Monde, Seuil, Paris, 1993, trans. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, Polity Press, Cambridge 1999, and Simon J. Charlesworth, A Phenomenology of Working-Class Experience, Cambridge University Press, 2000. ‘History’ matters to the working-class people interviewed for both books; but neither traces the long history of connection between suffering and subaltern subjects.

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preoccupations, as ordered in the six volumes he penned. It begins with him as a reader – with the novels and other literature that got into his head – and his interactions with turn-of-the-century print culture. It then moves outwards from what (it is suggested) occupied his imagination, through widening circles of social experience: of family, friends, sociability and conviviality, sexual and gender relations, law and religion, and work and labour. It then moves from Woolley’s consciousness to the most politically resonant of his contexts: the emergence of Nottinghamshire Luddism in 1811–12. The shape – or structure – of this book also inscribes a movement from Woolley’s mind and imagination to his physical body (how it was fed and clothed for example); from an individual psychology to the social and political circumstances that shaped him quite as much as did the books he read. At the end, the account returns to Joseph Woolley as a writer; not simply as a working man who happened to write, but as ‘a writer’ (as author; as creative writer) with the full cultural approbation that the term acquired during the long nineteenth century. Joseph Woolley the writer allows something to be said about the writing of history (then and now); about history’s disclosure of ‘the revolutions of countries’ in contradistinction to the minute particulars of everyday life (or ‘nothing much happening’, as Henry Fielding put it). Joseph Woolley’s writing suggests that we do not have to make that distinction; suggests some of the ways in which the personal and the political were (and are) one and the same.

2

Books do furnish a mind

‘O my good Girl!’ replied he, tauntingly, ‘you are well read, I see’. Samuel Richardson, Pamela, Letter XV.

Joseph Woolley bought books. Among the twenty-odd volumes he purchased during the diary-keeping years, he named one of them: Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones. But he borrowed fiction, noting three more novels (plus one ‘life’, or autobiography) taken out from a Nottingham circulating library in 1801, the only (or last) year he recorded subscribing to it.1 He was not the kind of reader who allowed Jonathan Rose to explore the intellectual life of the British working class, simply because he did not write about his reading; he did not recall his encounters with print, or the way in which books had shaped him.2 But his response to literature can be read out of his own prose style, and out of the allusions he made to the books he named; he left abundant evidence of his intellectual life; but in the absence of his direct testimony to what he read, or even titles for the majority of them, this chapter focuses on what was in the books he did name. Rose says that critics repeatedly commit this ‘receptive fallacy’, that is they try ‘to discern the messages that a text transmits to an audience by examining the text rather than the audience’.3 But here the texts themselves are – have to be – the bridge between what was in their pages and what Woolley did with them. To see how he made meaning out of literature, we have to see what it offered to his imagination. He bought and borrowed these books, out of a vast array of print items available to him. What’s in them is some guide to their meaning for him.4 1 2

3 4

Christopher Skelton-Foord, ‘To Buy or to Borrow? Circulating Libraries and Novel Reading in Britain, 1778–1828’, Library Review, 47:7 (1998), pp. 348–54. Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001), Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2010. Also James S. Amelan, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 115–50. Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 4. Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1957.

29

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‘I read the following books out of Suttons Libbery’, he noted in April 1801: ‘pamela or virtue rewarded in 4 vollums baron trenks Life in 3 voll Edmond in 2 voll the munck a romance in 1 vollum’.5 I wish that the ‘Edmond in 2 voll’ had been Edmund; or the Child of the Castle (1791), which sounds like a lot of fun. Even reviewers disparaging it had a good laugh at ‘lions roaring on the mountains of Scotland, and highland ladies dancing on the burning sands of Arabia’; at the way ‘every page presents us with bloody murders, without a motive, and resurrections from the dead . . .’. A fabulous-sounding heroine, deranged both mentally and grammatically, was quoted to get a rise out of the line ‘“Zaide was not herself ”.’6 The Critical Review thought that only a reader ‘steeled by frequent practice to inflexible perseverance . . . [would] not throw aside the work with contempt’.7 William Lane’s Novel Repository advertised it as suitable holiday reading (‘Amusements for the Watering Places and Summer Recesses’); it was noted in reading room and library catalogues throughout the 1790s.8 The author (whoever he or she was) produced another gothic yarn in 1792; but Edmund appears to be quite lost.9 5 6

7

8

9

NA, DD 311/1, 12 Apr 1801. ‘Of the style of this farrago, take the following specimen: “I wished to bind each virtue I beheld dawn in your breast. I mixed unheeded in your sports, crowned you when the prize you won. Confined your hair with wreaths, when it shaded your face . . . and found my heart so nearly allied to your gentleness, that, when covered with ornaments in my habitations, adorned around with many valuables, Zaide was not herself”.’ ‘Art 27. Edmund; or, The Child of the Castle. 12mo. 2 vols. 5s sewed. Lane. London, 1791’, English Review; or, An Abstract of English and Foreign Literature, 17 (Mar 1791), p. 235. ‘Edmund; or, the Child of the Castle, a Novel. 2 Vols. 12 mo. 5s. Lane’, Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, 70 (Oct 1790), p. 454. Also Town and Country Magazine, or, Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction, and Entertainment, 22 (Nov 1790), p. 510. World, 3 and 6 Aug 1790; 16 and 18 Apr, 11 Jun 1791; Whitehall Evening Post, 2–4 Nov 1790; General Evening Post, 13–16, 18–20 Nov 1790; Star, 22 and 26 Mar 1791; Thomas Lokett, A Catalogue of Novels, Plays, &c. Which Will Be Lent to Read, at 2d. per Volume, by Lockett, at his Printing-office, High-street, Dorchester, for the author, Dorchester, 1790; William Earle, A New Catalogue of the Extensive and Well-Chosen Collection of English Books; Being Part of Earle’s Original French, English, Spanish and Italian Circulating Library . . . for the author, London, 1799. Advertised by Lane as published in London with a Dublin edition a year later in World, 3 Nov 1792: Sidney Castle; Or, the Sorrows of De Courcy. A Novel by the Author of Edmund; or the Child of the Castle, Wogan, Dublin, 1793. There are two copies of Sidney Castle in US libraries; Edmund is catalogued – nowhere. Perhaps the anonymous author, who had some success with Edmund, responded to Lane’s ‘Wanted’ notice: ‘Novels in manuscript against the next season, for which a sum from Twenty to Five Hundred Pounds, is deposited at a Bankers’, World, 6 Aug 1790. Lane’s was the then infamous, now famous, Minerva Press. Alison Shell, ‘Lane, William (1745/6–1814)’, rev. Clare L. Taylor, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. Edmund; or the Child of the Castle is mentioned in one modern account of eighteenthcentury gothic fiction, probably as a result of the note about Edmund on the title page of the later Sidney Castle – but nothing in the reviews of the first suggests the ‘centrality of the castle’ to Child of the Castle, as a ‘signifying chain that draws into itself the human body,

Books do furnish a mind

31

Had the book Joseph Woolley borrowed been this particular Edmund, then it is not at all unlikely that his Nottingham library made it available, for it was Charles Sutton’s, Printer and Bookseller, corner of Bridlesmith Gate and Bottle Lane, from which he also borrowed the epitome of gothic fiction, The Monk.10 There were dozens of cheap and chapbook editions of Matthew Lewis’s extraordinary three-volume original of 1796 available by the end of the century.11 ‘Lust, murder, incest, and every atrocity that can disgrace human nature, brought together, without the apology of probability’ made it ‘totally unfit for general circulation’ (in cheap edition format). ‘A vein of obscenity pervade[d] the whole.’12 But that did not stop the printers/booksellers of provincial England making it available to eager and ordinary readers, every which way. William Lane built his famous – infamous – business the Minerva Press on supplying provincial booksellers with gothic fictions like this.13 And these were not the general opinion of The Monk; Lewis was more often praised, then as now, for his imagination and genius – and antiCatholicism, Englishness, and insight into male psychology (this last a judgement of the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century).14 Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) which Woolley also borrowed from Sutton’s, had been subject to charges of obscenity from its earliest days, both as original and in its many translations into cheap media for the

10

11

12 13

14

the ruthless father, the yielding mother, as well as the thematics of sexual transgression’ – or otherwise. Vijay Mishra, The Gothic Sublime, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1994, p. 52. These may well be the themes of late eighteenth-century gothic fiction in general, and perhaps of Edmund, but they are not to be discovered from contemporary reviewers, who thought that its only unifying idea was nonsense. NA, DD/764/1, ‘Our Suttons Private Family Record in Three Parts. Part 1 “Annals of the Sutton Family” by R. S. Sutton, Typographed at Manchester in 1882’, pp. 10–15. Sutton had started out with a bookstall in Nottingham Market. No stall or shop records survive. Matthew Lewis, The Monk. A Romance. By M. G. Lewis, Esq. M.P. In Three Volumes, J. Bell, London, 1796; Montague Summers, A Gothic Bibliography, Fortune Press, London, n.d., pp. 419–25; also William B. Todd, ‘The Early Editions and Issues of The Monk, with a Bibliography’, Studies in Bibliography, 2 (1949–50), pp. 3–24; Lisa M. Wilson, ‘“Monk” Lewis as Literary Lion’, Romanticism On the Net, 8 (Nov 1997). I have not traced a one-volume version (there were clearly many) before 1823. Also Franz J. Potter, The History of Gothic Publishing, 1800–1835: Exhuming the Trade, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2005. ‘Art. 28, The Monk, a Romance. In three Volumes. 12 mo. 10s 6d. Bell, Oxford Street. 1796’, British Critic, 7 (Jun 1796), p. 677. Lane advertised his wares to country booksellers and library proprietors as well as requests for writers to produce them in the first place. Sutton’s advertised supplier was Cooke of London. ‘Cooke’s Cheap Editions’ were more up-market products than those supplied by the Minerva Press. Nottingham Journal, 18 Oct 1800. Frederick S. Frank, ‘The Monk: A Bicentenary Bibliography’, Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997).

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mass market.15 Woolley probably read the most up-to-date edition (Sutton’s was quick off the mark) with corrections and amendments made by Richardson in the 1750s and published as the authoritative edition at the beginning of the new century.16 In borrowing these fictions, Woolley behaved as a typical customer of the late eighteenthcentury commercial library. We are never very likely to know if the copy of ‘Edmond’ (Woolley very clearly spelled it with an ‘o’, not a ‘u’) borrowed from Sutton’s was the farrago described above. It could equally and probably have been Edmond, Orphan of the Castle, a Tragedy, in Five Acts, which was published in book form (in one volume) in 1799.17 Not only does the name of the Orphan match Woolley’s spelling, but it would have given me some marvellous themes and epigraphs by which to frame Woolley’s perception of the world and the writing of this book. The play was a dramatisation of Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), which she said was designed ‘to unite . . . the ancient Romance and modern Novel’ in a ‘Gothic Story . . . a picture of Gothic times and manners’.18 In remote medieval times Sir Philip Harclay returns from his adventures to find the castle and estate of his friend Lord Lovel usurped. After the opening of a secret door, the intervention of a ghost, a murder revealed (and many more horrors) the rightful are restored to their place in the landed hierarchy of an imagined past. Here are three lost, displaced men found, or at the very least, restored: the eponymous Edmond, Lovel, and Harclay himself. John Broster’s play text followed this plot line, with new dialogue raising questions about the social order in relationship to the domestic realm, the law, and the workers. Lovel returns home wanting to hear about the everyday of his absence (‘Occurrences domestic I would hear’). One medieval nobleman expresses the Enlightenment view that ‘man was born for man, links of one chain,/Some act for us – why we not act for them?’. The goings-on at the castle are 15

16

17 18

Thomas Keymer and Peter Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace: Literary Controversy and Print Culture in Eighteenth-Century Britain and Ireland, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 14–37. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents; and Afterwards in Her Exalted Condition . . . In Four Volumes . . . A New Edition, Being the Fourteenth, with Numerous Corrections and Alterations, J. Johnson and eighteen others, London, 1801. William Lane at the Minerva Press was one of this group of printers/booksellers. Edmond, Orphan of the Castle. A Tragedy, in Five Acts. By J. Broster. Founded on the Old English Baron; a Gothic Story, R. Faulder & T. Hurst, London, 1799. Clara Reeve, The Old English Baron. A Gothic Story, Edward & Charles Dilly, London, 1778, p. iii. There was an earlier anonymous edition: The Champion of Virtue. A Gothic Story. By the Editor of The Phoenix. A Translation of Barclay’s Argenis, for the author, Colchester, 1777.

Books do furnish a mind

33

connected to recent proto-industrial developments in the locality and their effect on the psychology of the workers. Edmond himself (who has also been absent some long while) remarks that ‘The Peasants seen alert, more num’rous too,/Than when from Lovel Castle I departed–/It cheers my heart when men exalted high,/To industry their powerful aid extend,/Banishing Poverty from cottage doors!’19 But there is Woolley’s careful noting of ‘Edmond in 2 voll’ to argue against Broster’s being the book he borrowed in 1801. Or . . . it may have been Charles Lloyd’s Edmund Oliver (1798), however the central character’s name is spelled.20 Sutton’s Library was likely to have stocked this scandalous, radical, roman à clef. Two volumes, comprising seventy-eight fictional letters purportedly written contemporaneously, focus on the undoing of celebrity: on the revelation that a thinly disguised Coleridge is an opium addict.21 Edmund Oliver’s most recent editor suggests that it has often been misrepresented by ‘readings that oversimplify its political and ideological tendencies’; that the labels ‘jacobin’ (contemporaneous) and ‘anti-jacobin’ (modern and critical) simplify its themes and ambiguities; and that the laudanum-crazed Edmund is a less likely depiction of Coleridge than is the hero’s best friend Maurice, whose life of rural plenitude and domestic affection is closely modelled on the actual poet’s actual plans for life in the countryside.22 Edmund Oliver is about sex, masculinity, and friendship – some of Woolley’s preoccupations. Critics sometimes use it as a window onto the politically turbulent literary culture of the 1790s. A reader like Woolley (if he was one) perhaps had more means than modern commentators for contemplating the personal as political per se – in times of war and rumours of invasion, revolution, and counter-revolution, and the early stirrings of Luddism in Nottinghamshire. If this was the ‘Edmund/Edmond’ he read, then connection between the ruined life of a laudanum addict and the state order may have been easier to make out than it is for us. But whichever Edmund/Edmond he borrowed, all of the above offered a sustained contemplation of suffering, displaced, and beautiful masculinity. There is no doubt about ‘baron trenks Life in 3 voll’. This was Friederich Trenck’s The Life of Baron Frederic Trenck, first done into 19 20

21 22

Edmond, Orphan of the Castle, Act I, Scene 1; Act I, Scene 3; Act I, Scene 2; Act II, Scene 1; Act III, Scene 7. Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver. In Two Volumes, Joseph Cottle, Bristol, 1798; Charles Lloyd, ‘Edmund Oliver (1798)’, in Philip Cox (ed.), Anti-Jacobin Novels, vol. II, Pickering and Chatto, London, 2005. Christopher Rubinstein, ‘Coleridge, the Wedgwood Annuity and Edmund Oliver’, Coleridge Bulletin, new ser. 20 (2002), pp. 129–37. Cox (ed.), Edmund Oliver, pp. vii–xxi.

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English in 1747 as Memoirs of the Life of the same, with a third edition in 1800.23 There were at least nine imprints and new translations of The Life published between 1747 and 1800 in the UK and North America, not all of them enumerating themselves as editions. Prussian, soldier, spy, adventurer, wine-trader, lover, impregnator of a princess, mercenary, gambler, prisoner, writer . . . Trenck’s melancholy victimhood has had a transatlantic audience since the mid-eighteenth century. He was a bit-part player in several nineteenth-century novels, and two twentiethcentury German docu-dramas were devoted to him. Each nation entertaining his textual presence fashioned the Baron to its own purposes.24 In 1800 Thomas Holcraft believed that he was translating anew Trenck’s ‘haste, his daring spirit, his lively imagination, his sensibility of heart’ for a modern British readership.25 If this was the edition that Woolley borrowed, it contained Holcraft’s extended explanation of its illustrative plate, which showed Trenck in elegant yet ragged figure, necked round with a collar of iron and draped with chains, which ‘he was obliged to sustain with one hand day and night, or he would have been in danger of being strangled’. This graphic illustration of torture was assumed to have a particular appeal for ‘the lower class of readers’.26 An insistent, self-pitying condemnation of tyranny and absolutism may also have spoken volumes to plebeian readers. The Life is a sustained meditation on the sufferings of a particular type of masculinity as well as ‘eternal monument of the dreadful, the detestable, the diabolical effects of despotism’. No reader could accuse this translator of not preparing them for the sickening disjuncture of terms to be found in its pages: ‘King, liberty, vassal, military sentence, property, just claim, and an infinity of other heterogenous and incompatible phrases’. Holcraft also inducted readers into appreciation of the ‘inherent and masculine beauties’ of Trenck’s character and narrative.27 The books Joseph Woolley read involved a sustained contemplation of suffering, displaced, and beautiful masculinity. Their heroes are not

23

24 25 27

Memoirs of the Life of the Illustrious Francis Baron Trenck, Sometime Lord of the Bed-Chamber to Her Majesty the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia. And Colonel of a Body of Pandours, and Sclavonian Hussars. Containing a Compleat Account of His Several Campaigns in Muscovy, Silesia, Austria, Bavaria, and other Parts of the Empire, Together with Divers Entertaining Anecdotes Relating to His Secret History. Written by Himself, and Done from the Original German into English, W. Owen, London, 1747; Friedrich Freiherr von der Trenck, The Life of Baron Frederic Trenck, Containing His Adventures; His Cruel and Excessive Sufferings during Ten Years Imprisonment at the Fortress of Magdeburg, by Command of the Late King of Prussia. Also Anecdotes, Historical, Political, and Personal. Translated from the German by Thomas Holcroft. Complete in Three Volumes, G. G. and J. Robinson, London, 1800. John Hennig, ‘Trenck and Britain’, Modern Language Review, 41:4 (1946), pp. 393–407. 26 Trenck, The Life, vol. I, p. ix. Hennig, ‘Trenck’, p. 393. Trenck, The Life, vol. I, p. xii

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much like the quick-tongued, hard-drinking, street-fighting men who throng the pages of his diaries. These fictional heroes are the original Lost Boys of romantic and post-romantic Western culture.28 Baron Trenck, Edmund Oliver, and whichever Edmond/Edmund Woolley read, are ousted from place, alone in social space (or in the prison cells of madness, drug addiction, or obsolete feudalism) as fully grown men. They are not lost children, but rather lost and abandoned men. (We shall address Pamela Andrews and Tom Jones, by and by.) Ambrosio the Monk is the most abandoned of them all. He is abandoned by God, because he has abandoned Him. He is lost to humanity, to ‘the goings on of the world in which we live’ (De Quincey). The ‘despairing Monk’ has already, always, been lost.29 There is nothing redemptive about his story, in the way that beauties of character redeem Edmond/Edmund, Trenck, and Oliver. He suffers for nothing. Ambrosio is however, a commanding masculine presence throughout Lewis’s three volumes; he seduces – has sex with – does sex to – several other characters, in graphic detail. Woolley borrowed these narratives of abject and abused masculinity. Three years later, in October 1804, he actually bought Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (‘the 13 pd for 3 vol of the history of tom jones 4s 9d’).30 The investment of this sum of money and his own prose style suggest that he purchased something familiar, which he had already enjoyed. October was a good month. At the end of the agricultural year, the time of the Nottingham Goose Fair and the settling of many debts, Woolley pulled 28

29 30

Andrew Birkin, J. M. Barrie: Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, Potter, New York, 1979; Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan: Or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Macmillan, London, 1984; Carolyn Steedman, Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1995; James Holt McGavran, ‘Wordsworth, Lost Boys and Romantic Hom(e)ophobia’, in Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City, 1999, pp. 130–52; Emma Wilson, ‘Lost Boys: Trauma, Masculinity and the Missing Child Film’, in Phil Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington (eds.), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema, Wallflower, London, 2004, pp. 155–62; Maureen A. Farrell, ‘The Lost Boys and Girls of Scottish Children’s Fiction’, in The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature, 3 vols., Edinburgh University Press, 2007, vol. III, pp. 198–206. Also Franco Moretti, ‘Kindergarten’, in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, Verso, London, 1983. ‘Lost Boys’ has become shorthand for young, subaltern subjects whose lives are abandoned to the incomprehensible purposes of state and nation. John Oakes, Kitchener’s Lost Boys: From the Playing Fields to the Killing Fields: the Lost Children of the Great War, History Press, Stroud, 2009. Lewis, Monk, vol. III, pp. 313–15. NA, DD 311/3, Oct 1804. The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. By Henry Fielding, Esq. In three volumes, T. Longman, B. Law & Son and 14 others, London 1792. Sutton advertised ‘Select Novels’ including Tom Jones in the Nottingham Journal (he had not yet founded his own newspaper), 18 Oct 1800, and ensuing issues. But there were many other outlets in Nottingham for Woolley’s purchase.

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in £5 17s 9½d (nearly a pound of this month’s income was from his new enterprise of trading in candles). He spent over 9s at Goose Fair, and 2s 6d on having a pair of shoes soled – he had a little money to burn. Even so, a book purchase like this was a considerable expenditure. Tom Jones is not a figure like the Monk or Baron Trenck. He is not rejected, tortured or mangled in body and mind. He is not a Lost Boy. Of course, in strict point of the English poor laws he is technically and legally an abandoned boy, for he is the baby discovered on Squire Allworthy’s bed and assumed to be the bastard child of some village hussy. As a foundling, Tom is found in this moment, brought up as the squire’s son, and, in the end, found to be Allworthy’s nephew. Tom is hurt in many a punch-up and brawl; he comes within the shadow of the Hanging Tree. But his bodily sufferings do not inscribe a psychology, or a sensibility. He is not fashioned (nor does he fashion himself) by his travails. His sunniness of nature is depthless; he has no interiority. These qualities (or lack of them) are the basis of his considerable charm and sexual allure. I do not know what it is like to be a man, or to have been an early nineteenth-century man of the poorer sort; but Tom Jones roams the following pages not only because Woolley read the book, not only because Fielding’s text offers complex propositions about the meaning of law to varieties of people, but also because I assume that a man like Woolley might find Tom’s cheerful and energising sexuality something that lay within the realm of the everyday, and that he might think of emulating. However, if Woolley adopted a style (of thinking or writing) from Tom Jones, it was most clearly that of its magistrate-narrator Henry Fielding, who generously permits all his characters incisive analysis of eighteenth-century law and society and the role of the provincial magistrate.31 And what of Richardson’s Pamela, which Woolley also borrowed from Sutton’s in the spring of 1801? To discover Woolley – a working man – reading Pamela provides one of those sublime moments of finding something that historians long for.32 It is a gift to those of us who have spent many years claiming Richardson’s blockbuster best-seller as the ur-text of English social and economic formation. Pamela – and Pamela – can be made to narrativise class and class formation in English 31

32

Claude Rawson (ed.), Henry Fielding (1707–1754): Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate: A Double Anniversary Tribute, Associated Universities Press, Cranbery NJ, 2008, pp. 233–72; Lance Bertelsen, Henry Fielding at Work: Magistrate, Businessman, Writer, Palgrave, New York, 2000; K. G. Simpson, Henry Fielding: Justice Observed, Vision, London, 1985. Emma Rothschild calls this moment ‘the archival sublime’: ‘The Archives of Universal History’, Journal of World History, 19: 3 (2008), pp. 375–401.

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modernity. She can stand in for the struggle between the landed interest and the emergent bourgeoisie. She has been all things, to all sorts of literary and social historian.33 This is a heavy burden for a fifteen-yearold cottager’s daughter to bear. Entering the Big House as servant, she nets its gentry son young Mr B. and marries him. (Henry Fielding thought that she – or Richardson – always had this vertiginous social ascent in mind.34) Woolley may have made his way through volumes III and IV (he certainly borrowed them), which are a mighty dull account of Pamela in her married state (‘her exalted Condition’). Towards the end of the second volume, Pamela stops being a marvellous, hysterical ‘comical Girl’, and loses not only her funniness but her self-possession and her Bedfordshire accent.35 Her creator dims the light, pulls her indoors, stops listing the things that made her earlier world, dresses her 33

34

35

Judith Laurence-Anderson, ‘Changing Affective Life in Eighteenth-Century England and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 10 (1981), pp. 445–56; Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1982; Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1989, passim, esp. pp. 96–160. Pamela provides historians with access to most aspects of eighteenth-century culture and society: see Naomi Tadmor, ‘“Family” and “Friend” in Pamela: A Case-study in the History of the Family in Eighteenth-Century England’, Social History, 14:3 (1989), pp. 289–306, also Family and Friends in EighteenthCentury England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage, Cambridge University Press, 2001; M. G. Spencer, ‘Pursuing Pamela, 1740–1750’, Eighteenth Century Life, 26:2 (2002), pp. 96–100; Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740– 1914, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 26–34; Laura J. Rosenthal, ‘Pamela’s Work’, The Eighteenth Century, 46:3 (2005), pp. 245–53; Carol Stewart, ‘Pamela and the Anglican Crisis of the 1730s’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32:1 (2009), pp. 37–51; Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2008, pp. 47–82; Rebecca Davies, ‘The Maternal Contradiction: Representing the Fictional Mother in Richardson’s Pamela II (1741)’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 33:3 (2010), pp. 381–97. For Pamela as a modern pedagogic text, Florian Stuber, ‘Teaching Pamela’, in Margaret Anne Doody and Peter Sabor (eds.), Samuel Richardson: Tercentary Essays, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 8–22. Henry Fielding, An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews. In Which the Many Notorious Falshoods [sic] and Misreprsentations [sic] of a Book Called Pamela, Are Exposed and Refuted . . . By Mr. Conny Keyber, A. Dodd, London, 1741. She was a ‘vulgar, practical little soul’ in Clara Linklater Thompson, Samuel Richardson: A Biographical and Critical Study [1900], Norwood, Darby PA, 1978, p. 156. ‘She laugh’d, and said, I never saw such a comical Girl in my life.’ Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to Her Parents . . . In Two Volumes, 3rd edn, for C. Rivington and J. Osborn, London, 1741, p. 96. No one is better on Pamela’s divine comedy than Margaret Doody. See the ‘Introduction’ to Samuel Richardson, Pamela, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985, pp. 7–21. (Page numbers in parentheses above refer to this edition.) Also Margaret Anne Doody, A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1974, pp. 35–70.

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as a doll: limbs stiff, sauciness all gone. Self-possession is much to the point. As plebeian, teenage hysteric, Pamela speaks its language. She has been read as an embodiment of protest and Protestantism, of John Locke’s ‘Fundamental, sacred, and unalterable Law of SelfPreservation’.36 Always and utterly her self (‘I am Pamela. Indeed I am Pamela, her own self !’37) she protests against ancien regime power and corruption embodied in Mr B. Her letters make clear that his sexual attitude derives from his social, economic, and political power. He owns the vast tracts of land on which the story plays out, the villages on his two estates, and the allegiance of the people who live there. Fellow servants may wish to help Pamela, but they fear for their place. Mr B. owns the post-office, so he can intercept her letters. He is surveyor of highways, and so can control the passage of traffic along the roads crossing his land. He has the gift of two church livings, so he can rely on clergy’s refusal to help her. He is the law in his part of Bedfordshire, for he is local justice of the peace. ‘What?’ says someone well into volume II, ‘embroil myself with a man of Mr B.’s power and fortune? Not I, I assure you’ (173). Against all of this, Pamela pitches the doctrine of inalienable human rights (163, 177).38 She combines assertions of legal self-possession with the fundamental principle of equality in God’s sight (197). She refers to the Christian myth of origin, to the beginning of time, when there were no monarchs, no social hierarchies, and no country gentlemen like Mr B. – when ‘we were all on a foot’ (294). Pamela (in her high-flown moments) is concerned with juridical questions of rights and obligations, of equity, common law, and self-ownership. A self-dramatising fifteenyear-old represents some pretty grand ideas and makes an acute analysis of England’s administrative and confessional state as it may have been experienced by some eighteenth-century working people.39 We do not know if it was so experienced, but we do know about Pamela’s rapid movement into popular culture, and into the nineteenth century. Operas, play texts, parodies, chapbooks, children’s books, conduct books, sermon-collections, painted fans, decorated tea-cups, prints, 36 37 38

39

Jocelyn Harris, Samuel Richardson, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 15–32; John Locke, Two Treatises of Government [1689–90], Dent, London, 1993, vol. II, p. 149. Richardson, Pamela (1985), p. 89. In Inventing Human Rights, W. W. Norton, New York, 2007, Lynn Hunt finds the origins of human rights in the eighteenth-century sentimental novel in general, and in the epistolary Pamela in particular. Bruce Robbins discusses Pamela’s wildly shifting registers – how, at points of high political principle, she does not sound much like your actual Bedfordshire cottager’s girl. The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below [1986], Duke University Press, Durham SC and London, 1993, p. 103. J. C. D. Clark, ‘England’s Ancien Regime as Confessional State’, Albion, 21:3 (1989), pp. 450–75.

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paintings, and engravings, carried her story into the furthest reaches of the British Isles and beyond their shores.40 Nineteenth-century fiction pullulates with Pamela and her (fictional) daughters.41 We have evidence from some of the better sort who wrote about reading Pamela, but none at all from plebeian readers of the long eighteenth century.42 Woolley is our first; but he did not record his thoughts about it. And even if he had, we might easily be seduced into believing them to be a ‘reliable record of [his] actual acts of reception’, and not just ‘a tiny, randomly surviving, sample of the far larger total of acts of reception which were never even turned into words in the mind of the reader let alone recorded in writing’.43 Believing Woolley to be an accurate witness to his own appropriation of text would also be to disregard him as a writer, working within the generic conventions of his own time, with his own intended and implied readers exerting their theoretical influence on his composition. Nevertheless, Woolley’s borrowed-books reading list could shape a new (though not very innovative) history of the novel to add to all the ones we already possess. I could structure this book by multiple Edmonds, by Tom Jones, Pamela, Baron von Trenck, and The Monk, and use their themes and style as windows onto Woolley’s own 100,000 words. Joseph Woolley read the eighteenth-century canon, as defined by twentieth-century literary scholarship.44 The novels he names measure out a development in literary form (from the epistolary, through the picaresque, to the gothic) made active by the reading of one obscure framework knitter of turn-of-the-century Nottinghamshire. (If it was Edmund Oliver that he read, we could discuss the hybridisation of the epistolary, the sentimental, and the jacobin novel, by way of the gothic, in the 1790s.) But that would be to write a history of the novel, rather than a history of its readers. 40 41

42

43 44

Keymer and Sabor, Pamela in the Marketplace, pp. 143–76. For Pamela’s textual progeny, R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to de Sade, Macmillan, London, 1974; Robert Palfrey Utter and Gwendolyn Bridges Needham, Pamela’s Daughters, Russell & Russell, New York, 1972. There is much indirect evidence about plebeian readers; none from them. Katharine C. Balderson (ed.), Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs Piozzi), 1776–1809, 2 vols. [1941], Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1951, vol. I, p. 145. See also Stephanie Fysh, The Work(s) of Samuel Richardson, Associated Universities Press, Cranbery NJ, 1997, pp. 57–79; Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 41–2, quoting James Lackington, Memoirs of the Forty-Five First Years of the Life of James Lackington, the Present Bookseller, London, for the author, 1791, pp. 254–5. William St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 5–6. Rose, Intellectual Life, pp. 116–45.

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In pursuit of readers, the historian can draw speculative lines between novels and the reading of them. In Provincial Readers in EighteenthCentury England, Jan Fergus reports on the buying habits of Rugby schoolboys visiting the Clays’ bookstore in the county town of Warwick, between about 1740 and 1790. All of the children’s-book entrepreneur John Newbery’s publications were popular, his Little Goody Two-Shoes remarkably so with readers aged about nine or ten.45 Those acquainted with Little Margery Two-Shoes’ triumph over her orphan state, poverty, and general adversity, may be surprised at the boys’ choice of a heroine, of the poorer sort, by which to interpret their own situation. ‘Boy readers of Goody Two-Shoes . . . must to some extent identify themselves with this girl’s subject position’, remarks Fergus.46 Perhaps the book resonated with children’s experience of the dislocating environment of a public school. Like them, the child character Little Goody is ousted from home, literally and psychologically, yet despite some very powerful adult enemies, she survives and triumphs. Her narrative may have ‘reflected and solaced . . . [the boys’] own condition: dispossessed . . . exiled to a harsh world with incomprehensible and arbitrary laws that afforded no protection to the weak, and subject to the tyranny of the powerful’.47 Could Woolley have made a cross-gendered reading of Pamela? Transcend our suspicions that he may have read it for the dirty bits (heaving bosom, bodice ripped, improper advances on Pamela’s person by her employer, attempted rape . . .)? Might he have, briefly, read ‘like a woman’, or identified with a female character?48 The problem with this account of Woolley as a reader (and with pubescent boys finding comfort in Little Goody) is that the psychology of reading employed is a twentieth-century one, born of psycholinguistics, child psychology and literacy studies. It is a model informed 45

46

47 48

Jan Fergus, Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 118–54; 141. John Newbery, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes; Otherwise Called, Mrs. Margery Two-Shoes. With the Means by Which She Acquired her Learning and Wisdom, and in Consequence Thereof Her Estate; Set Forth at Large for the Benefit of Those, Who from a State of Rags and Care, and Having Shoes But Half a Pair; Their Fortune and Their Fame Would Fix, and Gallop in A Coach and Six. See the Original Manuscript in the Vatican At Rome, and the Cuts by Michael Angelo. Illustrated with the Comments of Our Great Modern Critics, 3rd edn, for J. Newbery, London, 1766. Fergus, Provincial Readers, p. 140. Also Jan Fergus, ‘Eighteenth-Century Readers in Provincial England: The Customers of Samuel Clay’s Circulating Library and Workshop at Warwick’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 78 (1984), pp. 155–213. Fergus, Provincial Readers, p. 149. Jonathan Culler, ‘Reading as a Woman’, in Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Routledge, London, 1983, extr. and repr. in Mary Eagleton (ed.), Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader [1986], Blackwell, Oxford, 1996, pp. 306–9.

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by psycho-analytic studies of children’s interaction with fairy tales, and women’s employment of the romance, both for purposes of compensation and self-construction.49 ‘Identification’ with characters in books, or their themes and plots, is our own, modern concept. We have no idea at all if early nineteenth-century readers behaved psychologically in this way, or believed that this was what readers were meant to do with novels. Twentieth-century readers were taught (usually in the educational systems of the Western world) to behave in this way with fiction.50 This technology of reading – and of the emotions – did not exist in the eighteenth century, though readers were assumed to be able to identify with a writer’s intentions, and also able to imagine a writer sharing the feelings he embodied in his fictional figures. But readers were not conceptualised as finding themselves in those figures. There were many lessons given in how to read; in how to be sensible to themes, characters, and settings, especially in guides for the sentimental reader of the later century. Sentimental novels sometimes included their own instructions, telling readers when and how to cry, and when it was appropriate to emote before a particularly ravishing landscape.51 ‘How to read’ manuals may well have preset expectations and responses, and some readers ‘may have devoted considerable efforts to try to build a full and balanced and critical understanding of the meanings of the texts they read’. But, as William St Clair says, to use their comments as a guide to reader-text relationships in any given historical period is to ignore readers’ autonomy and independence, and the many ways in which they made sense of text.52 Joseph Woolley was a reader, not simply because he could read, but because reading was a part of his everyday life, and a means of interpreting the social world he inhabited. On the evidence of his diaries, scarcely a day could have passed between 1800 and 1815 without his reading something, not least his own writing. He had the habit of reading, and evidently read easily and well. He expected to read; it was not an odd or intermittent activity. He was liberally provided with print (newspapers, political pamphlets, novels; there were lending libraries, reading rooms, bookstalls, and bookshops, all within walking distance) 49

50 51 52

Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1979; Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1984. George Steiner, Language and Silence: Essays, 1958–1966, Faber, London, 1967, p. 81. John Mullan, ‘Feelings and Novels’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present, Routledge, London and New York, 1997, pp. 119–34. St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 5.

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and he could afford to purchase a wide variety; his social circle gave him opportunities to discuss what he had read. He may have used a mail-order service; on a page of notes written sometime in the spring of 1804 is ‘Lackington and Co booksellers finsbury Square London’.53 For these reasons we can call him a modern reader, in the way William St Clair has described reading and readerships in Britain from about 1770 onwards as modern. In his borrowing of Pamela and purchase of Tom Jones, he also matches the profile of St Clair’s reader of the poorer sort c. 1790–1830. Changes in copyright law in 1774 provoked an explosion in book publication, much of it made up of reprints of older titles, which were cheaper than newly published novels.54 But Woolley also had access to at least one new gothic romance (The Monk) published in the 1790s. And Woolley knew Sutton’s Nottingham library and bookshop (though he only records borrowing from it once). Charles Sutton’s various commercial enterprises were an important context to Woolley’s encounters with print. As well as operating as printer/bookseller, Charles Sutton (1765–1829) was a newspaper proprietor; he founded the liberal Nottingham Review in 1808.55 The Review was sympathetic to the framework knitters’ grievances and in 1812, at the height of the Nottinghamshire Luddite disturbances, was a major player in what were called ‘the poetry wars’ accompanying the rebellion. Sutton published many verses and letters explicating the Luddite position.56 His editorials historicised Luddism, claimed its origins in the seventeenth century, and perhaps gave the movement its name.57 In 1814 a letter from ‘General Ludd’ himself appeared in its columns.58 Sutton may well have had some association with Luddism: he ‘sympathised with the motives of the disaffected framework knitters . . . a version of a seditious Luddite song, ‘Well Done, Ned Ludd’, appeared on a sheet of paper in [his] possession and in his handwriting before the song was posted in Nottingham on a handbill that was later sent to the Home Secretary’.59 A short-lived rival, the 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

NA, DD 311/1, 176. This is a fragment – a note – the only mention of Lackington’s emporium. St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 103–39. Rose, Intellectual Life, p. 120 for an 1850s stallkeeper referring to this legislation whilst discussing trade with Henry Mayhew. NA, DD/764, Papers of the Sutton family of Nottingham, 1816–1972. Kevin Binfield (ed.), The Writings of the Luddites, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2004, pp. 114–16, 129, 146–52. ‘ned ludd . . . the framebreakers, or Luddites, as they are now called’, Nottingham Review, 27 Dec 1811. ‘General Ludd to the Editor of the Nottingham Review’, Nottingham Review, 14 Oct 1814, reproduced in Binfield, Writings, pp. 151–2. Binfield, Writings, p. 150.

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Nottingham Gazette, published some very long charge-sheets against Sutton, accusing him of instigating violence and rebellion: ‘How much has the Review to account for in inciting deluded men to these dreadful acts!’60 In February 1816 Sutton was found guilty of political libel for publishing an anonymous letter which compared unfavourably the activities of British troops in the war with the USA with those of the Luddites.61 From his prison cell Sutton debated with his son the ethical and commercial advantages of publishing the most recent ‘Red Book’ put out by radicals to attack sinecure-holders, placemen, and patronage in general.62 ‘I should be sorry to publish it and to have it said it has occasioned Riots’, he wrote; but ‘I think . . . we should not be deterred from publishing it . . . It is already published and if a part of the People are to be informed of its contents, why not the whole?’ It would ‘convince the people of the necessity of reform’.63 Family history relates how Sutton had been asked to establish the Review by the liberal interest in Nottingham, ‘to communicate the free remarks of the . . . enlightened correspondent’.64 He was concerned that Sutton’s Library should play a similar role in the free dissemination of knowledge.65 Some eighteenthcentury readers and twentieth-century historians made the connection between pornography (not then so called) like The Monk and varieties of political radicalism.66 Stocking the kind of book that Woolley borrowed

60

61

62

63 64 65

66

Nottingham Gazette, 21 and 28 Oct 1814. The Gazette ran for eighteen months between 1813 and 1815. Founded by another Nottingham printer/bookseller, Samuel Tupman to promote English liberties in face of the threat from France, it was ‘bounded by the period’ of revolution and Jacobinism. It folded with Napoleon’s fall and imminent ‘establishment of mild government in France’. Gazette, 31 Mar 1815. It devoted many column inches to attacking the Review and Charles Sutton. ‘Court of King’s Bench, Thursday, Feb. 1. The King v. Charles Sutton’, The Times, 2 Feb 1816; ‘Court of King’s Bench, Friday, Feb. 9. The King v. Charles Sutton’, The Times, 10 Feb 1816. A Commoner, Extraordinary Red Book. A List of all Places, Pensions, Sinecures, &c. with the Various Salaries and Emoluments Arising Therefrom, Exhibiting also a Complete View of the National Debt with an Account of the Receipts and Expenditure of the Public Money, with Notes, Critical and Explanatory the Whole Containing the Strongest Body of Evidence to Prove the Necessity of Enfranchisement Which Can Possibly be Laid Before the Nation, J. Blacklock, London, 1816; James C. Slack, ‘The House of Lords and Parliamentary Patronage in Great Britain, 1802–18’, Historical Journal, 23:4 (1980), pp. 913–37. NA, DD 764/3/3, letter from Charles Sutton written from Northampton Goal, 29 Sep 1816; also DD 764/4/3, ditto, 18 Nov 1816. NA, DD/764/1, ‘Part 1 Annals of the Sutton Family. Written by Richard Sutton, Printer, Nottingham, Oct 1837, and continued at intervals’, p. 19. DD 764/3/3. He asked his son to arrange for a new publication to be sent to Northampton Goal – ‘The late Session of the House of Commons 5/6 published by Ridgway’. ‘You must order it for the library,’ he said – only let him read it first. Iain McCalman, ‘Unrespectable Radicalism: Infidels and Pornography in Early Nineteenth-Century London’, Past and Present, 104 (1984), pp. 74–110. The classic

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was provision of liberal and radical ideas. The Suttons were Methodists. Methodism provided them with a reforming, anti-establishment family history stretching back to the mid-eighteenth century.67 The politics of Nottingham Methodism has some salience for Sir Gervase Clifton’s two forays into its print wars, in 1800 and 1815, as we shall see; but much more for putting in place Joseph Woolley’s context as cultural consumer of print.68 Woolley recorded buying twenty-two ‘books’ (this total includes the three volumes of Tom Jones), paying on average 1s 8d per item.69 He distinguished between ‘this book’ (meaning what he wrote in, or yet another purchase of Vox Stellarum: or a Loyal Almanack for the Year of Human Redemption, 1801 . . . by Francis Moore, bound with blank pages), or the purchase of a ‘pocket book’, and the twenty-two bought volumes.70 Whatever the ‘books’ were, they were ‘literature’ in its broadest sense, not writing material. He once recorded paying for a book to be bound, which cost him a shilling more than the average price he had paid for individual volumes over the preceding twelve years.71 Two of his twenty-two purchases cannot be disaggregated from the goods and services he bought at the same time, as when in August 1809 he ‘pd for a book and ink shaving news’ (1s 3d).72 Henry Fielding is a guide to his consumer behaviour whilst being shaved. In Tom Jones he remarked on those ‘certain places set apart . . . where the curious might

67

68 70

71 72

account of traffic between pornography and political thinking is Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France, Norton, New York, 1996. Also William E. Brigman, ‘Pornography as Political Expression’, Journal of Popular Culture, 17:2 (1983), pp. 129–34; Lynn Hunt (ed.), The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800, Zone, New York, 1993. NA, DD/764/1, ‘Our Suttons Private Family Record in Three Parts. “Annals of the Sutton Family” and “Our Suttons The Later Generations”’ pp. 82–90. Charles Sutton’s granddaughter described him as Methodist leader, local preacher and trustee of the Nottingham Methodist New Connection. 69 See Chapter 7. For the price of books, St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 186–209. NA, DD 311/1, 28 Jan, 30 Apr 1801; DD 311/2, 3 Feb 1803; DD 311/3, 21 Feb, 26 Apr 1804; DD 311/4, 18 Mar, 19 Aug, 11 and 25 Nov 1809; DD 311/5, 5 and 12 Sep 1813. For Tom Jones, DD 311/3, 13 Oct 1804; for ‘this book’ (Old Moore’s Almanack) DD 311/5, 9 Jan 1813; the pocket book was bought on 1 Jan 1803 (DD 311/2), but was probably not another Vox Stellarum. He gave the titles of five novels (four borrowed, one bought) and noted – possibly – three other pamphlet publications. It is not possible therefore to provide a list of his reading as does David Vaisey at the end of The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754–1765 [1984], CTR, East Hoathly, 1994, pp. 347–58. The shopkeeper and parish official read Richardson’s Clarissa (not Pamela). But he read before cheap editions of earlier eighteenth-century fiction flooded the reprint market from the 1780s onwards. DD 311/6, 16 Aug 1815. For binding costs, St Clair, Reading Nation, p. 514. In the early diaries the day was usually a Sunday or Monday; he settled down to a regular Saturday shave in the later volumes.

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meet, and satisfy their mutual curiosity. Among these, the barbers shops have justly borne their pre-eminence . . . You there see foreign affairs discussed in a manner little inferior to that with which they are handled in the coffee-houses; and domestick occurrences are much more largely and freely treated in the former’.73 Here was where Woolley obtained much of the printed matter that passed through his hands: ‘Jan the 5 paid for 2 newes and shaving 3d’ (1801) ‘the 20 Shaving news hair Cutting 4d’ (Mar 1801), ‘the 3 Shaving and newspaper 3d’ (Jun 1809), ‘the 29 spent at nottingham and shaving news 7½d’ (Jul 1809), ‘the 23 shaveing and 2 newspapers 3d’ ( Jan 1813). These prices may suggest that he paid to read the papers whilst being attended to, rather than purchasing them outright.74 But he had much more access to newsprint than this. In December 1800 he listed the names of the men with whom he ‘Subscribe[d] to the Cambridge newspaper’, probably the radical and nationally distributed Cambridge Intelligencer.75 He appears to have kept the subscription accounts for a group of friends and colleagues. In 1809 he ‘paid 8s 4d for one quarter of the newspaper due’.76 (This could no longer have been the Intelligencer, for it ceased publication in 1803. Charles Sutton had launched the Nottingham Review in 1808 and Woolley and his friends may have turned to a local paper.) Once he invested in a bundle of ‘old newspapers’ for fivepence.77 William Widdowson, licensee of the Red Hart in Ruddington where Woolley drank regularly, may have run a reading room on his premises, or at least provided his clients with newspapers.78 The Red Hart was where his friendly society met. ‘The Club’ was an important mediator in Woolley’s appropriation of newsprint.79 Only once did he record what was in or supplemented the newspapers he read. In March 1813 he noted ‘the 31 Shving and newspaper Confesion’, which may have referred to an investigation into the conduct of the Princess of Wales after she was accused of bearing a bastard. At least one national newspaper serialised ‘“The Book!”’.80 He did not

73 74 75 76 77 79 80

Fielding, Tom Jones (1792), vol. I, p. 76 (Book II, chapter 4). Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 95–134. NA, DD 311/1, 15 Dec 1800. NA, DD 311/1, p. 10, accounts for Jan–Jun 1801; DD 311/4, 14 Feb 1809. 78 NA, 311/1, 6 Jul 1801. NA, DD 311/1, 8 Feb 1801. Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies c. 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000. ‘The Investigation into the Conduct of the Princess of Wales under a Commission from the King. Documents to be Continued in Regular Series from the Book’, Morning Post, 13 March 1813; NA, DD 311/5, 31 Mar 1813; ‘The Book!’ Or, The Proceedings and Correspondence upon the Subject of the Inquiry into the Conduct of the Princess of Wales, under a Commission Appointed by the King in the Year 1806, Faithfully Copied from Authentic

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name his newspapers, but he belonged to the world of modern news media.81 He understood that the papers interpellated men like him – for all that they got local detail wrong – along with their regular itemisation of battles, victories, grain prices, trade disputes, and the proceedings of the Houses of Parliament. In October 1815 he wrote about a ‘match at Cricket played at Bunney between 11 of nottingham and 16 of Barrow upon Soar (as it was termed in the Newspapers) . . . ’.82 But newspapers present particular problems for historians attempting to construct a typology of the exchange between readers and texts in the past, for whatever the exchange was, newspapers ‘included a great variety of materials and . . . [entailed a] vast number of acts of reading’, arguably far more than does a piece of prose fiction.83 So too with the smaller number of pamphlets Woolley noted purchasing. In the lead-up to the 1803 Nottingham election he spent 2s 2½d on pamphlet material.84 By taking part as a reader in Nottingham’s political ‘papers wars’, Woolley moved from the ‘boundaries of the reading nation’ to its centre.85 Or at least, to a well laid-out suburb of one of its cities of reading. But Woolley had never been restricted to the unchanging canon of the poor, to the Bible, almanacs, ballads, and chapbooks originating in the late sixteenth century.86 To be sure, he had a daily interaction with an almanac, for he wrote on interleaved blank sheets of Old Moore’s, but on my reading of his diaries there are only two entries which may record an exchange between its printed pages and his own writing.87 Woolley read

81 82 83 84

85

86 87

Documents. To Which is Prefixed a Narrative of Events that Led to the Publication of the Original Documents, John Bell, London, 1813. See Davis’s distinction between ‘newes’ and ‘news’ in the early eighteenth century. Factual Fictions, pp. 42–70. NA, DD 311/6, 4, 5, 6, and 7 Oct 1815. J. F. Sutton, Nottingham Cricket Matches from 1771–1853, Sutton, Nottingham, 1853. William St Clair, ‘Following Up The Reading Nation’, in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume VI: 1830–1914, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 706–35; p. 721. NA, DD 311/2, 31 Jan, 2 and 9 Apr, 21 May 1803. Malcolm I. Thomis, ‘The Nottingham Election of 1803’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society of Nottinghamshire, 65, 1962 for 1961, pp. 94–103; Roger Wells, Riot and Political Disaffection in Nottingham in the Age of Revolutions, 1776–1803: The Origins of Nottinghamshire Radicalism, Dept of Adult Education, University of Nottingham, 1985; John Vincent Beckett, ‘Responses to War: Nottingham in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815’, Midland History, 22 (1997), pp. 71–84. Daniel Parker Coke, The Paper War, Carried on at the Nottingham Election 1803. Containing the Whole of the Addresses, Songs, Squibs, etc. Circulated by the Contending Parties Including the Books of Accidents and Chances, W. & M. Turner, Nottingham, 1803. St Clair, ‘At the Boundaries of the Reading Nation’, in St Clair, Reading Nation, pp. 339–56. In April 1801, at the bottom of accounts for hose and family-produced honey sold that month, he noted ‘the Light’, directly opposite the Full Moon forecast on the almanac page. NA, DD 311/1, May 1801. Extant copies of the Vox Stellarum for the turn of the

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his Almanacks, but not in the same way as he read The Monk or the Cambridge Intelligencer. Anyway, for a reader of his competence and experience, Old Moore must have been a bit of a joke. But the form it came in was highly convenient for him as an account keeper and writer, for it was essentially a calendar. He must always have known what day of the week it was, and the date, so it may have been another factor in the production of him as a modern person – and reader.88 Woolley’s understanding of himself as competent consumer of all kinds of cultural production was a taken-for-granted of his writing. In August 1805 he had a lot of fun describing the ridiculous appearance of two Clifton acquaintances at the theatre in town. Not only were they dressed up to the nines in an attempt to attract the girls, but they made a deal of noise ‘when aney thing they atracted their atention in the play but that was verey seldom for they under stood the play Jast as much as if one of their four footed brothers Long Ears had been there’; ‘they often shewed their aplause where it was not due . . . ’.89 In this way he asserted that

88

89

century contain no blank pages, but ‘interleaved pocket almanac books’ were common in the seventeenth century. Mascuch, Origins, pp. 72–89; 112. I assume that paper-covered copies were unpicked by local booksellers and blank pages sewn in. Woolley recorded paying 3s for ‘this Book’ in 1813 and 1815. NA, DD 311/5, 9 Jan 1813; DD 311/6, 21 Jan 1815. Vox Stellarum: or a Loyal Almanack for the Year of Human Redemption . . . by Francis Moore, printed and sold by Thomas Pearson at the Wholesale Almanack, Stationary and Medicine Warehouse, Birmingham, 1797; for 1801, printed by the Company of Stationers, London. See Robin Myers, ‘The Stationers’ Company and the Almanack Trade’, in Michael F. Suarez and Michael L. Turner (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Vol. V: 1695–1830, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 723–36; Lance Bertelsen, ‘Popular Entertainment and Instruction, Literary and Dramatic: Chapbooks, Advice Books, Almanacs, Ballads, Farces, Pantomimes, Prints and Shows’, in John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 61–86. For the second interaction between Woolley and Old Moore, see below, p. 119. He also owned a watch. He recorded its having been mended or cleaned five times, at the Nottingham shop of John Wainwright and Son, watchmakers. For plebeian watch ownership, John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 98–107, and passim. And for diary-keeping itself as sign of the subject of modernity, Philippe Lejeune, ‘Counting and Managing’, in Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, pp. 51–60. NA, DD 311/3, 6 and 7 Aug 1805. They were all watching ‘The School of Reform; or How to Rule a Husband’. Also presented that evening was ‘a Whimsical Description of Town [&] Country’ and ‘a new Comic Pantomic Ballet called Hurry Scurry: or the Tailors’ Rumpus’. Nottingham Journal, 5 Aug 1805. Thomas Morton, The School of Reform, or, How to Rule a Husband: a Comedy, in Five Acts, as Perform’d at the TheatreRoyal, Covent-Garden, Longman, London, 1805 had opened in London on 15 January. William Godwin was at its first night. The Diary of William Godwin, ed. Victoria Myers, David O’Shaughnessy and Mark Philp, Oxford Digital Library, Oxford, 2010). Entry for 15 Jan 1805. http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. See Chapter 5 for further discussion of this play.

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he understood the play and knew when to applaud. When Richardson’s Pamela displays her considerable reading experience she is disparaged, either by Mr B. (as in the epigraph to this chapter) for the very idea of a poor girl knowing classical mythology, or by her author, who gives her errors of detail in her recall of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.90 By way of contrast Joseph Woolley presented himself as quite at home in the great sea of cultural production in which he swam. He had been the kind of reader he was in 1801 (and in 1815) for most of his life. A man like him would have read differently and different material a century, or fifty years, before Woolley recorded his interactions with text. His reading experiences from childhood onwards shaped his use of the printed word and varieties of fictional and factual narrative. The day (or dame) school he attended provoked the one visual memory recorded in his diaries. In 1804 building work in Clifton made him recall the street in which it was situated, its peculiarities of architecture, its setting among the trees; the time ‘when I was a small boy and went to school to martha burnay she Lived in that house that stands by the farm yard side . . . ’.91 A hundred years on, in a new era of mass schooling, small private schools for young children, past and present, were denigrated and dismissed by HMI and other commentators. Many have taken John Clare’s painful memories of his education in 1790s Northamptonshire to have been the experience of all working-class children.92 But someone helped Joseph Woolley become an enterprising, interested, and above all, good reader.93 From the psycho-linguistics of 90

91 92

93

Mr. B. sneers when Pamela evokes the legend of Lucretia in resisting his advances. She has misquoted Hamlet a few pages earlier. She confuses her bishops with her martyrs in The Book of Martyrs. Pamela (1980), ed. Margaret Doody, p. 522, n. 8. For the resonance of the Lucretia story for political radicals (and its circulation in chapbook form in the English eighteenth century), Ian Donaldson, The Rapes of Lucretia: A Myth and Its Transformations, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982. NA, DD 311/3, Sep 1804. In 1804 there were good reasons for Woolley to recall his childhood. See below, Chapter 3. ‘I think the manner of learning children in village schools very erroneous, that is as soon as they learn their letters to task them with lessons from the bible and testament and keep them dinging at them, without any change until they leave it. A dull boy never turns with pleasure to his school days when he has often been beat 4 times for bad readings in 5 verses of Scripture . . . I cannot speak with assurance only where experience informs me so much for village schools.’ Eric Robinson and David Powell (eds.), John Clare By Himself, Routledge, New York, 2002, p. 6; David Wardle, Education and Society in NineteenthCentury Nottingham, Cambridge University Press, 1971, p. 148; S. D. Chapman ‘The Evangelical Revival and Education in Nottingham’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 66 (1962), pp. 48–9. Phil Gardner, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England: The People’s Education, Croom Helm, London, 1984, pp. 147–87; Gillian Sutherland, ‘Education’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1850. Volume III:. Social Agencies and Institutions, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 119–69; p. 128.

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reading we know about the many ways in which learners can be helped to make sense of and appropriate written language. The history of childhood reading acquisition demonstrates that even an illiterate parent (as John Clare said his mother was) could help a child learn to read by hearing him tell aloud the printed version of a story they both knew well.94 Transhistorically, and in psycho-linguistic terms, what seems to have mattered in the production of successful readers is that someone cared about their reading, and about them as readers. Given the multifarious methods of reading-teaching that have pertained and the erratic lines between them and success or failure for individual learners, it is impossible to draw up a typology of a ‘good’ reading method. Children and other literacy learners have acquired reading skills in the weirdest and most unexpected of ways. However, there are things to say about the reading teaching that Joseph Woolley most likely experienced in a small private school, run by a woman, in the late eighteenth century. We can speculate about the connection between a seven-year-old learning his letters and a grown man reading Tom Jones, and the mental apparatus of someone of his age, class, and occupation. Indeed, a twentieth-century assessment of success and failure in learning to read gave the method that Martha Burnay almost certainly used with her pupils very high marks indeed.95 She probably used some version of the syllabic method.96 A child – or young adult learner – was expected to learn the alphabet, that is, get by heart the letter names rather than the sounds the letters represent. Rapidly (and sometimes, if nineteenth-century evidence is anything to go by, in parallel, for you could recite the alphabet on a daily basis for years in a village school, whilst doing quite other and sophisticated things with the written word) the learner was introduced to the phonetic qualities of the twenty-six letters by articulating strings of syllables: ba–ca–da–fa– (in reading primers these were usually set in rows). The child must then build the syllables up into units that conveyed meaning, as do bat–cat–fat. Then he or she must gain further experience of letter sounds (and the variety of sounds that might be conveyed by the same letter) by combining syllables (bat-on; fat-ter).97 After this, as might be supposed, 94 95 96 97

Robinson and Powell, John Clare, p. 2; David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 54–65. Ronald Morris, Success and Failure in Learning to Read, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 28–33. As opposed to phonetic methods, or types of whole-word recognition. When introduced, these methods were targeted at genteel home-educators. Ian Michael, The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 72–130.

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the primers took wildly divergent approaches, for as contemporary language theorists were at pains to point out, English is not organised at the structural level by syllables, but rather, by stress: by the irregular emphasis of the human (English) voice in articulation.98 The syllabic method of literacy-teaching may have allowed children and other learners access to the rhythmic structure of English by allowing them to play about with its sound system. It has been argued elsewhere that this form of reading teaching may have had some discernible effect on the poetic output of working-class people in the period c. 1740–1840.99 Repeated chanting of strings of syllables was thought to provide the key to unlock the reading process. All of this method involved voicing: the runs of syllables (and sometimes, the wild nonsense of their conjunction) were said out loud, often in chorus with other children.100 This was a kind of formalised speech-play, drawing on a baby’s first babbling and mapping onto learners’ reading what many knew already (albeit unconsciously) about the organisation of their spoken language.101 In some early nineteenth-century Lancastrian-inspired schools for poor children other sensory support for playing about with syllables (of finding out more about what you already knew about language) was offered, pupils repeating them again and again whilst tracing ba–ab, bat–tab . . . in trays of sand with a finger.102 The syllabic method may have affected thinking about language, not least because it connected with oral culture and a child’s experience of early speech development. Syllabic methods of literacy instruction may promote play with rhyme and rhythm. If this is how Joseph Woolley learned to read – and really, there is no evidence of any other teaching method in use, in the later eighteenth-century – two things follow. He belonged to a community of readers whose approach to text had been 98

99 100

101

102

James Beattie, The Theory of Language. In Two Parts. Of the Origin and General Nature of Speech, Strahan, Cadell & Creech, Edinburgh, 1788, pp. 62–7, 116; The Art of Poetry on a New Plan. Illustrated with a Great Variety of Examples from the Best English Poets, and of Translations from the Ancients. 2 vols., J. Newbery, London, 1762., vol. I, pp. 8–13. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Poetical Maids and Cooks Who Wrote’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39:1 (2005), pp. 1–27. For the wildness of the visual imagination – the sheer zaniness – that reading primers might promote, see Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 110–11. Courtney B. Cazden, ‘Play with Language and Metalinguistic Awareness: One Dimension of Language Experience’, International Journal of Early Childhood, 6:1 (1974), pp. 12–23; Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (ed.), Speech Play, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1976; Catherine Garvey, ‘Play with Language and Speech’, in Susan Ervin-Tripp and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan (eds.), Child Discourse, Academic Press, New York, 1977. Morris, Success and Failure, pp. 41–6.

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inaugurated in this way; and it is possible to speculate about his – and others’ – approach to written texts in adulthood. It was of course, an experience inflected by social class, but perhaps only in its brevity – and lack of Latin. Woolley’s schooling may have lasted between one and five years. (For the early century Margaret Spufford has suggested that an averagely bright seven-year-old could acquire the skills to read the Bible and other literature of the faith in about nine months.103) Instruction in writing followed a mastery of basic reading. Woolley did not go on to acquire Latin, instruction in which usually commenced when a boy was about eight and at a very different type of school from Mrs Burnay’s.104 But as for the mechanics of the very early stages of reading acquisition – before elite boys were banished to school from a mother’s knee or a sisters’ schoolroom – it was the syllabic method that was universally experienced by young initial readers. I believe that this early reading experience made Joseph Woolley a much better reader of a text like Pamela or Tom Jones than I am (for instance). In order to decode text and make meaning out of it, he had been trained in attention to minute particulars. I was made literate by whole word recognition, taught to constantly move ahead along a line of print, anticipating later words in order to make sense of the whole. Modern readers of Pamela are sometimes told to slow down in order to recover the strategies of the readers Richardson wrote for, and for the better appropriation of his meaning. The text itself provides lessons in how to do this. Richardson said that he had invented a new form of literature, in his words, ‘a new Manner of writing – to the moment’. By way of contrast with third person narrative in the past tense, no one knows what is going to happen. Readers of Pamela (and of epistolary fiction in general) can have no picture of a writer with the whole story in his head writing it down. The story in Pamela hasn’t happened yet; it happens as you read. As a reader of present-tense Pamela you must pause, go over what Pamela has just said, reflect on what she is up to (what is she really up to?) You must not – you cannot – hurry it. It is writing that draws attention to itself in many ways – physically, in its use of typography and punctuation with capital letters, italics – dashes – exclamation 103

104

Margaret Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers’, Social History, 4:3 (1979), pp. 125–50 for early reading experiences. Also Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories:. Popular Fiction and Its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England, Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 24. For a village school (a parochial school, rather than a ‘dame’ school like Woolley’s) that did teach little plebeian boys (and girls) Latin, see Steedman, Master and Servant, pp. 110–30. But this was unusual.

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marks!!!! – flung all over the page. All of these contribute towards what Richardson called his ‘present tense manner’.105 Its typography can help decelerate modern readers, but ordinary readers of the late eighteenth century may have been slow by training and education. And Pamela, being constructed out of fictional letters containing a large amount of dialogue, offers shorter units of language for processing than does – say – Tom Jones. Richardson’s average utterance/sentence length is much, much shorter than Fielding’s. The text of Tom Jones does demand that the reader looks ahead along several lines of print, in order to construe overall meaning (though they have been conveniently alerted to what is coming next by italicised summaries at the head of each chapter). But there is nothing in the schema outlined to say that readers do not go on learning new techniques for appropriating print throughout a reading life, as Woolley did.106 With the novels Woolley borrowed and bought, we have some evidence of what passed through his head.107 A wider educational and social context allows us to speculate about the cognitive framework he acquired. Reading Richardson for example, raises questions about interpretation of events, then and now. ‘What is really happening right now? What’s the truth here?’ are questions that readers are educated into asking by page two of Pamela. Outrage at an inequitable social system which supports Mr B.’s abuses of power is encouraged in readers: his seduction of a member of his own class would cause damage, but in Pamela’s case, ‘What is all this . . . but that our neighbour has a mind to his mother’s waiting-maid! And if he takes care she wants for nothing, 105

106

107

Samuel Richardson, Clarissa (1748), Preface, on ‘instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections; which may be brought home to the Breast of the . . . Reader’. Joe Bray, ‘An Historical Approach to Speech Presentation: Embedded Quotations in EighteenthCentury Fictions’, in Poetics, Linguistics and History: Discourses of War and Conflict. Proceedings of PALA XIX, Potchefstroom University, South Africa, March 1999, published for PALA by the Oxford Text Archive, 546–56. www.pala.ac.uk/resources/ proceedings/1999 comments on his ‘present-tense manner’ and ‘writing to the moment’. Also Marijke Rudnik-Smalbraak, Samuel Richardson: Minute Particulars within the Large Design, E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1983, p. 31. See the comments of John Money on John Cannon’s development as a reader when schoolmaster, and, later, excise man. John Money, Review Response to: Hoppit on Cannon, Humanities and Social Sciences Net Online, 24 Oct 2012, http://h-net.msu.edu/ In reading John Cannon’s chronicles John Money is powerfully reminded of Tom Jones (1749) and Fielding’s writing in general; but the novel could not have occupied Cannon’s imagination, for it had not yet been published. However it is likely that in the performance of his writing Cannon did reference Fielding’s prose style, for he was acquainted with the author’s Somerset circle though his work. John Money (ed.), The Chronicles of John Cannon Excise Officer and Writing Master. Part 1: 1684–1733, Records of Social and Economic History New Series 43, Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010, pp. xxxii, lii, cxxxix.

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I don’t see any great injury will be done her. He hurts no family by this.’ ‘So’, as Pamela writes, ‘it seems that poor people’s virtue is to go for nothing.’108 If Woolley did read the Pamela he borrowed, we can speculate that it inflected his understanding of – for example – Sir Gervase Clifton’s sexual involvement with a daughter of the poor, as well as providing a template for thinking about the 1803 Nottingham election, which was much to do with the county nobility’s reach in the everyday life of workaday Nottingham.109 And Mr B. serves as a template for understanding the conjunction of earthly, spiritual, and social powers in a landowner and magistrate like Sir Gervase Clifton, with his vast tracts of land, the villages on his estates, his shooting and fishing rights, his control of the roads and waterways on his property, and the church livings he had to bestow. This meeting of life and literature in Woolley’s many acts of reading will be discussed in Chapter 7.

108 109

Pamela (1980), p. 172. Thomis, ‘Nottingham Election’, p. 102; History, Topography, and Directory of the Town of Nottingham and the Adjacent Villages, Dearden, Nottingham, 1834, p. 17.

3

Family and friends

We shall be obliged to reveal all the secrets of a little family. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Vol I, Book II, Chapter 2.

When I first started to work on Joseph Woolley’s diaries it was not clear to me who he was. I transcribed his writing without being certain of his identity. The reader should be aware of this: the Joseph Woolley in these pages has a different shape and form from the one I set out with. The frequency of the name ‘Joseph Woolley’ in the baptism records of Clifton and district was only a minor impediment to determining his identity; the absence of a neat run of registration details (birth, marriage, death) for all the family members he named was a much greater one. His parents, a father named as Samuel and mother (no first name given), were alive during the years he kept the diaries. He wrote about a brother Edward, who was a married man when he died at the age of 33 in 1803. (Edward Woolley’s widow Rose and her brother-in-law’s feelings about her are a focus of this chapter.) He mentioned three sisters: one of them, Mary Woolley, married John Mann in 1804, the last year she appeared in her brother’s diaries. Details of these family members can be located in the records of Clifton and neighbouring Glapton.1 A Joseph with a sister called Mary and a father called Samuel, makes this particular Joseph, a son of Samuel and Elizabeth Woolley, baptised at Clifton in March 1773.2 It was only quite late in the day that I understood that his father was a twice married man and that Edward Woolley was Joseph’s half brother.3 1

2 3

In the nineteenth century it became common to refer to Woolley’s village as Clifton-cumGlapton. This is the ecclesiastical parish of Clifton with Glapton. Clifton and the small settlements of Glapton and Wilford were within the Clifton estates. NA, PR 3847, Clifton Parish Registers, 1573–1944, ‘Joseph of Samuel and Elizabeth Woolley, bap. Clifton, 7 Mar 1773’. Samuel Woolley, b. 29 Sep 1751, married first Mary Spenser in 1765, and then Elizabeth Tompson in 1772. NA, DR 1/5/40/127, 131, 134, Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton, 1765, 1772, 1773. Edward Woolley his son was also a twice-married man, leaving children from both marriages. PR 3847, Clifton Parish Registers, 1573–1944, DR 1/5/40/158, Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton, ‘Edward Woolley m. Sarah Chamberlin, 11 Dec 1796’; DR 1/5/40/160 ‘Sarah Wife of Edward Wooley Bur Oct 7

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Mary was his younger full sister, baptized in 1774.4 Woolley also wrote about ‘my sister Anne’, another half-sibling from his father’s first marriage.5 The ‘sister Louisa’, mentioned only once in 1801 (Woolley noted the death of someone she knew) I have assumed to be a child of the first Mrs Woolley’s first marriage. She has no role in Joseph Woolley’s writing and does not appear to have been in Clifton or in South Nottinghamshire during the diary years. Does any of this matter? Pursuit of the genealogical fix is deeply imbued in historians.6 It sometimes functions as compensation for not really knowing (or knowing that you will never really know) the ‘truth’ of the people and events you write about. And there comes a time when you have to stop wasting your own and your employer’s money on the search, though in this case the pursuit so far allows a family sociology to emerge, and some dim outline of an explanatory schema for making sense of Joseph Woolley. Four children, very close in age, from two mothers, grew up together; second marriages were usual in this family; when Edward Woolley died, Joseph became the eldest – the only – son; his parents lived a long time (his mother Elizabeth died in 1818 at the age of 75, his father Samuel in 1826 aged 86); Joseph never married. But all of these are explanatory factors born of twentieth-century child psychology. I do not believe they would have made much sense to Woolley, or his family, or any of his neighbours. This is not to suggest that ‘Joseph Woolley’ is some kind of textual effect of his own writing, or that genealogical and biographical detail are unimportant. But I am not attempting a biographical ‘footsteps’ in the manner of Richard Holmes and others, in which my textual effect would be produced by an utter certainty that – one of the subjects in whose footsteps that Holmes walks – the ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ he writes – was the author in question, and that the donkey on which ‘Stevenson’ crossed the Cévennes really was ‘Modestine’.7 I am not writing a ‘life’ of Joseph Woolley; his writing, not his biography, is the topic of this book, and it wouldn’t matter a very great deal if the subject of these pages had

4 5 6 7

1798’. Wherever he married his second wife Rose, it was not in Clifton. Their first child (his second) was born in 1799: DR 1/5/40/161 ‘Mary Daughter of Edward & Rose Woolley Bap Oct 22 1799’. NA, DD 1/5/40/136, Bishops Transcripts, ‘Mary Wooley of Samuel and Elizabeth Wooley bap. 18 Dec 1774’. NA, DD 1/5/40/129, Bishops Transcripts, ‘Anna Wooley of Samuel and Mary Woolley, bap. 19 Aug 1767’. Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘The Woman Question’, Routledge, New York and London, 1991, pp. 69–109 for a variety of fixes sought by historians. Richard Holmes, Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer, Penguin, London, 1985, pp. 11–70.

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actually been (as I thought he must be, for quite a long time) a Joseph Woolley born in Greasley in 1780, whose family details appeared a more perfect match than those in the Clifton records.8 Speaking textually, Joseph Woolley’s father Samuel was a progenitor of his son’s writing – of the particular shape and form of the diaries – for Samuel Woolley was clerk to the rector of Clifton. He was Parish Clerk, though his son never used that title to describe him.9 Once, in 1804, his son took over the task: ‘the 2d September I was Clerk my father being ill it was the first time that I was Clerk to mr Clifton’.10 Samuel Woolley also rented grazing land from the rector.11 Early in 1804 Joseph noted that ‘april the 6 acording to an agreement between mr Clifton the rector and Samuel Woolley the Clark he was to have Some Land in Lew of what he rented of the former rector . . . and on that day he sent him word to quit it’. There were many others in Clifton alarmed at the behaviour of the great cuckoo Sir Gervase had lodged at the rectory. The Woolley family had to arrange new pasturage for their cows, and there was great uncertainty about what was going to happen: ‘my father was at mr Clifton about it several times and he all ways Said that he Should have the ground that he had promised him but that he Could not find the value of the Land So my father thought that he ment to deall him on till such time that he would be forsed to Sell is Cowes and . . . he set off with them to market with hevy hart for he thaught that all the rest must follow’. On this occasion things turned out well for the Woolleys, at least in the short term, thanks to the help and interventions of friends and neighbours. And also thanks to the many land-acquisition strategies that were in play in Clifton parish. In sudden volte face the Reverend Clifton said that the family ‘might take possesion the next day and we did on Satarday and I think the first Saterday in april or the first Saterday in may So Long Looked for Came at Last but we knew who to thank for that for deveral wanted it and So he kept mr Clifton in play on purpose to 8

9

10 11

I owe much to Peter Hammond, Nottinghamshire Archives, and his own research on Joseph Woolley, not least the realisation that it was much more than unlikely that this longstanding Clifton family had migrated from Greasley, some ten miles north east of Nottingham. For the function of parish clerks and other lay personnel of the Church of England see W. M. Jacobs, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 161, 187, 214. James Barry Bird, The Laws Respecting Parish Matters. Containing the Several Offices and Duties of Churchwardens, Overseers of the Poor, Constables, Watchmen, and Other Parish Officers . . . The Whole Laid Down in a Plain and Easy Manner: in Which All Technical Terms of Law are Familiarly Explained . . . The Second Edition, Improved and Much Enlarged, W. Clarke, London, 1799, pp. 88–90 and passim, is brief but highly informative on the office. NA, DD 311/3, Sep 1804. For ‘ownership’ exercised by Church of England incumbents, see Chapter 7.

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put my father about and to Give it hup and if it ad not been for Some friends he would have had is End in it but Chance ordered it better . . . he Could not Git ours a rogue he was Things turned out well’.12 But then in October the family received a formal ‘discharge from the reverand William Clifton to quit all the Lands tenements Creditments and that wee occupy under him’.13 There were several Samuel Woolleys in Clifton, Glapton, and neighbouring Ruddington, but in Joseph Woolley’s writing, ‘Samuel Woolley’, ‘Samuel Woolley the clark’, and ‘my father Samuel Woolley’ are one and the same person. Samuel Woolley as parish clerk may well account for the formal style of the diaries, and Joseph Woolley’s intermittent appearance as village annalist or memorialist. When the economic and legal relationships of everyday life were recorded – when he owed his father money, or his father repaid a debt to his son, or performed a role of civil society – ‘Samuel Woolley’ is just another name in the registers of credit, debt, and obligation that Woolley kept.14 (Sometimes however, even when the economic transaction was to do with Samuel Woolley’s own framework knitting enterprise, he was called ‘father’.15) Woolley Senior the parish clerk may also explain Woolley’s listings of the number of couples ‘asked to church’, the births (legitimate and illegitimate), marriages, churchings of women, and deaths in Clifton. Joseph Woolley has been called a nosey and gossiping neighbour in one account of the nineteenth-century working-class family, for his prurient interest in the sexual shenanigans of his neighbours.16 Whilst not denying that he was interested in who was doing what with whom, really – what salacious 12 14

15 16

13 NA, DD 311/3, Apr 1804. NA, DD 311/3, 9 Oct 1804. ‘apr the 25 samuel Woolley to me for work £1 11s 6d’, NA, DD 311/1, Apr 1801; ‘may the 3 John man and marey woolley were maried by the revd William clifton Samuel Woolley were the father [gave his daughter away] and martha hardy were bridesmaid’, DD 311/2, May 1803; ‘may the 9 1804 Lent to my father Samuel Woolley the sum of £2 12s 6d’; ‘May the 11 1805 received the sum of £2 12s 6d’, DD 311/3, May 1804; ‘mr marting roe of nottingham was the undertaker he had a scarf and hatband and Gloves Samuel woolley the Clark had a hat and Gloves’, DD 311/3, July 1804; ‘august the 5 paid at crofts one shilling that my father run in debt for ale when he fetched John Langfords frame about a year and a alf before’, DD 311/4, 5 Aug 1809; ‘April the 1st the Account of what I Receive of my father in Return for what I expend’, DD 311/6, Apr 1815. Family credit is discussed by Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America, University of Pennsylvania Press, Pittsburgh, 2009, pp. 69–100. Also Beverley Lemire, ‘Budgeting for Everyday Life: Gender Strategies, Material Practice and Institutional Innovation in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, L’Homme. Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft, 22:2 (2011), pp. 11–27. ‘paid to my father 9 shillings for frame rent which he is to return to me again 3s 8d’, DD 311/4, 8 Dec 1809. Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn. A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, Yale University Press, London, 2013.

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interest can there have been in the churching of a perfectly respectable married woman? Woolley was keeping many of these notes about the sexual life-cycle for his father, so that Samuel Woolley, clerk to Rector Clifton, could enter them in the parish books. Woolley wrote with feeling about his father’s feeling over the trouble with Reverend Clifton. He described Samuel Woolley’s anxiety and persistence over many weeks. Conflict between landlord and tenant was told with the sentiment of the extraordinary Preface to Little Goody Two-Shoes, whose orphan state is the direct result of her father’s loss of tenancy by the chicanery of an appropriating farmer – which is to say that it was a social conflict so commonly experienced and so well-known that it provided the plot-structure of a tale for children.17 In Woolley’s view the whirligig of time brought in its revenges on the farmer whose grasping hand he saw behind the very rapid loss (between May and October) of the seven acres the family had agreed with the rector. He ‘had Cabaged with mster Clifton’ thought Woolley. But although Mr Deveral had entered on another local farm on ‘the same Lady day’ as the Woolleys obtained their temporary reprieve, he ‘onley Lived to stock and sow it and then died almost unrespected by Every one in the parish for I never Saw so Little Consarn shown at a funerel in my Life for I did not see one tear shed by aney body there but a Great maney seemed to rejosce and Some said that he was Gone to answer for is roges tricks and others Said . . . if he had Lived much Longer he would have ruined the parish howsoever there was Scarce aney person that did not observe Something amiss in him and seemed to rejoice . . . that he was Gone for they said he Could do no more So he Lived a great man and died as much unrespected as the poorest object in the parish Could have done’.18 Samuel Woolley is present in his son’s six volumes as manager of a small-scale dairy farming and framework knitting enterprise, as parish official, and as father. His mother appears far less often, though Woolley recorded the money they lent and repaid each other over the years, and kept careful accounts of the nursing he paid for during her long illness in 1815.19 He lived at home for most of the years in which he kept his diary, so there was no need to report on the affective relationship with his parents – even if he had conceived of the purpose of journal-keeping 17 18 19

See Chapter 2 for Little Goody Two-Shoes. The previous September ‘mr marting had [had] a discharge / him from the revd William Clifton to quit his farm at a fortnits notes’. DD 311/2, 19 Sep 1803. DD 311/6, ‘mar the 25 [1815] paid marey Holt for Looking after my mother 54 weeks £6 15s 0d’; ‘oct the 27 paid marey Holt for Looking after my mother 31 weeks £3 17s 6d’.

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Figure 2. Joseph Woolley’s diary, entry for 23 November 1803

being to do so. His siblings did not live at home and even a short distance gave him a perspective on them: they were not absorbed in the narrative course of his daily life, as were his father and mother. His way of writing about out-of-the-ordinary events in their life appears – to the modern eye at least – to demonstrate his feelings for and about them, though there were always accounts to keep (‘January the 21 Sent to my sister Mary £0 10s the sum of ten shillings /march the 27 1802 received in full’).20 Wherever she had been in 1801, Mary Woolley was back in 1803 to marry John Mann.21 Woolley noted the birth of the couple’s first child, his sister’s churching, more children and their illnesses. He noted that in September 1803 his sister bought a dining table (‘and a very Good oak on[e] . . . for sixteen shillings’) from a Clifton man returned home to his parish of settlement (‘he Left nottingham the night on account of being in so much debt and he was afrid of is Goods being seased by 20 21

DD 311/1, Jan 1801; also 27 and 30 Oct 1804. DD 311/2, ‘April the 10 bands of mariage were published between John man and marey Wooley both of this parish’; ‘the 3 may John man and marey woolley were maried by the revd William clifton . . . they made a very Sumptious wedding and invited vast number of friends and the ringers Got ten shillings for ringing and the weding was kept at hir fathers house’.

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is Credditors . . . the neighbours Say that he as brought a fine quantity of bugs and Lise along with him . . . he his in Gabble row and if they all Git bugs a fine roe it will be’.22) Woolley distinguished John Mann as the one ‘that married my sister’, for there were others in the area not fit to be introduced into his friendly society in Ruddington.23 Indeed his sister’s husband was respectable enough to be nominated by the muchdisliked Reverend William Clifton, using the bequest of the former rector.24 So there is much about Mary Mann at the time of her marriage and setting up of her new family, but she is not mentioned after 1804. It was the same with Anne. In March 1803 she was working at the house of Woolley’s master – where he worked his frame – when she ‘was taken whith a Sterick fit and a very Shocking one it was she fell against a table in the kitching and Cut hir head very bad and she was unsensiable for some time after she Came to hir Self again and was very ill for some time after it’. She had had a pain in her side the day before and had been given the home remedy of spirits of tansey. Later the apothecary gave her medicine that made ‘hir throw up’. Sniffing hartshorn seemed to help her briefly, but then she felt ‘hir self Goin again’. Her brother stayed with her as long as he could, and then as he was ‘Goin out of the kitching . . . Just as I went out of the door She put it too and Locked and bolted it and put the Cross bar up the same as she use to do when she went to bed but much quicker and as she put the bar a Cross She made a kind of Shreting Laugh and fell Emedeately but I could not Git in’. Their mistress was in the house and heard her fall; she unfastened the door. Woolley thought about what would have happened had the house been empty: ‘I Could not have Got to hir asistance . . . unless I could have Got over a high wall and would have been almost impossiable for I Could not retch the top of the wall with my hands and the top of the wall is Covered with broken Glass to prevent people Gitting over it’.25 Woolley was distressed by this incident. When he wrote it up – probably later in the year, as part of the annals of Clifton births, marriages, and churchings – he remembered his sister on the other side of a bolted door, the house

22

23 24

25

Gable Row was the bad end of town (if there could be such a thing in such a small place – pop. 381 in 1810). It was where the parish houses were situated. NA, DD 311/3, Jul 1804, for the erection of three new ones. Woolley recorded a lot of movement in and out of this street. DD 311/3, 17 Sep 1804. DD 311/3, Jun 1804, ‘the 1[st] John mann Entered into ruddington Club he is one nominated by mr Clifton the rector of Clifton I mean that he is one that mister Launder Left Some money to pay for four and he Left the nominating of them to the rector of Clifton So he nomenated John and he was not in the Club befor’. NA, DD 311/2, Mar 1803.

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impregnable, his inability to get in.26 It is the only passage in the diaries on which he contemplates the ‘what-if ’. But Ann was not written about again, at least not in the extant diaries. The 1803 Vox Stellarum in which he recorded his sister’s hysteric fit had twenty-five blank pages before the printed title page. On page twenty-eight, opposite the printed heading ‘january xxxi days’, Joseph Woolley started his accounts: ‘the 1 [Jan] Club and spent 1s 7d . . . the 1 Shaving and hair Cutting 0s 3d . . . the 2 pd for a hatband 4s 9d . . .’ The blank pages are filled with his narrative of everyday life up until and including September. At the end of Old Moore’s printed matter (which he interspersed with weekly accounts of income and outgoings), another January narrative begins, on page 117 of the manuscript (‘Janewary the third was the day for boloting for the malitta . . . ’). I think that the January to September pages (1–25) were completed relatively soon after the incidents they describe. There is ‘ Joseph Woolly his book Joseph Woolley of Clifton his book of memorandums and other notes for the year . . . ’, and then the first entry proper records the death of his brother Edward: ‘Janewary the 2 Edward Woolley Son of Samuel Woolley of Clifton was bured in Clifton Church yard he died in the 33 year of his age he as left a Whife and three Children he was Caried by Joseph Woolley Juner and thomas wooten his next door neighbeiour . . . he was bured by the friendly sosiety held at widersons of ruddington and he had been a member of the Sosiety six teen or seventeen years’. This was his brother, despite the formality of expression and reference to himself in the third person.27 Sister Ann had her hysterical fit as things began to go badly awry in the family Edward left behind. Edward’s widow Rose kept on the frames and knitters who worked in her husband’s shop, and in the November after Edward’s death Joseph Woolley noted a new kind of socialiability – laxity even – in the house, though he was not to work out what it portended until later. There was ‘a poset Eating at rose wolley’ he wrote, ‘and there was John barker and ame howet and when they were tired of Card playing Edward hallam made them up [a] fire in the Shop to Sit and Coart by and then hallam went home with oldhams wench and left ame and barker to Gather in the 26

27

Interest in the home and professional treatment of Ann Woolley may anticipate the herbalist/home doctoring enterprise he describes in the later diaries. See below, Chapter 8. Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 42–4 suggests that the tansy remedy was as likely purchased as home made. Hartshorn was sal ammoniac, used as a bleaching agent in the laundry work of many households. NA, DD 311/2, 2 Jan 1803; DR/1/5/40/165, Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton, ‘Edward Woolley Bur Jan 2 1803’.

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Figure 3a. Joseph Woolley’s accounts, November 1803

Figure 3b. Joseph Woolley’s accounts, November 1803

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Figure 4. Joseph Woolley’s diary for November 1803

Shop and leave you to Gess how they went on for barker is me Lad’.28 This was written on an interleaved page opposite the 1803 February calendar, though the date given was in November. The next entry concerning Rose came in the middle of the 1804 diary: ‘november the 5 that hore that rose woolley was delivered of a base born daughter’.29 Now Woolley started to write a detailed back-story, picking up on the entries from 1803 concerning Samuel Boyer, the father of Rose’s child. It was a story of betrayal as much as it was about his sister-in-law. It occupies seven pages of the 1804 diary and 2,000 words. It is by far the longest thing Woolley ever wrote, about anything. Sam Boyer, whom Woolley later described as an ‘old play fellower’, had arrived in Clifton in April 1803.30 He was returning to a place he had already run away from. Some eight or so years before he had been an apprentice framework knitter in neighbouring Gotham. With only six months to serve he had disappeared – to avoid being arrested for 28 29 30

NA, DD 311/2, Nov[?] 1803. NA, DD 311/2, 5 Nov 1804; DR/1/5/40/166, Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton ‘Elizabeth Bastard of Rose Wooley, Bap Decr 13 1804’. NA, DD 311/2, 11, 25 Apr, 7 May, 1803; DD 311/2, May 1804.

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housebreaking, Woolley said. He had fled to Mansfield and enlisted in the Nottingham Fencibles.31 Boyer evidently told his story all over the place, about going ‘to Garsey [Jersey] with . . . [the Fencibles] and when they left there they went into Ireland when the rebellion broke out and was there about five years and he says he was about three years in Gurnsey So by his account was a Solder about Eight years’. Boyer told the story of sinking a well and being blinded in one eye by gunpowder. He told about not being discharged – despite his injuries – until the regiment got back to Nottingham. He told about going home to his mother in Leicestershire and hanging about there for ‘about Six or Seven weeks Expecting is mother to doe something for him’. His explanation – or Woolley’s? – was that ‘She had so much to do for hir self She Cold does nothing for him’. Probably Woolley’s explanation. Woolley continued: Sam ‘was a base born Child is mother was boyer so he took her name She . . . put him out to nurse as Soon as he was borne.’ He had returned to the only home he knew, Glapton, where he had been ‘braught up’ and where his foster parents had done ‘to him the same as if he had been their Sone’. His mother had paid maintenance at first, but later ‘almost nothing [as] through hir mis Conduct in mariage So She is not able to doe aneything for him’. Woolley dwelt on the mother’s story: ‘She as had one husband and while he Lived they did very well but after is death She maried a man his name is turner a butcher by trade but such a drunken fellow that he spends all he can git . . . she is forst to work Like a turk to make both Ends meet for he morgages what he Can at the alehouses before the incom is due but most of the publicans will not Let him in a Count of is famely only there is one that Lives hunder him and he durst not refuse to Let him have ale on trust So there he Goes and spends all the rent before it is due . . . so he Gits drunk and Gos home and abuses hir because she Canot find the money for his Extravaganses So this is all the pleasure she as’. (He expected women to have pleasure in life.) Now, in November 1804, Woolley remembered the spring, Barton Feast, and walking back to Clifton with Boyer at three in the morning. Sam had ‘told a fine tale that there was a Letter from is mother and that she desired he would Come and Live along with hir but that was a Lie of is for I was told after by a person that he told it to that She would not have him . . . he told me a Long tale about is mother and about the Letter that was Left for him but it was for nothing but a blind’. He should have worked out then what was going on, he thought. In this cumulative narrative, written after the birth of Boyer’s child, Woolley did not 31

The Loyal Nottingham Regiment of Fencible Infantry served mainly in Ireland between 1794 and 1801. ‘Fencible’ regiments were defence forces, intended to supplement the embodied militia and release regular troops for service abroad.

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mention the efforts he had made to set Boyer up with a frame and with work. The accounts of his patronage and extension of credit are detailed throughout the 1803 volume: ‘Laid down for Samuel boyer to fetching a frame . . . pd for him at Green man inn . . . pd for needles . . . gave him one pound’. In April 1803 alone, Woolley advanced Boyer nearly three pounds.32 A year later Boyer disappeared, leaving unfinished work behind at the shop: ‘he was in such a hurey to be Gone that he Left a new wascoat peice and pane Stocking and a hankerchief and told them that he was a Going to Live with his mother but that was not all he for Got for he for Got to pay . . . thomas hallam for a new pair of Shoes 9/6 [9s 6d] . . . ’. Boyer went to Gotham, stayed at the Plough Inn, told someone from Clifton that his reason for leaving was that Joseph Woolley ‘had not used him well for I had not Spoak to him [for] a fortnight’. That was foolish, wrote Woolley. Boyer must have known that the reason for his unusual silence at work was to do with a quarrel he had had with another of his workmates. Really, wrote Woolley, what was going on was that Boyer believed Joseph had ‘found him out’ in his affair with Rose ‘and thaught I was angrey at him so he thaught it was time to be going’. Angry about what? That he had got ‘a bastard by that hore rose Woolley’. Now, Woolley understood that Sam had invented the story about his mother wanting him because he wanted to get away from the pregnant widow. Rose Woolley ‘had been maried and had two Children by hir husband and I had suspected She Was with Child’ wrote Woolley. Rose Woolley must have conceived her child at the end of February or in early March. Woolley had had his suspicions about Boyer, but he could not be certain. All through the early spring of 1804 he watched, ‘but did not [think] it Could be by him for I had watched as much as I Cold and I Cold never see any thing that I Cold think it could be by him’. But Boyer had got to work unusually early – ‘he used to Come to the Shop a deal Sooner to work than I did so he took that opertunity’. Or perhaps he had spent the night in the house with Rose. Woolley thought he might have crept back after hours, for he had been seen about the entrance very early in the morning. Perhaps he often stayed all night – ‘But be that as it may the hore is with Child by him and She Swore it the Last Saturday in July or the last but one.’33 Woolley had been very hard done by. When he took Boyer on in the spring of 1803 ‘he had [already] been all over the town before he Came to

32 33

NA, DD 311/2, 25 Apr 1803. Whichever magistrate Rose Woolley swore Sam Boyer’s child before, it was highly unlikely to have been Sir Gervase Clifton. Woolley would have named him if he had been. In 1804 Clifton noted only four items of magisterial business – two in May, one in October, one in November – none of them bastardy or poor law cases.

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me and he Cold find no body that would be plazed with him and I thaught . . . as we had been old play fellowers it would doe him a Great kindness and I [thought] that is Seaming and Frame Standing would do the hore Good as my brother died and Left hir with three small Children’. Boyer was part of a family strategy for supporting the widowed Rose and the children, and they too had been let down. His parents had taken in the oldest child (from Edward Woolley’s first marriage); ‘but two was more I knew than she Could mainatin without more Coming in so on the Considderation I thaught that wat with is seaming and is frame standing and the other frames and what I could doe for hir it might keep hir from the parish and so it did for a Long while for she had milk for fetching from my father and my sister ann did what she Could So one how or another she made a Good shift for I did all her Gardining and found things to set and sew it with besides what I gave hir and we paid hir house rent amung us . . . ’. And Boyer had been very demanding. Woolley had gone to the hosier’s immediately after his arrival in Clifton, got him an ‘Eight and twenty Gage [frame] and Good work he had to it and I never Charged him aney thing for my trouble we went to fetch it on Easter mondey or Tuesday and from that time while he had the frame I never Charged him aney thing [f]or taking is work in or anay thing Else’. The frame had needed a lot of attention ‘and I was first to mend it . . . and at Last nothing would Serve him but I must Git him a five and thirty Gage . . . and I had the same trouble still for he did not Care what work he made so [long] as it got out of is hands’. Admittedly the first frame was not a good one, ‘but he mite have done a deal better than he did I never Charged him aney thing for my trouble while he staid’. And Woolley hadn’t asked him for the usual 3d a week ‘for taking a Jurneymans work in’. Sam ‘was short of money and Cloths’ so Woolley ‘Lent him a deal of asistance for if he wanted aney thing I Let him have money he was allways in my debt . . . ’. The legacy of Bowyer’s year in Clifton lingered, not only in the abandoned mother and child, but in Woolley’s own reputation: ‘the rogue is Gone and Let him be onley I don’t like to have aney peple say that I have behaved ill when I know that they could not be behaved better to him but he is Gone like a rogue as he is and he as Left the hore behind’.34 He could have looked back to his 1803 diary to confirm that Sam Boyer had been a right ‘me Lad’ from his first weeks in Clifton. On 12 May 1803 Woolley had been walking home from West Bridgeforth with some companions. It was about midnight when they heard a woman

34

NA, DD 311/3, May 1804.

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calling out from a nearby field. A man ‘had hir down in the path that Goeth up the Cow Close hill belonging to mr thorp he was not upon hir but he soon would have been for he was quiat reddy and he had Got hir reddy to for we saw all before us as we were about a yard from them when she was and she be gan to Cry out take this nasty fellow off me’. They did not meddle, said Woolley – she had only called out when she noticed the audience – but stood and watched as they both leaped up, ‘and he rann on one side to pull his breeches up and while he was doing this a way run miss and in the scuffle he Lost his hat’. Once in the village they told the man where she’d gone, and ‘so after hir he went with out his hat stil and found her some where in Glapton and a rare bout he said he had staid with her till about four oclock in the morning and then went and foun his hat and who should there be but Saml boyer and mar[tha] buxton’.35 In 1804 Woolley was not amused by the conclusion of the sexual comedy as he had been by the hat story, and he did not maintain a writerly anonymity over the indiscretions of Sam and Rose. In August he shifted his frame home to his father’s house: ‘I . . . should not have shifted so soon but that rose being with Child I cold not bare to see hir.’ Rose was six months pregnant and showing it. He took a workmate from the shop with him: ‘there being a frame at Liberty the[re] he Come and worked in it’. They carted the frames together from Rose Woolley’s house ‘and Glad I was when wee were Got away’.36 Rose Woolley left the formal record of her unrespectability in the parish registers with ‘Elizabeth Bastard of Rose Wooley’, Bap Decr 13 1804’. But Woolley only used the term ‘respectable’ once, in six years’ worth of writing, and its antonym not at all. Perhaps ‘respectability’ is the historian’s frame for understanding rather than Joseph Woolley’s. Social historians work with the vast accretion of literature on ‘the rise of respectable society’ and its particular location in the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. In the twentieth century ‘Victorian respectability’ was connected to the rise of the middle class.37 In equally resonant accounts of working-class formation, respectability was understood as a set of qualities and behaviours required of or imposed on plebeian people by the better sort. Historians connected nineteenth-century working-class respectability to the world of trade union organisation, the emergence of organised labour, the struggle for political enfranchisement – and to 35 37

36 NA, DD 311/2, 12 May 1803. NA, DD 311/3, 6 Aug 1804. F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900, Fontana, London, 1988; Dror Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840, Cambridge University Press, 1995. Also, Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600– 1800, Routledge, New York and London, 2002, pp. 244–5 and passim.

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the teaching of cleanliness, domestic order, and deference to workingclass children in mass-schooling systems. In this way, working-class parents might be instructed in, or at least made aware of, the social and domestic virtues, in the same period, the later nineteenth century.38 It was then that our modern distinction between the ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ poor emerged, as a kind of social vision, by which all manner of journalist, philanthropist, social theorist, and slum visitor knew what it was they were looking at in the homes and streets of working-class districts.39 ‘Respectable’ was a nineteenth-century term, adopted for the purposes of twentieth-century historical inquiry. Of course late eighteenth-century men and women could be ‘respectable’ (or not) by embodying qualities believed to be admirable and worthy of respect: by being of good report. They could dress in a respectable way, and be respectable members of an audience – for a sermon or at a meeting of the United Committee of Framework Knitters. In framework knitters’ idiom, a pair of fully-fashioned stockings could be ‘respectable’: beautifully wrought, by skilled men: worthy of encomium and praise.40 ‘Respectable’ was a form of polite address; it could describe behaviour, circumstances, and institutions. But it had not yet its antonym in ‘unrespectable’, and ‘unrespectable poor’. These categories entered social historians’ vocabulary in the mid-twentieth century, when working-class heroes and heroines were sought out, often the more unrespectable the better. The men and women whom the Victorians had called ‘unrespectable’ were the more worthy of our attention for being so. We replaced the great Names of history with ‘smart and crafty rebels, who mastered their everyday life with supreme ease and were always ready to play a trick on the powerful’.41 ‘Respectability’ developed connotations of conformity;

38

39 40

41

Julie-Marie Strange, Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain, 1870–1914, Cambridge University Press, 2005 and Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914, Cambridge University Press, 2003 both discuss the changing historical understanding of ‘respectability’ by reference to Peter Bailey’s seminal ‘“Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?” Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability’, Journal of Social History 12:3 (1979), pp. 336–53. By the end of the twentieth century, it was no longer possible to understand working-class respectability as ‘a filtered version of its bourgeois form’. Ellen Ross, ‘“Not the Sort that Would Sit on the Doorstep”: Respectability in Pre-World War One Neighbourhoods’, International Labour and Working Class History, 27 (1985), pp. 39–59. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London, Princeton University Press, Princeton and London, 2006, pp. 11, 42, 61. Or at least, compared with modern shoddy, turn-of-the-century stockings had been respectable: ‘those stockings at that time of day were most respectable, and came into the trade most beautifully’. See below, p. 206. Andreas Eckert and Adam Jones, ‘Historical Writing about Everyday Life’, Journal of African Cultural Studies, 15:1 (2002), pp. 5–16; 8.

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you could deprecate ‘the respectable poor’ for their unthinking obeisance to the demands of their betters. In recent years historians have tried to complicate the monovalent character of working-class respectability, demonstrating how contradictory modes of behaviour (the respectable and the unrespectable) were held together in the course of an individual and family life.42 But it is still very difficult for historians of the English working class between about 1790 and 1840 not to project back modern understandings of the term, however nuanced they may now be, in the way that I called Joseph Woolley’s brother-in-law ‘respectable’ a few pages ago. John Mann clearly was of good enough report to be nominated for friendly society membership by the Rector of Clifton, using clerical money left for that purpose. Nineteenth-century ‘manliness’ had not yet become ‘a high profile discourse’, and the term was not in general use when Woolley wrote. Later in the century ‘manliness’ (as observed by contemporaries and written by modern historians) preserved some of its early modern origins as an external code of conduct, policed by one’s peers.43 ‘Its core attributes were physical vigour, energy and resolution, courage and straightforwardness. Its public face was “independence” . . .’, says John Tosh. More than half the population of nineteenth-century England would lie ‘beyond its remit’, irremediably ‘“rough”’, in the label applied to them so casually by the propertied classes’.44 But in the early 1800s, Joseph Woolley was not beyond the pale of honesty and good report: he cared about his own reputation for fair dealing, friendship, creditworthiness, and sociability. If honour – a nice sense of the dignity of virtue – were not the stranger to the vulgar mind it was thought to be, then we might say that he cared about his honour – certainly about the reputation of his family and his name.45 Later in the century, his capacity for hard work and the meticulous management of his money might well have been found admirable by any reformer of domestic habits and manners slumming in his vicinity. And Sam Boyer was clearly not 42 43

44 45

Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 30–44; Finn, Character of Credit, pp. 278–316. Karen Harvey, ‘Gender II: Masculinity Acquires a History’, in Nancy Partner and Sarah Foot (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Historical Theory, Sage, London, 2013, pp. 282–93; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 152–85. John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrialising Society’, Journal of British Studies, 44:2 (2005), pp. 330–42. Alexandra Shepard, ‘Honesty, Worth and Gender in Early Modern England, 1560–1640’, in Henry French and Jonathan Barry (eds.), Identity and Agency in England, 1500–1800, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2004, pp. 87–105. For elite and plebeian (lack of) honour, Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity, Violence, and Honor: An Introduction’, in Spierenburg (ed.), Men and Violence: Gender, Honor and Rituals in Early Modern Europe and America, Ohio State University Press, Athens, 1998, pp. 1–37.

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respectable, in any estimation, then, later, or now. But Woolley’s narrative explanation for the events of 1803–1804 did not encompass respectability or its opposite. The explanation was, first, that Rose Woolley was a whore, and second, that Boyer was a base-born child who grew up to father another one. And no formal account of ‘respectability’ or ‘honour’ over the last two hundred years has encompassed two young men watching the show of a young woman being felt up in a field and finding the best part of it in the loss of a hat. The young Glapton woman who went on to accommodate the ‘nasty fellow’ her seducer in a four hour ‘rare bout’ appears quite lost to any notion of respectability, then or now.46 But Woolley was not writing with modern notions of sexual probity in mind. He didn’t care about the sexual licence of the many women he called whore in the pages of his diaries, as we shall see. He did care about his dead brother’s wife having her many bouts with Sam Boyer. Joseph Woolley wrote about related questions of reputation and honour, and about the formal relationship of one man to another in his friendly society accounts. A near-contemporary social commentator described friendly societies as associations expressive of ‘the individual’s natural interest in providing for himself and the realisation that this could be best done through communal means’.47 They were mutual benefit societies insuring members against the everyday disasters of a working life by paying maintenance to those incapable of working because of sickness or injury.48 When a member or one of his family died, there was a levy on the others to pay for a decent burial. Most societies, like Woolley’s, which met at the Red Hart public house in Ruddington, were not restricted by occupation. Woolley’s brother-in-law John Mann, 46

47

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Woolley’s ‘bout’ meant ‘fuck’, or in a more circumlocutory way, ‘having it off with’. He also used ‘bout’ when describing many drunken fights among alehouse ‘friends’, as in a round in a boxing match. Perhaps the term also derived from eighteenth-century ploughing vocabulary (to plough up, to make bouts). Woolley also used the phrase ‘come on’ for the act of male penetration (or rather, failure to penetrate), as in ‘he could not come on’, rather in the sense of he could not get on board. NA, DD 311/2, 3 Oct 1803. Julie O’Neil, The Spirit of Independence: Friendly Societies in Nottinghamshire, 1724–1913, for the author, Burton Joyce, 2001, p. 95, citing Frederick Morton Eden, The State of the Poor; or, An History of the Labouring Classes in England, from the Conquest to the Present Period . . ., B. & J. White, G. G. & J. Robinson, and five others, London, 1797, vol. I, pp. 3–31, 590–632. ‘One of the assumptions made about friendly societies is that they were effectively trade unions in another guise at a time when . . . [they] were forbidden under the Combination Acts. In the 1820s . . . government expressed such a view’. O’Neil, Spirit of Independence, p. 54. Sydney and Beatrice Webb, Robert Alexander Peddie, The History of Trade Unionism, Longmans Green, London, 1894; P. H. J. H. Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England 1815–1875, Manchester University Press, 1962, pp. 1–12; Malcolm Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000 for the relationship between trade unionism and friendly societies.

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who joined the Ruddington Society in 1804, was not a framework knitter. Ruddington is a couple of miles from Clifton. It lay outside the Clifton acres – it was an ‘open’ village. There was no friendly society in Clifton until 1801 when Woolley noted an inaugural meeting in the village at Thomas Langford’s Coach and Horses.49 Later, Woolley misremembered the date of its founding, but noted the excellence of provision made for its first death, describing the funeral arrangements twice as ‘verey deasant’, the pall bearers (including six women) carrying the ‘verey handsome Coffing’, and the singers leading the procession; the deceased ‘had 30 shillings from the Club to wards is funeril . . . ’.50 Woolley did not join the Clifton club, staying with the Ruddington Society, which had been inaugurated in 1779; he was an established member when the diaries open.51 His brother Edward had joined when he was about 17; if Woolley joined at the same age, it must have been about 1796. It met on the first or second Saturday of the month, and Woolley often did the books, perhaps holding subscriptions for other Clifton members and paying them in on the night. Club accounts were carefully kept throughout his six volumes, but they were his own – his memoranda of having paid for other members, the repayment of the debt – not the official club books. He was interested in friendly societies throughout the area – how they managed themselves, clashes of personality, financial scandals – and was aware of legislation governing their operation.52 He noted club activities and many funerals of members and their families (including that of his brother Edward); he mentioned the Society band which played at some funerals (it is not clear whether he played himself), and fines on members (including himself ) for nonattendance at funerals, feasts, and meetings. Like most friendly societies,

49 50

51 52

NA, DD 311/1, 4 Jul 1801. Simon Cordery, British Friendly Societies, 1750–1914, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2003, pp. 21–5 for the role of the public house. NA, DD 311/4, 21 Jun 1809. In 1801 use of the Ruddington club pall and ‘a oak Coffin with 6 inges and a brest plate’ – for a club member’s wife, again with six female pall bearers was noted by Woolley; DD 311/1, Feb 1801. Of Samuel Hoe, Woolley noted that ‘he died a Great deal in debt and at Least is farther trusted him till he Could Git very Little on him for is board and it was said that he owed his father more than ten pounds for is board and a deal more to other people’. NA, DD 311/2, ‘July the 2 [1803] Joseph woolley was voted in to hold the place of Eldor in the Club’. NA DD 311/1, 22 Jun, 10 Sep 1801. A 1793 ‘Act for the Encouragement and Relief of Friendly Societies’ (33 Geo. 3, c. 54) required societies to deposit a copy of their rules with the magistrates in quarter sessions. Also the amending acts of 1803, 43 Geo. 3 c. 54, c. 125. See John Thomas Becher, The Constitution of Friendly Societies, upon Legal and Scientific Principles, Exemplified by . . . the Friendly Society at Southwell, Together with Observations on the Rise and Progress, as Well as on the Management of Friendly Societies . . . 2nd edn, Simpkin and Marshall, London, 1824, pp. 41–70.

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Woolley’s club appears to ‘have been accepted as an ordinary, open and uncontroversial part of life’, remarks Julie O’Neil. ‘There is no suggestion that . . . [they] were interested in anything other than meeting . . . benefit needs and enjoying social occasions . . . his journals cover some of the years . . . when Luddism was rife in the area, there is never any hint of trade or political involvement.’53 Woolley never wrote about what happened at club nights, though he often described the midnight walk home. His friendly society accounts were literally that: accounts of monies paid in by himself and others. We do not know how the evening was organised, or whether his spending above and beyond his subscription was on food and drink taken at the meeting or later, or how much opportunity there was for socialising with non-members drinking at Widdowson’s on Saturday night. The key factor in Woolley’s relationship to Luddism – if there was one – is the absence of a volume of his diary for 1812. But he did write about other social crises – in 1801 for example, about the aftermath of harvest failure in the preceding year and the rising price of foodstuffs. He mentioned the Making of Bread Act 1800 (41 Geo. III c. 16), also known as the Brown Bread Act, which attempted to deal with food shortage by prohibiting the milling of white flour and the baking of any bread except with the whole grain – and bran, observed Woolley. It was so unpopular a measure that it was repealed within two months. Woolley said that, in Clifton at least, bakers stopped using wholemeal flour after just three weeks. He had things to say about the national response to dearth, which was to encourage the consumption of barley, oats, and rice – any grain but scarce wheat. This happened in Barton he wrote, where rice was bought by the overseers, but the parish still managed to make a profit out of its paupers.54 It seems unlikely that local repercussions of national crises such as these were not discussed by working men in a public house on a Saturday night, and equally unlikely that even semi-official records of a friendly society would contain any note of that discussion. 53 54

O’Neil, Spirit of Independence, p. 80. NA, DD 311/1, 17 Feb 1801. For the harvest failures food crises of the 1790s, and the hyper-crisis of 1800–1, Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1798– 1801, Allan Sutton, Gloucester, 1988, pp. 35–52. Woolley kept an eye on the price of flour and bread throughout 1801, and reported on local thefts of flour and meal. DD 311/1: ‘march they [there] was mathew fair and there was plenty of Chea [white bread flour of the second quality] and not so dear as was expected it was a considerable deal Lower in price than it was at Goose fair’; ‘Either on Monday night the 1 of June or Early on Tuesday morning Sombody broak in to Mr Langfords bake house and Stole about nine or ten Stone of fine flour and 2 loves of bread.’ Nottinghamshire was well supplied with rice. The advertisement placed by a London supplier (‘Rice for the Public’) was repeated for several months. Nottingham Journal, 24 Jan 1801.

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Club meetings structured Woolley’s months, as his knitting accounts structured his weeks. His local was the Coach and Horses in Clifton (‘Langfords’ – after the proprietor) and he spent by far the greater proportion of his drinking and eating money there. But apart from club nights, he also drank at the Red Hart (Widdowson’s, or ‘Widersons’) which hosted his friendly society, and at other places in Ruddington. His usual entry for friendly society nights was ‘Club and spent’ – never more than 1s 7½d, with the subscription accounting for 1s of this – until 1809, when he several times noted spending double the club fee on food and drink, and, perhaps, reading material. Club nights involved less strenuous drinking than other social occasions. A friendly society formalised the relationships of common life. It involved the recognition of common interest and purpose, and imposed civility on self-interest. It was a site of organised sociability and pleasure.55 It structured drinking, sociability, and friendship within the club room, and, more uncertainly, outside it. Many friendly societies had strict rules about members’ general social behaviour.56 In 1801 Woolley noted that ‘as Jos napor and Will Letherland was working upon the rodes in Glapton they fell out a bout some thing as all other fools do and napor kicked Lether Shin very bad and beat him with his fises and made him all over blood and he fetched a warrant for him and napor paid him 4 Shillings to make it up withe him and So it is Settled till the first Club night and then napor pays another Shilling for striking him’.57 But Woolley also recorded one incident where fighting between friendly society members was an expression of attitudes and relationships formalised in club membership. It happened on the night in 1804 when John Mann his brother-in-law attended his first meeting. Perhaps his having been nominated for membership at the behest and bequest of Clifton Rectory was a problem for some other club members. Woolley was doing the books that night, for both the usual clerks had joined the volunteers.58 William Fletcher

55

56 57

58

Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Pleasures Engendered by Gender: Homosociality and the Club’, in Roy Porter and Marie Roberts (eds.), Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century, Macmillan and New York University Press, Basingstoke and New York, 1996, pp. 48–76; Christiane Eisenberg, ‘“Artisans’” Socialization at Work: Workshop Life in Early NineteenthCentury England and Germany’, Journal of Social History, 24:3 (1991), pp. 507–20; Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, ‘“An Irresistible Phalanx”: Journeymen Associations in Western Europe’, International Review of Social History 39 (1994), pp. 11–52. Cordery, British Friendly Societies, pp. 26–28. NA, DD 311/, 9 Jun 1801. See ‘Articles to be Observed by the Members of a Friendly Society Held at the House of Mr. John Bamford, in Barton, Nottinghamshire’, S. Tupman, Nottingham, 1807, repr. in Friendly Societies: Seven Pamphlets, 1798–1839, Ayer Company Publishers, North Stratford NH, 1972, Art. IX. See Chapter 4 for local volunteering.

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Sr was ‘the assistance for Clifton’ (suggesting that in this club at least, men from different parishes and villages were organised in separate sections).59 Fletcher’s son, Woolley’s brother-in-law, and another Clifton member, Charles Hodget, turned up together at the meeting. Mann and Hodget had been out after a job.60 Very soon after they arrived ‘fletchers crew bein drunk they began to fall out with John and mee about John Coming into the Club they said that he did not Come is as he aught to have done and made a deal of disturbance . . . about it’. Were ‘fletcher’s crew’ Ruddington members, perhaps? Or Clifton men united against clerical interference in general and the Clifton rector in particular? It is impossible to tell. Woolley and his brother-in-law maintained a dignified silence (‘would say verey Little to them’); but outside the club room, on the walk home to Clifton, Fletcher’s mob ‘Got on in such a manner we was forsed to Speak and a fine blackguarding we had all the way home . . . they frettened to fetch the Cunstable to us’. They said Woolley and Mann were blocking the road, and forcibly detaining them. ‘We stood on one side and told them to Go and then they Swore they would Stay as Long as they pleased.’ (They were all – we have to assume this – very, very drunk.) ‘When the frig began’, wrote Woolley, ‘they was as fears as Loyons but when they found that they must Give it in they turned as quiet as Lambs’. The reason why they were ‘so tame at Last . . . was I believe they found that we was not afraid of their blackguard Swagger and that we were a match for them at fiting’, wrote Woolley. Old Fletcher retreated calling ‘all the roagues and rascals that he Cold Lay is tongue to and Swore that he [John Mann] deserved hanging’. Writing up, Woolley suggested that this was a friendly society altercation off friendly society premises. It had to do with friendly society procedures and politics. The other side was worried about what Woolley would 59

60

NA, DD 311/3, 4 Oct 1804. O’Neil, O’Neil, Spirit of Independence, pp. 43–5, 58–61, 84 for friendly society organisation, administration and book-keeping. Also Cordery, British Friendly Societies, pp. 12–41. ‘Charles hodget and John mann went to Sea after a place at mr breedons.’ Breedon of Ruddington was a notable improving farmer. In his 1813 survey of the county Robert Lowe remarked on his particular innovations in sheep breeding, which he had begun ‘about twenty-four years ago’. General View of the Agriculture of the County of Nottingham; with Observations on the Means of its Improvement, Sherwood, Neely and Jones, London, 1813, pp. 101, 123, 126–7. Woolley appears to have approved of Breedon, shared his sense of humour – or perhaps was simply not as antagonistic as he was towards some Clifton tenant farmers. In 1813 he noted that ‘Dc the 1st there was 4 sheep rosted at Ruddington and distributed to the poor Inhabetants with plenty of Bread the sheep was Given by . . . Mr Breedon . . . and others.’ DD 311/5, 1 Dec 1813. For ‘mr bredon hurt [ing] is Side with Laughg’, DD 311/1, Jul 1801, and below Chapter 11. He was connected in some way with the Ruddington society, probably as patron. DD 311/1, 3 Jan 1801. Cordery, British Friendly Societies, pp. 42–64 for patrons and supporters.

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do about the incident at the next Club meeting, he thought; that’s why they retreated like lambs into the dark. As intermittent club official and book-keeper Woolley had some disciplinary power over his fellow members. He did ‘put . . . [Fletcher’s crew] on’ before the next meeting: put them on a discipline sheet, or ‘on the book’. That ‘as offended them as bad as Ever’, he observed; ‘but that I don’t mind for they swaggered what they would doe but when the Club night Came they none of them went’.61 Friendly societies created and regulated friendship – a network of support and mutual interest – among men for the purpose of navigating the exigencies of everyday life.62 The Ruddington Society provided Woolley with many of his drinking companions (but not all of them), and with companionship, especially on the road home between Ruddington and Clifton (though it was a short walk, taking about fifteen minutes). The union of interest and influence that underpinned eighteenth-century notions of friendship was at work here – except that Woolley and his fellow members were men of the poorer sort who did not possess the means of influence, cultural or economic, that have been claimed as a factor in the friendships of the better sort.63 Woolley used the term ‘companion’, not ‘friend’ when he described his relationships with other men. Companions literally accompanied him whilst he was doing something: walking, drinking, spending money at the Goose Fair, smashing up an ale-house . . . He reserved ‘Friend’ for the formal descriptor of a charitable person, as in ‘She was a Just and upright woman and an poor mans friend’, and ‘a Great friend to the poor and did a Great deal of Charity’; or it might describe a function in civil society (‘his brother and Sister with his friend that went to Church with them and that Gave him his Whife or what you Call the father’).64 Friends (anonymous) might exercise influence, as some did, briefly with Rector Clifton over Samuel Woolley’s grazing land as described above, or as equally anonymous ‘friends’ did in the case of the Rector’s gardener, who was wrongly accused of theft when he left his place in 1804.65 In Woolley’s vocabulary 61 62

63

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NA, DD 311/3, 4 Oct 1804. This narrative occupies three pages. Keith McClelland, ‘Masculinity and the “Representative Artisan” in Britain, 1850– 1880’, in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds.), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, Routledge, London and New York, 1991, pp. 74–91 for some comments about practical friendship in later nineteenth-century friendly societies. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 168–9. See also Alan Bray, The Friend, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2003, pp. 307–23. NA, DD 311/3, Mar 1804; DD 311/2, 7 Jul 1801. He is describing the person who gave away the bride. DD 311/3, Sep 1804. See below, Chapter 7.

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the upper classes unambiguously ‘had’ friends, as when ‘Mr Edward fearon of wilford was a Shooting with a friend in Wilford Liberty his Gun went of by Axedant and he shot is friend in the bowels and he died in a few days after.’ Here an older understanding of ‘friends’ as brokers between each other of patronage and social power is at work, for a gentleman had shot an officer.66 When Sam Boyer arrived in town in 1803 Woolley described him as coming ‘to Clifton to see is friends’. Ominously so perhaps, for Boyer expected his ‘friends’ to exercise what influence and patronage they could on his behalf. After Boyer had wrought his havoc and his bastard child, Woolley did record that they had been ‘old play fellowers’. But he never described the one-eyed seducer as a ‘friend’ or even as a ‘companion’. Rather, he stood friend to Boyer, looked out for his interests, got him work, got him a frame (two frames, in fact), behaved towards him as he had assured his friendly society would to him, had he fallen on hard times. Keith Snell has described friendly society membership as an important aspect of ‘belonging’ in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England. Along with the ecclesiastical and civil organisation of a parish (church services and ceremonies; the poor laws administered by its vestry), and cultural expressions of place, like parish feast days and festivals, Sunday school processions, cricket matches played against other parishes – friendly society membership contributed to an individual’s sense of personal identity.67 The administrative and legal functions of a parish were of subjective importance to individuals; belonging to a friendly society became increasingly important to personal identity in the new century. Woolley’s friendly society was in Ruddington: close by Clifton, but in a very different legal and cultural space, for it did not lie within the manor of Clifton and was not part of Sir Gervase Clifton’s estates. Ruddington was a much larger place than Clifton, with a population of near 900 in 1810. Clifton was a ‘close’ or ‘closed’, a village regulated at every level by its landlord. The relative openness of Ruddington, its several public houses (Clifton had only one), and above all, the Red Hart friendly society, could have promoted Woolley’s ‘belonging’ to a

66

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‘is Name was Cooke he was a officer in the Navey and a man of a verey Good benevilent Caracter and well respected by all who knew him’. NA, DD 311/5, 25 Oct 1815. ‘Almost all of the literature stressing the importance of friendship as an emotional, practical and physical response to the stresses of life has dealt with the middling and aristocratic groups,’ remarks Peter King: ‘Friendship, Kinship and Belonging in the Letters of Urban Paupers, 1800–1840’, Historical Social Research, 33:3 (2008), pp. 249–77. But for the early modern period, see Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. Keith Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 21, 38, 76–7 and passim.

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place other than his home village. But it did not. Clifton was Woolley’s ‘manor’, in the colloquial sense established in the nineteenth century and close proximity to the slum and the criminal classes (‘Come round my manor again, and yer a gonner!’): your own territory or turf; a person’s home ground, on which they felt at home. On your own manor, whether it be in central Nottingham, or in the fields, closes, and alleys of tiny Clifton, you knew the people you passed, where they were going, and often, the story of their life. Clifton was where Woolley did most of his drinking and socialising, with the greater part of his acquaintance.68 It was his manor then – but not literally so, for every brick of every building, every blade of grass, and the living of St Mary’s church, ‘belonged’ to Sir Gervase Clifton, excepting the church lands, the uncertain legal status of which provided the conflict between earthly and ecclesiastical power (between Sir Gervase Clifton and the rector Mr Clifton) played out in Woolley’s diaries and his family’s everyday life.69 In his justicing room magistrate Clifton dealt with many poor families and heard many family stories (as shall be related). Administration of the poor laws required that he hear these stories, just as the poor were required to tell them; poor law and settlement cases provided by far the largest category of his recorded business as a justice of the peace. Woolley’s was not a family required to reveal its secrets in this way. Indeed, the family was imbricated in the complex civil and ecclesiastical arrangements that the old poor law represented by Samuel Woolley’s position as parish clerk, and the duties of that office that his son’s writing probably helped him fulfill. Samuel Woolley was the minor functionary who, by recording legitimate and illegitimate births, provided the data used by magistrates when they put the poor laws into effect. When Rose Woolley was widowed, the family’s first thought was to ‘keep hir from the parish’ by giving her practical and financial help. His sister Mary was pregnant when she married John Mann in May 1803. Perhaps Woolley hadn’t been told about her pre-nuptial pregnancy; or perhaps it was a secret that could wait until November (or another two hundred years) to be revealed.70 He did not mention it at any point in the diaries, rather emphasising

68

69 70

His monthly accounts show his expenditure at Langford’s (the Coach and Horses, Clifton) to be on average three times what he spent at named inns and public houses elsewhere. These calculations do not include what he spent at Widdowson’s (the Red Hart, Ruddington) on Club night. The money spent at Langford’s must have been on food as well as drink. For ways in which ‘belonging’ may have been inflected in estate or ‘close’ villages, Snell, Parish and Belonging, pp. 153, 155, 174. NA, DR/1/5/40/165, ‘John Mann & Mary Wooley Marr May 3 1803 by Banns . . . Samuel Son of John & Mary Mann Bap Nov 11 1803’.

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the sumptuousness of her wedding feast, the money spent on the event, and the fact that his sister and Mann were married by banns.71 Pre-nuptial pregnancy was scarcely unusual in late eighteenth-century England; in fact after about 1750 it ‘accelerated at a rate unprecedented in the British population’.72 Many brides were, like Mary Woolley, just a little bit pregnant. Her brother – if he was aware of her condition – was not ashamed of her as he might have been a hundred years on. When he did the date-calculations for other pre-nuptial pregnancies in Clifton, his tone was irony, not outrage: ‘December the 9 or 10 marey rue whife of William rue was delivered of a daughter’, he wrote in 1804. ‘They was maried about the 12 or the 14 of Sept So She was very quick at breeding.’73 David Vincent has suggested that at the beginning of the twentieth century, a mark of poverty, or being poor, was that a family could not keep its stories to itself. Its secrets were demanded by all sorts of state official, local, and central.74 Eighteenth-century applicants for poor relief or settlement knew that the price of a dole, or sixpence a week in bread, or a certificate of settlement, was a story . . . of poverty, abandonment, abuse, hard times, and often, of hunger.75 Woolley was well enough acquainted with the register of secrets in the parish records, and the stories told in Sir Gervase’s justicing room, to want to keep his own. Not being ‘poor’, Joseph Woolley had the advantage of keeping family secrets to himself.

71

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73 74 75

NA, DD 311/2, ‘April the 10 bands of mariage were published between John man and marey Wooley both of this parish.’ Mary Woolley was (probably) 21 when she married, so her father would not have been able to withhold his consent. What ‘marriage by banns’ meant legally after the 1753 Marriage Act was that nobody had the power to forbid the marriage, as a father might have done in the earlier century. What the phrase signified socially might have been that the marriage had the support and approbation of the family. Rebecca Probert, ‘Control over Marriage in England and Wales, 1753–1823: The Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753 in Context’, Law and History Review, 27:2 (2009), pp. 413–50. John R. Gillis, For Better, For Worse: British Marriages 1600 to the Present, Oxford University Press, 1985, pp. 110–15; Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 180–1. NA, DD 311/3, Dec 1804. David Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth-Century Britain, Longman, London, 1991, pp. 13–15. Carolyn Steedman, ‘Enforced Narratives: Stories of Another Self’, in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (eds.), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, Theories, Methods, Routledge, 2000, pp. 25–39.

4

Fears as loyons: drinking and fighting

‘D – m me if ever I love my friend better than when I am fighting with him’. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, Vol. II, Book IX, Chapter 4.

Joseph Woolley enjoyed writing up the long, episodic battle royal reported in the last chapter. His pleasure can be read by the length of the entry: the narrative occupies three pages; it may have taken as long to write as the fight had been long. It was written at leisure, some weeks after the event, so there was space to recollect that ‘When the frig began they was as fears as Loyons but when they found that they must Give it in they turned as quiet as Lambs.’ It is a contradictory account, in that the fight ends in two ways: with the retreat of Fletcher into the dark, letting loose vile oaths and curses, and with all of them making up – making friends. ‘We all apereantly parted friends’ is surprising to a reader who has made her way through several pages of drunken brawling in which at least one of Woolley’s party was seriously injured. But Woolley had the choice of reporting style here, as did the narrator of Tom Jones. Like Fielding, Woolley described many fights, including this one, by using ‘traditions of farce and picaresque with comically vulgarised evocations of epic’.1 And the surprised reader may also have forgotten Fielding’s comment that a fight like this was only to be expected, ‘as no nation produces so many drunken quarrels, especially among the lower people’, as England – ‘indeed, with them, to drink and to fight together, are almost synonymous terms’.2 Sir Gervase Clifton heard reports of interpersonal violence and threats of violence from his earliest days as a magistrate. Local people – ‘poor’ 1

2

Claude Rawson, ‘Thoughts on Adventurers: Fielding to Byron’, in Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall (eds.), Eighteenth-Century Culture: Serious Reflections on Occasional Forms. Essays in Honour of J. Paul Hunter, Associated University Presses, Cranbery NJ, 2001, pp. 136–49; 140. In the first volume of Tom Jones there are three ‘battles’ (domestic, among women, and on the road). The last was ‘of the kind, that for distinction’s sake is called royal’. Tom Jones (1792), Vol I, p. 230. Woolley’s description of a battle royal between Clifton women is discussed below, p. 89. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1792 edn), vol I, p. 211 (Book V, Chapter IX).

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but not paupers – came to him believing that he could put the law into effect on behalf of their family. Children were a factor in neighbours’ arguments and altercations across all the Clifton estates. Like their parents, children fought: hit, punched, and ‘cloted’ each other. Unlike their parents, they threatened each other with their father. A Gotham father who went to talk to the man whose seven-year-old had punched his, was called a ‘Lying Son of a Bitch’; the other man ‘swore he would fight him’.3 Fighting between their little boys may have been a form of play, but it was the seriousness of children’s altercations and the harm done by one child to another that brought parents to confrontation, and then to the magistrate.4 In 1787 one Wilford mother told Clifton that she had given the seven-year-old who had beaten up her little girl a little ‘knock upon the back’, whereupon the ‘boys Mother went into the House and fetched some scalding water and threw into her face’.5 What came before the magistrate was an altercation between two adults who had not been able to settle a dispute with either fists or words. All the fights described by Joseph Woolley settled something, so that he might write, as he did of many events, ‘and so it Ended’. The fight on the road home from Ruddington was given a third ending when a month later Woolley imposed Red Hart society fines for improper public behaviour. He had the authority to impose a rule of conduct binding on members of his society – for all that Fletcher did not turn up to pay his fine. Many complainants and petitioners before the magistrate hoped for a similar exercise of authority, though more came to Clifton Hall to complain that violence to the person had been threatened than with reports of actual physical harm. In July 1772 a Beeston joiner and alehouse keeper described how two framework knitters had come ‘into his house at Beeston . . . and began Cursing and swearing and otherwise Breaking the peace and [how] since that time have behaved in a very riotous manner . . . have Threatened to murder him and swore they would do for him root and Branch wherewithal he prays . . . the surety of the peace’.6 The ‘house’ here was a public house, as was the case when a Nottingham man come over to Wilford to have his dinner at Carver’s alehouse where ‘John Worekham of Market Hill in the 3

4

5

NA, M8050, n.d. – (1772). Sir Gervase may not have known the colloquialism ‘to clock’ (to hit or to punch). It may have been misspelled by his clerk attempting ‘clout’, of which ‘clot’ is an East Midlands dialect variant. They all knew what they were talking about. For fighting as a form of play (among adolescent boys rather than children), Robert Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in Eighteenth-Century London’, Social History, 26:2 (2001), pp. 190–208; p.199. 6 NA, M8050, 28 Jul 1787. NA, M8050, 21 Aug 1772.

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Town of Nottingham Frameworknitter came to the Door of the Said House and . . . threatened to do him some boddily Harm.’ Clifton noted that ‘He did not strike him or did he do him any Mischief.’ As both men ‘belong to Nottingham . . . [he] advised them if he was afraid he would do him a mischief to swear the Peace against him before the Mayor of Nottingham’.7 The incident had taken place at Wilford, which was literally Sir Gervase’s manor, but he advised the man to seek protection from the threat of violence where he ‘belonged’. He also provided some legal advice: the complainant must be certain that some harm was threatened before any magistrate could act on his report.8 People knew full well that they must convince a magistrate on this point. Threats of violence like these were connected to alcohol in that they were experienced in or near an ale house, but being drunk or accusing someone of being drunk was not a factor in the law to which the complainants referred. Sir Gervase did not hear (at least not in his justicing room) about the kind of drunken brawl Woolley wrote about. Woolley reported on actual fights and actual physical harm – and on something settled by the fight itself. The complainants in Clifton’s notebooks wanted the magistrate to settle things. Woolley’s account of the club-night fight on the road to Clifton was written in retrospect. People before Sir Gervase recalling events of the night before, or Tuesday last past, were also giving retrospective accounts. But the verbatim transcription of their words – their hesitations, their attempts to elucidate the sequence of events, names transmuted into the he and she of rapid note taking, the questions put (but not recorded) pursuing a point of law that wrench a telling out of chronological sequence – all of this produced a form of narrative different from Joseph Woolley’s. In his writing, intervening events shaped the story. The fight between friendly society members happened on club night; the description was dated 4 October, but was preceded by an entry concerning 16 October (the delivery of a boatload of coal at Wilford), a note of Woolley’s entering the Volunteers on 3 November, and a volunteer inspection day on 3 December. Woolley wrote about the fight not only at a distance of two months but after the experience of joining a defence organisation promulgated in times of war.9 All through September Woolley had noticed the movement of requisitioned wagons and horses along the roads between local townships: ‘these waggons is marked to Convey the vo[l]En tears to any place in Case 7 9

8 NA, M8050, n.d. – (1786 or 1787). For ‘belonging’, see Chapter 3. Austin Gee, The British Volunteer Movement, 1794–1814, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 45–6

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of any invasion’.10 War with France had resumed after the very brief peace of Amiens.11 Volunteers were recruited as ‘citizens, not soldiers’, but nevertheless, between the October club night fight and the end of 1804 Woolley had been drilled in military formation, his troop had been inspected, he had handled a weapon, and been ‘mesured for . . . [his] ridgemental Cloaths’.12 He had written up the antics – general incompetence, drunkenness, and inertia – of the local volunteer troops all through the summer and autumn of 1804. He made nine entries concerning the Ruddington and Bunny Volunteers between August and November. He used the high comic style, and produced some vivid scenes of women weeping and wailing along village streets entreating fate not to send their husbands off to war. In Ruddington in September there was ‘fine sport among the wimmen for they run from house to house with poor piteful tales that they would send their husbands off were they pleasd and Some damd their husbands for fools and wondered how they would be so foolish as to have aney thing to doe with it while others swore that they would be damed if their husbands should Go and . . . others Laughfed that Cared nothing about it for some of them will doe better when they will have 2 shillings a week for Every Child and alf a Crown for them Selves So they will n[ot] have their husbands at home to spent it . . .’.13 There is a particularly fine account of a cucumber eating marathon undertaken by the Bunny Volunteer Band (‘nobody wanted them as Cold aford to Give them any thing’; at one house they were given platters of bread, cheese, and cucumbers in lieu of the money they were after). Woolley concluded the story with their finding ‘fault with the vinegar because it was not Sharp Enough and if the vinegar had been as Sharp as their stomaks it would have Cut their thraots for I never Saw Such Gluttond work

10

11 12

13

NA, DD 311/3, Sep 1804. He was uncertain how to spell the word when he first wrote it, but very soon got it right. The Volunteer Movement was widely discussed in the local and national press. Winifred Stokes, ‘Investigating the History of Local Volunteer Regiments. The Stockton Volunteers and the French Invasion Threat 1798–1808’, Local Historian, 37: 1 (2007), pp. 24–8. John D. Grainger, The Amiens Truce: Britain and Bonaparte, 1801–1803, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2004. NA, DD 311/3, 3, 13 Nov, 16 Dec 1804. In 1805, Woolley returned to this volume (p. 187) to note ‘august the 17 1805 the bunney voluntears was Called up to be inspected at bunney park and they had their waggons to Exercise along with them that is to see how they Could Git in and out and how many they would hould and how the seats fitted and they fired seven rounds’. He was no longer serving. On the same page he also noted the death of a local man in June 1806. The two entries taken together could indicate that he did not keep a diary during the five-year gap. NA, DD 311/3, 4 Sep 1804.

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in my life befor’.14 In short, he laughed heartily at these local defenders of the realm; and then suddenly in November, became one himself – because, he said, he had been asked.15 His account of the October punch-up on the road to Clifton may have been inflected by the experience of being prepared to fight in case of invasion – the idea of fighting formalised, made military, and yoked to the needs of nation.16 But the evidence of his writing is that he described all physical conflict, between man and man and between women, in the mock heroic style of Tom Jones, emphasising the bathetic difference between what his characters believed of themselves and how they were in reality. Woolley recorded some dozen altercations that resulted in what he called ‘a fite’, ‘fiting’, or a ‘battle’ during the six years covered by his journals. Occasionally he reported on what he had heard tell, not what he had witnessed, as in August 1804 when his brother-in-law and some other Clifton men set off for Lincolnshire to find harvest work by the piece. ‘The 27 of august the 5 Lincoln Shire Lumpers set of a Lumpong into Lincoln shire . . . it highly afronts them to Call them the Lincolnshire Lumpers . . .’.17 They were back two weeks later with ‘a very dismal tale’, not only about a complete lack of work, but also with reason why there was none to be had: ‘they was pressing So about the Sea Side that it had drove all the Irish and Scotch men that come to work harvest work in the Cuntery all a way from the sea Side up into the Cuntry . . . some of them Said that there had been a battle between a press gang and some Lumpers near the sea but they did not say [where] and I believe they Could not say which Got the master for I believe there was no such thing but they thaught they must tell some tale and they told a very weak one for I Canot think that they would press aney one from is work’.18 Woolley usually reported on fights he had observed. But even when he was clearly involved in the altercation leading to the fight, he never – on 14 16

17

18

15 NA DD 311/3, 10 Sep 1804. NA DD 311/ 3 Nov 1804. Woolley had by now been trained to handle a rifle, but a notable aspect of the fights he describes is the absence of weapons. Men and women fight with fists, fingernails, and feet. Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Knife Fighting and Popular Codes of Honour in Early Modern Amsterdam’, in Spierenburg (ed.), Men and Violence: Gender, Honour and Rituals in Early Modern Europe and America, Ohio State University Press, Athens, 1998, pp. 103–27. To go ‘lumping’, or ‘on the lump’: to join together with others to find short-term casual work. See Eric Partridge, The Routledge Dictionary of Historical Slang, Routledge, London, 1973. NA, DD 311/3, Aug 1804. He was right to be anxious: they did press men from their work. Kevin D. McCrainie, ‘The Recruitment of Seamen for the British Navy, 1793– 1815: “Why don’t you raise more men?”’, in Donald J. Stoker and Harold Blanton (eds.), Conscription in the Napoleonic Era: A Revolution in Military Affairs, Routledge, London, 2009; Nicholas Rogers, The Press Gang: Naval Impressment and its Opponents in Georgian Britain, Continuum, London, 2007.

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paper – raised his own fists. He was the narrator of the stories he told, not a protagonist. The day after Christmas 1801 he was at the Coach and Horses, Clifton with ‘several young people’ when John Holt ‘Came in all drunk and a fool as he always is when he has had aney bear and he wanted me to play im at drafts but I would not So he Called for a cup of ale and while he Sat drinking it this Jos belton Came in and holt Cold [not] hold is tongue about the drafts and at Last he challenged all the house or at Least aney one in it’. Belton agreed to ‘play him for a tancard of ale and the best out of three Games’. Holt won the first, but half way through the second, Belton started to cheat ‘which holt did not properly See’. Belton boasted that ‘he was to Sharp’ for his opponent. Holt then ‘called im a Lier and the Said Joseph belton Said he hated the name of a Lire and Still presisted in being right So holt found that the first part of is Language had no weight and then he frettoned to fetch him a Slap in the face and that So Egasporated the Said Jos belton So for all he was in a Strange plase he told holt that if he slaped im in the face he would have off the Second [game]’.19 Holt’s tactic was then to get up ‘as if to Go out of the door in to the yard or in to the Street and the Said Jos belton followed him and they was so fond of fiting that they Could not stop’. In fact they started before they got outside; ‘by the noise you would have thought’ that they were in danger. Out in the yard ‘the said belton was too nimble for him they had several meetings but holt had not the advantage he promised himself for the Said belton was so nimble that holt Could not hit him to aney purpose So he Contented imself with laying hold of im and pulling the man about by the Collar while the said belton Contented himself with Comming at a blow when he could . . . throw im down twice or three times but that was but Little to is advantage for the fellow threw im down onse and Some how or other he mad it in is way to Give holt a black Eye and several other blows about the hed and some on the body and holt was so kind to not hit him one blow when he was on is Legs but Struck him when he was down’. He used the organising strategies of the magistrate’s notebook (‘the said Belton’); magistrate and diarist both made practical attempts to keep control of unwieldy narratives. They both used techniques of writing universally practised by legal personnel to make narrative coherence out of inchoate experience and to keep track of who is doing what and saying what to whom in the story. Woolley needed the writing 19

The stranger Belton made the verbal move here of referring to a taxonomy of insult: out of all the disrespect that could have been flung at him, ‘liar’ was the worst. Robert Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (2004), Hambledon, London, 2007, pp. 51–7.

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technique here, for the moves made by the two protagonists were described in very great detail. And he did not know Belton, who was a stranger in town. Woolley, watching, had time to wonder about tactics: ‘holt held im fast by the Coller and I looking at im some time while he held the man So fast that he had no power to Guard holts blowes holt held up his other hand So hit the Said belton but he was so Long about it that I thought he was Considering if he Should hit im and hurt im or Give im a tapp but at Last he thought it best to Give im one Small blow at the back of part of is head then threw the said belton on the flower’. And he noted the theatricality of Holt’s performance (more apparent perhaps than the stranger Belton’s). At last ‘the Champeon Ended and the Great Champeon holt went home to wash the blood from of his face and to bath is black eye . . . is antagonist Came into the house again and had received no more hurt than a Slite blow on the nether Leg’. Then Holt came back in greatly revived and let loose much abusive language. The other man chose to ignore it. Woolley thought that this was because Langford’s was not his local (‘the said Joseph belton durst not resent it was because he was in a Strange place’). There was nothing for Holt to do but give up on the idea of another bout, ‘go home and take is black Eye with im’.20 Woolley’s only stated part here was as witness: he clearly was both inside and outside the Coach and Horses, watching. The fight occupies seven pages of the notebook (the length of the main part of the Pregnant Widow story), taking an hour, or perhaps longer, to put on the page. The minute discussion of tactics and analysis of the antagonists’ psychology was part of Woolley’s experience of the brawl as much as the verbal altercation that preceded it. And he knew Holt well; these long passages were also delineation of someone’s character and his long history of doing badly at gaming. In September 1805 he noted that ‘John holt and thomas Langford plaid at picking at a Cork for a tankard of ale a Game and holt won three Games of him . . . it was the first Explite of that sort that I Ever saw holt winn and known him for 20 years’.21 At another Coach and Horses brawl in August 1803 Woolley was clearly not present; he reported on the incident after taking a kind of witness statement from someone else: ‘august the 16 there was a falling out between thomas Langford [son of the licensee] and William barker and barker abused mrs Langford much and struck hir and Langford turned him out of doors and then barker broak the house window that 20 21

NA, DD 311/3, 26 Dec 1804. NA, DD 311/3, 27 Sep 1805. This is the 1804 notebook; its last thirty pages contain entries for 1805.

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is in the Corner all to peices So Langford fetched a warrant for him and they went in on Saturday and the Justices Let them make it up but it is Said that thomas hallam took a false oath for he swore that barker struck mrs Langford first which ritchard tongue says that she struck him first in the face’.22 Woolley hovers at the edges of fight-stories (in a way that he may not have hovered during actual fights) but he had much experience in reporting them, and sometimes increased tension by noting an absence of conflict. One January afternoon in 1803 (it was Plough Monday, Woolley noted) ‘John fletcher and thomas hardy runn a foot race for a shilling Each . . . fletcher beat him about five yards they run in Joseph Streets Street Close’. Woolley was certainly present later, if not at the race, for at ‘night wee went to Langfords and there was thomas bradley and is brother and after there we had some falling out but not fiting out at Langfords’.23 The fighting took place later. Fletcher and another man (not Thomas Hardy) set off home, but something ‘Set of[f] them again and they begun to fall out and when they Got into Glapton they begun to fite and they raised all the neighbour hood in St Charles Street’. Someone went for the constable but he refused to come. ‘When they had role one another in the dirt and tore one another Colose [clothes] and Given one another a black eye or too they went home Contente to sleep.’ Woolley as witness is left outside Langford’s. The story was told him by someone else. His self-presentation was as one who avoided physical altercation. In September 1801 he caught a neighbour stealing bricks from his master’s yard. (He was paying frame rent at a Clifton workshop at this time.) He watched the man jump ‘upon the Whorl [wall] on his belley and then flung is Self over and Laid the bricks upon the whorle and Got over again’. He approached him, went ‘as I thought unperceived to Lay hold of him he perceived me and run away without the bricks’. Woolley was very close ‘but Could not Lay hold of him’. He followed him up the town, went ‘to his fathers house two or 3 times and at last found him at home and well blackgarded I was with him and his father and mother and he frettened to baste me and Said he shoud Lite on me some dark night and then he would doe for me but

22

23

NA, DD 311/2, 16 Aug 1803. They did not apply to Sir Gervase Clifton for a warrant. Clifton’s only piece of magisterial business in 1803 was in October when he heard a settlement case. ‘Went in’ suggests that Thomas Langford obtained the warrant from the same Nottingham magistrates, who had him and Hallam make it up (which may have involved financial recompense to the Langfords). For magistrates arbitrating and ‘settling’ things in the case of assault by means of payment to the complainant, Peter King, ‘The Summary Courts and Social Relations in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 83 (1984), pp. 125–83; esp. 148–9. NA, DD 311/2, 10 Jan 1803.

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I told him I was no blackguard So I told him I would Sware to him and Left them to make test on it’.24 He threatened to go the magistrate (‘Sware to him’) and left them to think about it. (There is no more about the bricks in the diaries; and nothing in Clifton’s papers about the theft. This conflict was settled with words.) Drink was not involved here and there was no physical altercation. Most of Woolley’s drinking and fighting stories end with either a defeat in words, or an altered state of mind in the antagonists. This was one of the ways in which he produced narrative closure and delivered narrative explanations for the fights he described. Drunkenness and gambling were the causes he highlighted. Drink was involved in all of the fights between men he described; when gambling was detailed, the absence of a fight was worthy of note. In drink, men made bets that they claimed they never would have made when in their senses. One Saturday night a drunk bet a pound he could carry a frame single-handed, but on Monday morning said that ‘when he was Sober that he would not have Caried it for ten pounds’.25 In July 1804 there was a one-mile pony race run on the turnpike road by two Ruddington gentlemen ‘for a Leg of mutton and a Gallond of ale’. There was much betting on the race (Woolley himself lost a tankard of ale) and repercussions during the celebratory dinner at Widdowson’s in Ruddington: ‘a fine disturbance in the room nocking one another over the Chairs and tabels’. Two men went outside to settle their difference. Woolley watched, thought that the rules were being broken by one of them: ‘I never Saw in all my Life a man fite more like a Coward and a blackguard . . . for he never pased is man as he aught to doe but run with is hed in is Guts or took the oppertunity to strike him when he was not a ware of him’. His opponent was advised ‘to kick him in the face but he was a Long while before he would but he had hit him some Sever blows before the Last meeting for he had Lamed him So till he Could hardly stand and the Last meeting when he was Coming at him with his head down to catch him by the harms [the other] kicked him in the face with is knee . . . ’. Then abruptly, they ‘Exchanged peace and so it Ended and I believe both went into the house appearing 24

25

NA, DD 311/1, 8 Sep 1801. Woolley frequently used the term ‘blackguard’ (sometimes the variant ‘blagger’) as both a verb and a noun, perhaps in the sense established by the mid-eighteenth century, of impolite (rude, insulting) man. Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain, 1660–1800, Longman, Harlow, 2001, pp. 136–8, 196. On this occasion Woolley described being verbally abused by all of the would-be thief ’s family, who did the blackguardly thing of calling him a blackguard, and thus impugning his probity and honour. I owe this observation to an anonymous reader. NA, DD 311/2, 8 Jan 1803. Geoffrey Clark, Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695–1775, Manchester University Press, 1999, pp. 1–3 and passim for the endemic betting culture of eighteenth-century England.

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to be Contented’.26 Men who have just pulled each other to pieces fall into each other’s arms with declarations of love – in histories of early modern sociability, in Tom Jones, and in modern reports of binge drinking. At some level Woolley treated incidents of drunken fighting as a form of disciplined play among men and strangers.27 He never wrote about lone drinking; to get very drunk in company was an expression of conviviality and companionship.28 The fights that ensued were part of the play of conviviality, as Henry Fielding pointed out. It was – and is – also convention that the observer report with irony the sudden volte-face of drunken fighters (indoors again, arm-in-arm, well content with beating each other up, buying another round) as Woolley frequently did. All writers need to reach narrative conclusion, and Woolley ended many of his fight stories in the same manner as the novelist. But unlike the novelist, Woolley was not the omniscient narrator who reports events with utter certainty about a textual realm he has created. He was concerned to be clear about what he had and had not witnessed. The fight after the Ruddington pony race in July 1804 spiralled out over Monday night. At three o’clock on the morning of the 31st ‘there was another battle faught between John Wilson and Samuel topley they were both Got fresh and I believe there was some old [dis]agreement between them’. There were ‘Some Swagering fellowes was [standing] by when they was quareling’, and Wilson and Topley quickly turned their argument into a betting opportunity: ‘they made a match to fite for alf a guinee Each Sid’, recruiting at least ten others (though this is difficult to work out, as Woolley did not know all of them – ‘Some more but I don’t know who’). Woolley watched ‘a very hard battle but Willson won the day or the battle which[ever] you please to Call it’, despite Topley’s team having ‘plaid all the pranks they Could to have him win but they Couldnt’. His men ‘held him up till he was almost killed and it was said at our town that he was dead but if he was not dead he was so much hurt that he was forst to lie in bed for three or four days after’. ‘So Ended ruddington races’ he concluded, ‘and a fine Ending it was’. He repeated details of the occasion and location (‘the diner was prepared at Widdersons and the battels faught in is home Close’) and emphasised that ‘the Last battle I did not see’. He had presumably gone home after the first round. In some historical accounts of masculine performativity, 26 27

28

NA DD 311/3, 16 Jul 1804. Gina Bloom, ‘Manly Drunkenness: Binge Drinking as Disciplined Play’, in Amanda Bailey and Roze Hentschel (eds.), Masculinity and the Metropolis of Vice, 1550–1650, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2010, pp. 21–44. Phil Withington, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, Social History, 32:3 (2007), pp. 291–307.

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drinking is disconnected from fighting and fighting from gambling.29 There is no such separation in Joseph Woolley’s diaries. Woolley’s fighting women were written from the same ironic sideline as were his drunken, battling men, perhaps with greater relish for the comedy of female ‘Gallantesses’ laying into each other, and with more overt literary reference. There are four female battle scenes in the diaries, including the one fought ‘feb the 27 [1804] at Gabble row in Glapton between marey winfield and marey hardy and it was faught with much furey on both sides for marey hardy had a black Eye and . . . and hir harm very much bitten and hir Cap pulled off and hir hair much Luged by hir antagonis while she was onley able to nock some of winfields teeth out as they say’. He had been told this story. ‘It was terible fite as Ever was faught in that row and it went faviour of marey winfield . . . Charles hodget was second for them boath and tho Winfield had the better of the ingagint [engagement] she was Challenged again by hir antagonist but it is said she declined fighting aney more so the other will be don of the roe again unless Some other Gallantess under takes a boxing match with hir and it is thaught they will Lose’.30 The ‘Don of the Row’ is a woman; the point about Don Quixote’s many battles is their pointlessness and pathos – and that he believes himself to be the knight and gallant that he so clearly is not. This reference to Don Quixote suggests that Cervantes’ work was as widely known among the early nineteenth-century poorer sort as Hester Thrale said it was in 1778.31 Woolley’s reporting style was plainer when he described fights between men and women (though he did employ literary allusion in one report of domestic abuse).32 In May 1813 he simply recorded that ‘Thomas Billey being Jellous of is whife and John Holt they had a battle and She scrached is face . . . She Left the four Clawings of one hand upon is face.’33 He was now some forty years old; perhaps his involvement and interest in the social drama of the fight was on the wane. There are no fights, public or domestic, reported at all in the 1809 diary. Battles fought after 1805 were more likely to be explained by the disasters and antagonisms of sexual relationships. In 1813 he made the low-key report that ‘Some time in febewary marey Hardey Comonley Called Robins swore a Child to mr Thomas Butler she swore it at East Leak some time about the 15 of 29 30 31 32 33

Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour’, pp. 190–208. NA DD 311/3, 27 Feb 1804. For the formality of plebeian boxing, ‘with seconds, according to accepted rules of fair play’, Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour’, p. 198. Katharine C. Balderson (ed.), Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs Piozzi) 1778–1809, 2 vols. [1941], Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1951, vol. I, pp. 354–5. Woolley’s reporting of domestic violence is discussed in Chapter 5. NA DD 311/5, 3 May 1813.

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march and on the 2 april william Reckless met old hardey against Bateses in the town street and he asked him whoes Child it was and they raised a battle over it for old hardey had always said that it was recklesses Child which made hardey so mad to be asked that Question by him . . .’.34 There is much physical injury reported in Woolley’s fight narratives, and he sometimes appears to find human suffering highly amusing. Modern readers are troubled by the gales of laughter greeting serious pain and hurt in the eighteenth-century novel. Reading Woolley’s diaries is disconcerting in the same way. He did not write for an audience, but as a writer he was the distanced, amused auditor of many broken and battered bodies, and he found what he wrote funny. There is the same expectation of laughter (because the narrator is laughing) when we read of the humiliations and physical assaults experienced by the cleric in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. Modern critics explain that Fielding subjected a character of whom he was clearly fond to physical violence as part of his ‘attack on the puerile humor of his age’; the scenes reflect ‘certain conventions in the representation of nonsense or folly’; Fielding was able to separate anti-clericalism from impiety, and hoped his readers would do so too; what is mocked and abused and assaulted in Parson Adams is his clerical function, not his evident goodness as a person.35 All this is well and good – though it is highly unlikely that any sentimental reader of the twenty-first century will end up splitting their sides after understanding Fielding’s position in ‘the great laughter debate’. On the evidence of his journals, one of the ‘low’ like Joseph Woolley participated in the debate, as well as holding up for scrutiny – and further laughter – the puerile amusements of Clifton and district. This is not the same as saying that he somehow ‘learned’ his comic style of reporting from Fielding; but rather that the blows and the bleeding he reported involved scrutiny of the world he inhabited and its network of social and sexual relations, in the manner of the novelist. Reading Tom Jones did not ‘influence’ Joseph Woolley, in the way that Henry Fielding said he had been influenced by Don Quixote to write Joseph Andrews (1742), ‘in imitation of the manner of Cervantes’. Fielding further designated his novel ‘a comic epic poem in prose’ designed to emphasise the ‘light and ridiculous’ over the ‘grave and solemn’, the ludicrous over the sublime, the common people over those of superior rank.36 By ‘the manner of 34 35 36

NA DD 311/5, 1813. It is not clear when this was written. Simon Dickie, ‘Joseph Andrews and the Great Laughter Debate’, Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture, 34 (2005), pp. 271–332. Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote. In Two Volumes, A. Millar, London, 1742.

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Cervantes’ was signalled that at least one character would be another deluded Don Quixote, that many roads would be travelled, and that many encounters thereon would result in lengthily-described fights between antagonists who had not the slightest insight into their own absurdity. A twentieth-century critic corrected Fielding in his acknowledgement of influence, said that the extended title was an afterthought, and that what Fielding was really doing was attempting to capture in prose – reproduce – ‘the life of the common people of England’.37 If that is the case, questions of influence are by the by, however much Fielding may have underlined it. And ‘influence’ is not the term we need for interpreting Woolley’s set-piece battles, for he does not have to have modelled his prose on Fielding’s for it to bear resemblance to the novelist’s. Fielding wrote about the common conflicts of the common people on many models (Bunyan and Defoe, Addison and Steele came to the critic’s mind). Woolley could well have written in the manner of Fielding had he never clapped eyes on Tom Jones (we do not know if he read Joseph Andrews), for the noisy habits and manners of the poorer sort were reproduced in law reports, newspapers, printed sermons, and in countless, unknown conversations. This is what they were like, and the poorer sort knew it as well as their betters.38 But Woolley did know Tom Jones, and his writing could stand as one example of the great cycling between life, literature, and back again, in the making of modern Western self-identity.39 At the very least, Fielding’s Tom Jones may explain why Woolley so very much enjoyed writing about the aggressive willingness of his friends and neighbours to raise their fists (and other implements) on roads, in taverns, and through the courts and closes of Clifton. But Woolley stopped laughing at all of this sometime between 1805 and 1815. There had come the knocking at the gate: the Luddite crisis and depression of the stocking trade. Life, and Woolley’s reporting of it, was darker now. The last ‘battle’ of the diaries is plainly recounted, with no rhetorical flourishes: ‘May the 18 [1815] there was a Battle

37

38

39

A. W. Ward, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes . . . , Volume X: The Age of Johnson, Putnam, New York, 1907–1921, II.1, ‘Fielding and Smollett Compared’, II.8, ‘Fielding and Cervantes’. Discussing eighteenth-century plebeian norms of violence and its decline among the better sort of the new century, John Tosh remarks on the extraordinary difficulty of getting past labels like ‘rough’ in disinterring working-class masculine codes of behaviour, then and now. Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family and Empire, Pearson, Edinburgh, 2005, pp. 334–42. And Fielding did mention Cervantes in Tom Jones. Towards the end he apostrophises Genius, who helped Cervantes, ‘Shakspear, Swift and Marivaux’ and many others, to help him finish the damn book. Tom Jones (1792), vol. III, p. 680 (Book XIII, Chapter 1). He understood that a reader glancing at the Contents page would also like its help: the end is continuously delayed.

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faught between John wittson Comonley Called Tinsel and Robert Smith Comenley Called Black bob they faught for a Guinea and bob Smith won Easea for tinsel was like a Baby to him they Are a lot of black guards all together but they thaught that tinsel would have died upon the Head of it for he Lay in bead a Long time and was forst to have the doter he never speok for some Day but he is Got over it and he will have more wit than to Lose a nother guinea on the same futting.’40 Immediately after writing this, he remembered an incident from early August when a local servant maid had been riding ‘to the pastuer a milking with william Hoe behind hir on the poney Robert Smith threw a stone or a Clot at them and struck hir over the helbow and Lamed hir and hir parents fetched a warrant for him and they went before the Justices and they ordered that he should pay the Docters Bill and [her employer] . . . a shilling per day so long as she was not Able to work’. He thought that her parents were wrong to get the warrant – to go to law – for Smith had already promised to pay her mistress ‘for hir Lost time and pay the Docter’. If he hadn’t made recompense, then they could have involved the law, but under the circumstances they were far too precipitate.41 As a writer he had turned to recording violence in everyday life. There was little now of the fun he had in 1804 with other servants on the road and much more severe injuries sustained, when ‘thomas Langford juneor went along with mr Cliftons Garedener and footman to Wilford for some Close [clothes] and must ride and as they was Going they must run a race and wich won I do not know but they were not Satisfied about it so as they Come back a Gain they must run again and tom Langford rode behint tom parson and the Gardener made by him Self and as they were upon the full speed that horse that had the too on him Jumped out of the rode and then the Gardener won for the other horse Spillt is Jockes and Sorely wounded Langford for he fell upon is back and Soused his head and back’. Langford was so badly injured that he paid for the relatively expensive remedy of being blooded.42 Woolley’s endpoint was not the broken head, but the comment that he didn’t ‘wonder at is bruseing is head for it is so Soft and a small thing will bruse it he Could not work for Some time . . . Langford says that he never will run another for this as made a Criple of him.’43 Of course he knew all involved and what they were like; he wrote their character parts for them, including one for the bear of little brain, Thomas Langford Jr. He did not know the Clifton serving maid, and he wrote about women in a different way from men – with 40 42 43

41 NA, DD 311/6, 18 May 1815. NA, DD 311/6, Aug 1815. Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 65–6; 159–62. NA, DD 311/3, 5 Aug 1804.

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their friendships, foibles, and continual propensity to violent movement. But the absence of literary devices in the telling of the tale from 1815 is striking when compared with earlier entries. Drink and drunkenness were the explanatory context to men’s fighting. Most of the violent engagements Woolley recorded happened in drinking places, or in adjacent yards and closes. Men went outside to fight, and then returned to drink some more. In contemplating Sam Boyer’s family background he reflected on the public house and domestic violence, the miserable life of Boyer’s mother, yoked to ‘a drunken fellow [who] . . . Gits drunk and Gos home and abuses hir’.44 This was unusual: he described many incidents of domestic abuse throughout the six notebooks but rarely attributed a man’s aggression on home-coming to drink taken in the public space of the alehouse. Yet the disgusting behaviour of amazingly drunken men took him, in imagination, into the domestic sphere – into houseplaces and bedchambers all over Clifton and Glapton. At harvest time 1803 ‘John buxton Got So drunk that when he got home at night and was Going to bed he wanted to make water but he said he could not without his Whife would wistle whilst So She wistled then he pissed and whent to bed satisfied’.45 When the crops were in and harvest workers had celebrated with drink, men went home and behaved insanely: on the same night ‘Samuel boger Got so drunk that when he Got home . . . he Got a Great ovel tabel down in the middle of the flore to twist it up into bands and pulled all the Chairs and tabels into the flowr and made such a racket that [his landlord] was forst to Git up and put him to bed for he was not able to Git there himself ’. Woolley dwelt on the fallout in bedrooms, as after a wedding party in November 1804 when one guest ‘spued before he got home’ (it was six o’clock in the morning) and another ‘spued a Chamber pot full as soon as he Got into bed and his whife held it’ and another ‘was so drunk he Cold ardley sit in is Chair’.46 ‘In short they was all drunk’, said Woolley; ‘tom hallam Shoemaker Got so drunk that night that he did nothing but spew all night’. Woolley was amused by these stories rather than disgusted. But there may have been a degree of distaste in his stories about drunken women. After Goose Fair weekend 1803 he heard that ‘Sarah Canterledge went to Nottingham and got drunk and fell down in a Chaniel and stoped the water till it run dry and fell dow[n] of off the Cart bout Street Lane End beshit hir self for they say She stunk so that Charles hodget and thomas bradley Could hardly take hir up home.’47 One local couple were known for their revolting habits – ‘such drunken diletory people as they are for he is never happy but when he is in Langfords fire 44 46

45 See above, p. 64. NA, DD 311/2, 27 Aug 1803. 47 NA, DD 311/3, 25 Nov 1804. NA, DD 311/2, 8 Oct 1803.

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nook drunk and she is never happy but when she is Smoaking and drinking for she will drink till she pisses under hir . . . She onse Got so drunk at . . . that she had Life [lief] to have hanged her self in the yard Gate she did beshite hir self and spent till she stunk so that aney body Cold not go near hir’.48 He highlighted the incontinence of drunks; Woolley suggests that he had smelled this woman on numerous occasions (it sounds as if the couple were a pretty permanent fixture at his local) as well as hearing the story about her befuddled encounter with a gate. But he was sensitive to smell – one of the few statements about himself that he made – and there are very few who do not find the odour of human excrement disgusting.49 Woolley’s own experience as a drinker was much more opaquely recounted. He sometimes noted his consumption as modest: ‘they asked me to drink when I first went in and I did but I would not drink but once’; he never ran a race for a tankard of ale (though he bet on other men doing so), nor got so blinded ‘that he Cut his nose and one of his fingers and then he went and Lay upon the bed with the nife in is hand’ (Thomas Langford Jr again); he doesn’t report on himself drinking ‘six quartons of Gin and . . . [coming] home as drunk as a Lord’.50 He had a vocabulary for degrees of drunkenness: ‘middling’ (as when at the time of volunteer recruitment across the district in 1801, ‘joe aram and mr barker drank a quart or too of beer to Gotham at mr Langfords besides that 2 pints he had before they Joined Company so Joe Got middling’); ‘mellow’ (‘they say they were not drunk and they might not but I believe they were very mellow’); and ‘drunk’ – so pissed that men and women lost control of their bodily functions and their senses.51 He had a wry line on the soft-headed who were not inured to hard drinking, noting in 1804 that ‘a quart of ale Goes a Great way with a ruddington volontear’.52 In the first volume he made notes about the price of ale across the district; the grain crisis had affected the price of drink as well as basic foodstuffs.53 His accounts do not allow disaggregation of his spending on drink 48 49 50 51 53

NA, DD 311/3, May 1804. ‘[I]t stunk so much of Smoak that I Could hardley bare to smaell of it’, he said of the litter left after a haystack fire in 1805. NA, DD 311/3, 7 Sep 1805. NA, DD 311/3, Sep 1804. 52 NA, DD 311/1, 23 Sep 1801, DD 311/2, 24 Dec 1803. NA, DD 311/3, 26 Aug 1804. NA, DD 311/2, 10, 15 Sep 1801. Roger Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in Wartime England, 1798–1801, Alan Sutton, Gloucester, 1988; Douglas Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’, Past and Present, 162 (1999), pp. 100–62; Roger Wells, ‘The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700–1850’, in Mick Reed and Roger Wells (eds.), Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880, Frank Cass, London, 1990, pp. 29–53; Roger Wells, ‘Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness, in the English Countryside 1700–1880’, in ibid., pp. 121–214; John Bohsted, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, 1550–1850, Ashgate, Farnham, 2010, pp. 165–244.

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from spending on food. The bills he paid were ‘at Widdowsons’ (The Red Hart, Ruddington) and ‘at Langfords’ (The Coach and Horses, Clifton). The only separate account items for expenditure on ale (and his father’s alehouse tally sheet) occur in the later diaries and suggest that by now, he was buying in ale for home consumption.54 Perhaps he usually ate whilst drinking, and was less liable to inebriation than those who did it on an empty stomach. But we really cannot tell. His apparent moderation in drink is part of the writerly persona created in the journals: sitting over a modest pint he watches, a half-participant observer, noting the drinking habits of those around him. During Clifton feast in 1805 he watched Thomas Winfield of Ruddington drinking in the Coach and Horses. ‘There was a sagroon55 of a felow Comes from nobody knows were and he was drinking with Winfield and they was both drunk for Winfield had been there all night and had drank verey hard and thomas morley was in the house were they was and he put some words out that did not please them and they fell out and he would fite that fellow that was the duke of blusters and how it was that they did not fite I dont know but winfield Struck morley and nocked him down and made him a verey bad face and So the fray Ended and all three blackgards went home before dinner and then the rest of the Compney was verey quiat and that was all the falling out that I saw.’ He clearly went outside to watch incoherent quarrels settled by some very dirty fighting, but in his text, he remains on the sidelines. The ethnographer of Clifton ‘deep play’ does not report on himself. At the end of his 1972 account of the social meaning and symbolic function of Balinese cockfighting (what is involved in men watching ‘a chicken hacking another mindlessly to bits’) Clifford Geertz concluded that ‘its function, if you want to call it that, is interpretive: it is a Balinese reading of Balinese experience; a story they tell themselves about themselves’.56 The story is about violence: ‘the cockfight is the Balinese reflection on theirs: on its look, its uses, its force, its fascination’. It binds those who watch ‘into a set of rules which at once contains them and allows them play’. Thus is built a symbolic structure in which the reality of their experience (of being Balinese men) can be felt and known. The anthropologist on this occasion – though deeply

54

55

56

NA, DD 311/4, 7 Oct 1809, 311/6, 7 Dec 1815. In 1809 he ‘paid at crofts one shilling that my father run in debt for ale when he fetched John Langfords frame about a year and a alf before the above date’. DD/ 311/4, 5 Aug 1809. I have not been able to trace this word. I want it to mean poltroon (blustering, cowardly fool), which is pretty close to what Woolley called the stranger a few lines later: a ‘duke of blusters’. NA, DD 311/3, 27 Sep 1805. Clifford Geertz, ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight’, Daedalus, 110 (1972), pp. 11–37; also in The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York, 1973. Reprinted in Daedulus, 134 (2005), pp. 56–86.

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immersed in 1950s Balinese culture – was an outsider, watching men watching two birds killing each other, and then writing up an interpretation of what he had witnessed. Geertz informs us in detail of the language (the imagery, the metaphors) with which Balinese men talked about their fighting birds and the body part they so clearly stand in for. But we do not know what form of language a Balinese participant observer (or indeed, cock fighter) would have chosen to write about the cockfight, nor whether a written description by a native participant might use a different narrative form and structure in – say – 2008 compared with 1958. When Woolley tells multiple stories about men and women drinking and fighting – his reflection on his own culture – we could think that his style of writing gets in the way of some fairly direct access to two men slugging it out in a pub yard in south Nottinghamshire in 1803 (some fairly direct access to plebeian masculinity, or to the normality of violence, or to the culture of drink). Or we can take Woolley’s literary style, his authorial stance, his carefully introduced ironies, as part of the evidence of these phenomena. And because he wrote about drinking and fighting more than once, we can add time and change to the structured deep-play he reported, noting that by 1815 his field notes were written up in a more sober manner. This may be to do no more than suggest that Woolley had grown older; or it may be that by reading his evasive, allusive ‘selfhood and subjective experience of being male’ the history of masculinity can continue to be reworked.57 And so too can its historiography be reworked – for as non-participant observers, historians have used wildly divergent methodologies in disinterring masculine behaviour and subjectivity in the past. Hannah Barker has observed differences between historians of the early modern period and the nineteenth century in their accounts of masculinity. Investigating the eighteenth-century, assumptions about the importance of culture have led to a focus on elite men operating in the public sphere, whilst ‘histories of the sixteenth, seventeenth and nineteenth centuries have emphasized the importance of the household and religion in their descriptions of manliness, manhood and masculinity’.58 Joseph Woolley’s testimony on drinking and fighting concerns a plebeian social sphere that was his own. It is important inside evidence from a culture which for the main part, we know from the observations of outsiders.59 There were statutes on the books (dating from the reign of James I) which allowed a magistrate to proceed on a report of drunkenness.

57 58 59

Hannah Barker, ‘Soul, Purse and Family: Middling and Lower-Class Masculinity in Eighteenth-Century Manchester’, Social History, 33:1 (2008), pp. 12–35. Barker, ‘Soul, Purse and Family’, p. 12. Anna Clarke, The Struggle for the Britches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1995, pp. 25–41.

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Handbooks to the law told magistrates about their powers in this regard, emphasising the important principle that ‘drunkenness excuseth no crime, but he who is guilty of any crime whatever, through his voluntary drunkenness, shall be punished as much as if he had been sober’.60 But drunkenness per se was never reported to magistrate Gervase Clifton. It was a factor in several stories told him; he was concerned to note degrees of inebriation and evidently some witnesses and deponents thought it important to tell him how little they had drunk, as in May 1804, when he heard the complaint of a farm labourer concerning an incident in Sutton Bonnington. The man lodged in Nottingham during the week and went home to his family, over the county border in Leicestershire, every Saturday night. The previous Saturday he had left work as usual, calling ‘at a publick house known by the Starr or Pitt house in the parish of Sutton Bonnington . . . [for a] cup of Ale’. After drinking up he went to the door to get a good look at a horse that took his fancy. Standing there ‘he was grossly abused by one William Mills alehouskeeper of West Leek . . . who knocked him down broke his head kicked and otherwise much abused him the said William Freeman and said Dam him I will kill him’. There were witnesses here to both men’s behaviour; what Clifton was bound to be concerned with was the assault on Freeman, and the threats made by Mills.61 Drink was incidental to the account. But Woolley’s diaries were about drink and drunkenness and thus provide a rare insight into what we have come to call a culture of violence.62 Woolley was not always an observer; on occasion he was involved in the kind of behaviour he described (perhaps many more times than he wrote of it), and drink was implicated, if not overtly stated. In August 1804 he remembered back to the spring, when a new master arrived at the free school at Grimston (‘and the Sallery is about thirty pounds a year and I think . . . that he is but young for such a place but he is a good Scoller and Steddy So I think he may do very well’).63 He had 60

61 62 63

Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer . . . The Twelfth Edition, in Four Volumes, T. Cadell, London, 1772, vol I, p. 39 (‘Alehouses’). Also, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer. By Richard Burn, LL. D. Late Chancellor of the Diocese of Carlisle. Continued to the Present Time by John Burn, Esq. his Son, one of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. The Eighteenth Edition: Including the Statutes of the Last Session of Parliament (32 Geo. III) . . . In Four Volumes, T. Cadell, London, 1793, vol. I, pp. 45–7. This was ancient legislation, very little used in the eighteenth century. NA, M8050, 28 May 1804. Stuart Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in a Historical Perspective, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007. Forty years on, William White, The History, Gazetteer and Directory of Leicestershire and Rutland, for the author, Sheffield, 1846, described the Grimston school as ‘teaching a few poor children’; it was supported by subscription and charitable donation. The master had £2 10s a year from a local charity.

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arrived in neighbouring Old Dalby bringing ‘some young man along with him’. Why was Woolley there? Grimston and Old Dalby are in Leicestershire, about twelve miles south east of Clifton close by the Nottingham Road to Melton Mowbray. Woolley spent June and July attending village feasts along the Nottinghamshire–Leicestershire border, looking at a heifer that his father had his eye on along the way. He must have already made William Stoner’s acquaintance when in late June, he and a friend from Widmerpool called on the schoolmaster and ‘he went with us to the publick house’. Then at night, ‘him and is Companion and tom Woodford and me and some more of his aquintance went to the ale house to Gathere and a fine row we had for they would sing baudy songs and turner the Landlord would not Let us and would not fill us aney more ale So we set Swaring and singing all the bawdy songs as we Could think on and then we broak all the Glasses about the house but one as they told me at the ale house the next day So when we had made them as mad as we Could and done all the mischeef we Could think on we paid our Shot and went and they were Glad they Got shut of us So for they were so afraid of us that they sent for too men out of the town to be in reddiness if we Should begin to a buse them but there was no fear so Long as they kep their hands of off us we paid for our ale but we paid for nothing that we broak and indeed they never asked us for anything they were so Glad to Git shut of us at aney rate’.64 Woolley’s involvement in ale-house trashing and his authorial position on it here may have had something to do with being away from home. Indeed he was so far from his manor as to be literally in another county. All of the drinkers were relative strangers in town. He justified his companions’ behaviour (‘we paid our Shot . . . no fear [of abuse] so Long as they kep their hands of off us’). He did not write up this incident from his usual perspective on a known world in which his own position was taken for granted. This was the only description of drunken disorder in which he noted the effect on others: he attributes both fear and relief at seeing the back of them to the landlord and his wife. He noticed things that he did not need to notice at home. He was both observer and observed. The implications of literal and psychological distance here were a clearer picture of himself – at least for those who read him at a distance of two hundred years.65 But he often hung back: ‘I did not stay’; ‘I was invited to it but did not Go’; ‘I would not have aney thing to doe with them’; ‘they asked 64 65

NA, DD 311/3, 29 Jun 1804. Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Killing a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’, Critical Inquiry, 21:1 (1994), pp. 46–60.

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me to Eat . . . but I would not’.66 In September 1805 his absence from a Feast Friday dinner at the Coach and Horses was noted. ‘Several young people mad a proposal to dine and drink with the fiddler as it is a Custom for the fiddler to Spend five shillings that day it being reckoned the Last day of the feast and they was all there but one that is Joseph Woolley and I having misst dineing the day before they thaught . . . it was so bad a Sercum Stance that I should be abstand too days to Gether at such a time.’ They borrowed a bell from the landlord and gave an old man from Barton a tankard of ale to cry Woolley through the town. There was pleasure in his recounting: the crier ‘Came down to the Cross hill and rung the bell a Considerable time and then he began is oration as followes O yes o yes o yes this is to Give notis there as absented himself from dinner these Last too days from the sign of the Coach and horses a stout young man in a Gray Coat who Ever Can give information where he may be found shall be well rewarded for their trouble’. Dissatisfied with his page layout, he wrote the cry out twice – though that was later on. Soon after hearing the oration he followed the crier down the town ‘and Some fine fun we had it was about 2 oclock when I got up there and I staid till nine’. Some of his enjoyment was to do with the fact that in seven hours he ‘onley spent Eight pence while a maney of them Gambled and Lost a Good deal besides paying the Crye and me drinking out of their misfortun So I will Leave aney bodey to Judge who were the bigest fools’.67 This was the only occasion reported in the six volumes of his diaries on which he said he had fun (though he clearly had a lot), and it was partly to do with thinking his companions to be idiots.68 And it is also the only time he comes into view, as a ‘Stout broad set yount man’, in the scored-out transcription of the cry.69 He described his feelings on many occasions, had a vocabulary for emotion, knew his own mind (and his own resentments and loathing, above all in the case of his dead brother’s wife); but this solitary view of his physical person was through the window of other people’s words.

66 67 68 69

NA, DD 311/2, May 1803; DD 113/3, Feb, May, Sep 1804. These last three invitations were turned down in the family-crisis year of 1804. NA DD 311/3, 27 Sep 1805. (This is recorded in the 1804 volume.) For George Hoe’s fun at Nottingham Goose Fair, see Chapters 5 and 6. ‘Stout’ as in well-set up, strong, with staying power. There are connotations of physical bravery, but probably not of corpulence, though Woolley certainly wasn’t thin and scrawny either. He was ‘broad set’. His friends knew him by his grey coat, but what, if any, were the connotations of a grey coat in 1805, I do not know, though the colour marks it as unusual. Working men’s coats were ‘predominantly made from woolen cloth, with various shades of brown the most common colour, followed by blue and then green’, remarks John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in EighteenthCentury England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, p. 39. Woolley had paid 5½d for the coat to be mended in 1803. NA, DD 311/2, 26 Feb 1803.

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Here’s Shamelessness for you! Sure the World must be near at an End! for all Gentlemen about are as bad as he almost, as far as I can hear! – And see the Fruits of such bad Examples! There is Squire Martin in the Grove, has had three Lyings-in, it seems, in his House, in three Months past; one by himself; and one by his Coachman; and one by his Woodman, and yet he has turned none of them away. Indeed, how can he, when they but follow his own vile Example? Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1792), Letter XXVII.

Literary critics and cultural theorists have taught us to read Samuel Richardson’s novels as historical artifacts – as things wrought out of ideologies and beliefs experienced in historical time. In Pamela, a very young woman of the poorer sort comments on the sexual behaviour of her betters. The assault on her person and psyche by landowner, master, magistrate, and gentleman Mr B. epitomises social power expressed as sexual power. Many other relationships of inordinate sexual and social inequality are detailed throughout four volumes of fictional letters. It has been said that sex and sexuality and how various characters behave towards each other sexually, provide the medium through which class conflict is conducted in this novel.1 There are suggestions that its dramatisation of sexual power as social power was one factor in the resonance of the Pamela-story for many ‘low’ eighteenth-century audiences. The way in which it became a kind of social text, known by those who never read the four volumes, or even one volume, of the novel Richardson authored, cannot be entirely explained by its translation into multiple media over the century following its first publication.2 Radical readers of the twentieth century designated Richardson a feminist for the analysis he had his character make of what would later be called the sexual double standard: ‘Those things don’t disgrace Men, 1 2

Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson, Blackwell, Oxford, 1982. See Chapter 2, n. 40.

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that ruin poor Women, as the World goes’, says Pamela very early on in the first volume.3 But Pamela and her author in role as twentieth-century feminists may have disappointed – just a little – for immediately after she has told her parents about the goings-on at the Grove (as in the epigraph to this chapter) she exclaims ‘But, dear Father and Mother, what Sort of Creature must the Womenkind be, do you think, to give way to such Wickedness . . . alack-a-day! what a World we live in! for it is grown more a Wonder that the Men are resisted, than that the Women comply.’4 Once you start reading a character as a form of political analysis, subtleties of characterisation must fly out of the window. Pamela’s inconsistency here is the epitome of her story and herself: by refusing to be seduced by ‘such Wickedness’, by her many acts of verbal and bodily resistance, she becomes Mr B.’s wife, in the most perfect demonstration of her difference from the troop of unwed mothers at the Grove. We are never very likely to discover what Pamela meant to ordinary readers in the past; but in Joseph Woolley there is one plebeian man who read the novel – at least, he paid good money to borrow it – and who left a detailed account of sexual behaviour in his community. Moreover, like Pamela, he observed the behaviour of high as well as low: he wrote about goings-on at Clifton Hall as well as the turbulent sexual life of his neighbours. He was keenly aware of the legal factors governing the sexual attitudes and behaviour he described. The old poor law, the common law, and church law were the structuring devices of the sexual stories he told. Sir Gervase Clifton behaved like the fictional ‘Squire Martin’ in one respect, though he did not, as far as we know, impregnate the plebeian woman he took up with after his wife’s death. In 1804 Woolley reported that ‘Sir Gerveses Lady or other wis his hore Came to see him and they went by Langfords’. They presumably dropped in at the Coach and Horses after viewing the improvements to St Mary’s church funded by provision of the former rector’s will. The job was finished and the contractors (‘undertakers’) were treating their workmen to dinner; as Woolley said ‘they had a Good Job and at the Conclusion they treated their men as hansomly’.5 He had the back-story on the woman and named his sources: ‘Is Lady is the daughter of poor parents but a very fine woman I am very Credditable informed that She is the daughter of a man that Came with Six oxen that Sir Gerves bought in Summersetshire 3 4 5

Richardson, Pamela (1792), vol. I, p. 44 (Letter XIX). Richardson, Pamela (1792), Vol. I, p. 85 (Letter XXVII). Woolley heard of – or overheard – Sir Gervase telling his companion that she would see a fine spectacle of low-life drunkenness (what are they like?): ‘he told hir that they would Git as drunk as blaggers but he was mistaken for there was not one man drunk’. NA, DD 311/3, 24 Aug 1804. For blaggers and blackguards, see above, p. 87, n. 24.

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these Severel years a Go . . . and this man Came to drive them he went by the name of old bath but what is real name was I don’t know . . . I am told that this man was Sartenly the father to the Lady above for a inkeeper told it to mr Langford when he was at bath and Thomas [Langford’s son] told it to me and said that he thaught that it was So for the man Cold tell him all the perticerlars about it and hir parents and it maybe so.’6 It was a different case with the sexual activity of Sir Gervase’s servants. In January 1813 Woolley reported that ‘Henerey Allin arived at Clifton from London he was turned away from is place for Being too free with the Cooke or as people say he was Caut with hir in such a place as was no Credit to them it had Been sospected that they was more kind to Each other than they aught to bee before they left Clifton but they was not Caught till they was in London and then Sir Ger Gave poor harey a Bill of shifts’.7 Woolley did not comment (in the manner of Pamela) on the way in which having a mistress did not disgrace a baronet, in the way it did poor Harry (the two entries are, anyway, ten years apart). But he made a much more considered assessment of the dismissal of another servant – of the Reverend William Clifton this time – for sexual misconduct. At the end of 1805 he described how ‘George booth Servant to parson Clifton was taken for a bastard Child Sworn to him by Eleizabeth barns She Lived sarvant with him at the old parsons’. He described at length the apprehension of George and the high-handed behaviour of the Rector: ‘the old parson Came home from Shooting as Soon as he Got off from is horse . . . ordered him to strip is Cloaths of . . . [George] had not aney of is own to put on’. The long and short of it was that ‘he was Cummitted to prison he Could find no Security and there he Lay till the Epepney quarter Sessions and then they had him before the bench of Justices but he had Got no securety and he was ordered back to prison again’.8 6

7 8

‘[T]hey was for draught oxen’, said Woolley. This team of plough animals was famous. They were noted in reports on Nottinghamshire agriculture in the 1790s by Griggs of Kelvedon, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Nottingham, with Observations on the Means of Its Improvement. By Robert Lowe, Esq. Drawn Up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, C. Clarke, London, 1794, and by Robert Lowe, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Nottingham, with Observations on the Means of its Improvement. Drawn Up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, G. Nicol, London, 1798, p. 131, though said here to have originated in Devon. Perhaps Clifton’s relationship with his Lady was of long standing. Clifton’s wife Frances Egerton Lloyd died in 1779. NA, DR 1/5/40/141, Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton, ‘Gervas Son of Sir Gervas Clifton & of Dame Frances his Wife Bur 10 Aug 1779’; ‘Dame Frances Clifton wife of Sir Gervas Clifton Bart Bur Sept 17 1779’. NA, DD 311/5, 8 Jan 1813. NA, DD 311/3, 27 Dec 1805. NA, QSM 1/35, Quarter Sessions Minute Books, Mids. 1803–Epiph.1809; Epiphany Sessions 13 Jan 1806.

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‘As for old betty’, he ruminated, ‘She was turned a way and the parish put hir to marey and William hardy and they alow hir a shilling a week to pay hir house room and Lodging with and She is to Earn hir Living by Spinning for the parish’. He thought about her life, as he thought about that of the baronet’s whore, the difference between the stories being that he knew old Betty’s to be true: ‘She is so deaf that you can scarsely make hir hear but he [George Booth] made hir understand and he said that hir breth stunk so that he was forst to Lie Crossways for fear of being posined or suffecated with the Smell of it so he had stinking meat and Sower Jaws to it.’ Another Clifton man had been so relieved that Betty did not lay the child to him that when he heard of George’s misfortune ‘he Got verey drunk and Like Something out of its wits he took the Constable by the Collor and pulled him about the room and played a Great maney moor anticks that Shewed is Joy at missing the bargen’. And this was Betty’s latest in a series of mishaps: ‘it is the third Child that She as been with Child of and old Gerves aram Said that wen she Lived with mr marting he Cold have ridden [her] aney time when he had a mind and if that be true wich I believe it is it is no wonder that . . . aney other did as had a mind’. He contemplated local attitudes to her: ‘Everey body almost Culls the poor old Creatuer all the ill names that males Can in vent but if She is deaf and as a Stinking breath then [they] should not take the pleasure of playing with hir meregold . . . as Long as She Can Git Customers She will Let the ill natured world say what they will of hir.’ He did not call Elizabeth Barnes ‘whore’ as he did so many other women, notably his sister-in-law Rose, and Sir Gervase’s mistress. There was deep hurt and a sense of betrayal in his account of Sam Boyer’s association with his dead brother’s wife, whilst Sir Gervase’s mistress was a whore ‘but a very fine woman’. Sometimes ‘whore’ was the only descriptor he used, so it is difficult to read attitude out of it, as in 1801 when ‘mrs parker Caught hir husband with that old hore nan hallam about Eleven o’clock at night’.9 Sometimes he merely reported the language of others, as when in 1803 ‘there was a man of nottingham found in bed with mr quintons wench marey ketley and a fine dust [up] there was about it She swore that he would Go and She Could not help it and old dolley swore she was the biger hore for it’.10 ‘Whore’ sometimes 9 10

NA, DD 311/1, 19 Jun 1801. NA, DD 311/2, 26 Sep 1803. For Mary Ketley out on the town and on the pull, see below, p. 115. For ‘whore’ and related insults fifty years before, Tim Meldrum, ‘A Women’s Court in London: Defamation at the Bishop of London’s Consistory Court, 1700–1745’, London Journal, 19 (1994), pp. 1–20. Also Sharon Howard, ‘Gender and Defamation in York, 1661–1700: Reputation, Authority and the Power of Words’, MA dissertation, University of York, 1998.

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had the same meaning as ‘rogue’. He wrote about a man whose lying and cheating reached its apogee with ‘having is brother in Law Sold up . . . he must be an arant roague to take is own brother in in that manner . . . I believe and is whife is as big a hore as he is a rogue for She as Left him and Gone to Live with a nother man . . . She of this man Coming aqainted with hir [when] He worked as Jureney man with . . . hir husband’.11 We could say that ‘whore’ was one of Woolley’s shifting signifiers; or read the word as confirmation of contemporary legal anthropology written up in the handbooks for magistrates in their advice about language-use in low-life – the way in which ‘the common people are wont to call one another knaves, and rogues, and whores’.12 Given the shifting meaning of ‘Whore’ between Rose Woolley and Gervase Clifton’s ‘fine woman’ and its absence in regard to poor Elizabeth Barnes – indeed his empathetic account of her sexual transactions as part of an economy of everyday life – we could say that ‘whore’ was reserved for women whose sexual activity involved some kind of betrayal or – closer to Woolley’s vocabulary – ‘roguery’. He was interested in the sexual activity of others and the variety of good stories that could be told about it. The tedium of the sexual life-cycle – birth (in wedlock and outwith), marriage, churching, the baptism of legitimate and illegitimate children – structures the diaries. He wrote – in some semi-official capacity – for the completion of the church records by his father. Those entries were the baseline of his writing. From it arose the baroque of outrageous sexual behaviour and illicit sexual activity. He told the stories well, from a particular narrative point of view and often with a concluding flourish. In 1805 he outlined the character of a right me lad: ‘Some time this summer richard henson that Lived sarvant at Lamberts . . . had a Child Swore to him by a Girl that Lived [there] . . . in 1804 and he Came over and made it up with the parish for 27 pounds to be paid at four installments it was settled august 14 1805 . . . he was a verey Conseted [conceited] fool of a fellow for swagering how he Culd Go to such and such wenches and doe as he pleas with then when he had a mind and made a fine doeing of it at Last for . . . he . . . as 27 pounds to pay for doing as he had a mind so if one was plaster the other was paint . . . if he had Sweet meat for a wile he 11 12

NA, DD 311/3, Jan 1804. Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer . . . The Twelfth Edition, in Four Volumes, T. Cadell, London, 1772, vol. IV, pp. 183–4. For women’s language of insult taken into the early modern London courts, Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the Language of Insult in Early Modern London’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), pp. 1–21. Also Domestic Dangers. Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 59–110.

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Cold have some Sause to it for a Long while’.13 He was concerned with dates, for they often provided the punch-line of a story: ‘feb the 8 John parker was maried and on the 5 march he had a Sone born So he or hir had Look pretty Sharp about them’; ‘December the 9 or 10 marey rue whife of William rue was delivered of a daughter they was maried about the 12 or the 14 of Sept So She was very quick at breeding’.14 He did not mention that his sister Mary was about three months pregnant when she married John Mann in 1803.15 He recorded many knobstick weddings – marriages required of couples under the old poor law where the woman was pregnant and had sworn the name of the father before a magistrate.16 These forced wedding ceremonies were part of the annals, or official records of Clifton. But Woolley also wrote at the centre of a network of sexual information that extended beyond Clifton parish boundaries. In August 1801 ‘Samuel hardy was seen upon ails [Alice] preesley in the walk as they was Coming home from the races . . . about twenty yards on the side of that gate that Comes out of mr Lamberts Close behint a tree he might have been pulled of very Easy but those that Saw him thought it best to Let him a Lone’;17 a man ‘married at barton the woman . . . was with Child by him and it is Said that he was first to have her but how that is I do not know’; ‘thomas powderill was maried to marey mattley of Gotham she as sweethearted him a Long time and they Say it was a forse put at Last’; a Ruddington man married his housekeeper and Woolley noted that ‘he had one wife before and had some Children by hir’.18 All these incidents (and many more) were reported in the first diary. He started as he meant to go on: in 1804 all Mr Butler’s harvesters ‘had a very mery harvest supper they plaid till one oclock in the morning and John francis went home with John oldhams wench Elizabeth eaton 13 14 15

16

17

18

NA, DD 311/3, Aug 1805 (1805 entries in 1804 diary). NA, DD 311/2, Feb 1803; 311/3, Dec 1804. NA, DR 1/5/40/165, Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton, ‘John Mann & Mary Wooley Marr May 3 1803 by Banns’; ‘Samuel Son of John & Mary Mann Bap Nov 11 1803’. DD 311/2, 3 May 1803 for Woolley’s account of the wedding; he gives a different date for the baptism of baby Samuel: ‘nov the 18 Samuel son of John and marey man baptized’. On 27 November he noted that ‘John mann had his sone Cristned by the revd John Evens of nottingham he Churched hir marey mann after Sarves in the vestery’. He was an unreliable narrator of little Samuel’s birth. J. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Life and Labour under the Squirearchy [1932], Frank Cass, London, 1966, p. 291 for ‘the “knobstick wedding” as it was called in Nottinghamshire’; but the phrase was in common use across the country. Robert P. Maccubbin, ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality during the Enlightenment, Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge, 1985, p. 38. This was probably in The Grove, a formal walk (and lovers’ alley) between Wilford and Clifton, celebrated in early nineteenth-century poetry and song. See The Stranger’s Guide through the Town of Nottingham, Sutton and Son, Nottingham, 1827, pp. 81–2. NA, DD 311/1, 10 Aug, 6 and 20 Jul, 1 Sep 1801 (two entries).

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and I staid till between four or five oclock in the morning’. Round about the same time, at ‘the begining of September there was a report that hopwells head wench went to bed to this man harvey or henery wich you pleas’.19 He was still chronicling the sexual life of the district in 1815: ‘In April Marey Hallam Daughter of Edward Hallam of Glapton was Married to James Gunn and after they had Been Married too or three days he had a Child Swore to him by a woman that he had followed for three years as the tale Goes a pritty Good fellow to have 2 with Child at one time for acording to what people say his whife was Big with Child when they were married.’ In November this year he – unusually – divulged the source of his information about ‘Henerey Garton and Ann Bates . . . Married at Clifton Church and a deal of Companey there was at the wedding But . . . it was Little Better than a Knobstick wedding for According to hir mothers Repoart she was Big with Child she had kept hir at home all the year or there abouts for him to Run att so it is no wonder she was with Child and he had better been hanged than Ever have known hir but married they are . . . ’. (So the World – and the story – goes.)20 He observed many unhappy marriages. He predicted sad and frustrating partnerships when noting shotgun weddings, or couples involuntarily married on the eve of their child’s birth; he thought that Henry Garton would be better off dead than yoked to Ann Bates (and her mother). But the domestic violence and sexual abuse he chronicled was written after the event, with Woolley as some kind of witness. His attitude is easier to discern when he writes in the past tense. In 1801 there was ‘a Sore despute betwen William barker and his wife’. Woolley described the night of 19 June twice, on the same opening of the notebook, so in passages written very close in time. ‘June the 19 mrs barker Caught hir husband with that old hore nan hallam about Eleven o’clock at night and a strange uproar they made about it for he locked hir and hir daughter mary hout all night and they Staid at mr butlers all night he charged the Gunn and Swore he would shoot any person that Came ny his daughter whent home in the morning and his Whife to hir busness and he Soarely abused hir for it and his daughter he ran round the yard with a Stick I[n] his hand and Swore he would kill hir how the matter Whent any further I canot tell at presson’. Soon he had more detail: ‘his Wife

19

20

DD 311/3, 28 Aug 1804. Woolley worked this harvest and others across the parish: ‘the 30 august barker Got all in we had a very merry harvest supper and we kept it hup till six oclock the next morning wee began to play at Cards about too oclock and played till that time [what] makes me say we [is that] I helped him’. NA, DD 311/6, Apr, 27 Nov 1815.

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[had] Watched him go thro the barn next to the house that the old Slut Lives in . . . he pretended that he went to Sit with neighbours’. Confronted, Barker ‘abused his own wife Shamefully and would have beat hir if the neighbours had not interposed he would not Let his wife Monday Sleep in the house that night . . . his wife Called out murder and his daughter Called him an old toad but I think She miss Called him for she Should have Called him an old . . . Scoundrill and a Shame full fellow’.21 In 1801 the 19th June fell on a Friday, so Woolley described a weekend of family altercation and violence, with further threats made to the mother and daughter on Monday. He also indicated some kind of local support for the abused mother and daughter, and certainly his own. The violent anger of frustrated and thwarted men erupts into the text: ‘alsop and his whife had some diferance and She would Leave him and she took hir bed up to hir mother Leesons and some of hir boxes and She took Sheets that he thought She had no business with and he followed hir up from his house and took the bill[hook] in his hand and Choped some of hir boxes open and threw hir things about and took the Sheets and then went and Listed into the armey of resarve and it Cost the town about forty five Shillings to Git him of again’.22 The Alsops had another altercation at harvest time, 1804. Woolley thought that Mrs Alsop resented her husband’s attention to another man’s wife: ‘Some time this harvest alsops whife was Jellous of Letherlands whife and Called him and hir all that she Cold think on when he was Shearin in mr thorps barn close Some of the shearers Gave Letherlands whife a horn of ale and when she had drank it She gave the horn to alsop and is whife saw hir Give it to him and She began to Call her all she Cold Lay hir tongue to or think on’. Domestic tensions were exacerbated when married couples worked together. ‘About the Same time bet brown whife to thomas brown was Jellous of hopwells wench,’ reported Woolley. ‘She Came to hopwells and Called the wench all to pieces about it.’ Woolley thought that if Tom had a mind to the girl he might be successful, and she would not put out for anyone else. ‘[A]s for poor alsop and Lethelands whife’, Woolley concluded ‘I think they are quiet Inosent for they have as much as they want’ [at home?].23

21

22 23

NA, DD 311/1, 19 Jun 1801. For community attitudes to men’s domestic violence, Anna Clarke, The Struggle for the Britches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1995, pp. 25–41, 63–88; also Joanne McEwan, ‘Attitudes towards Male Authority and Domestic Violence in Eighteenth-Century London Courts’, in Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent (eds.), Governing Masculinities in the Early Modern Period: Regulating Selves and Others, Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 247–62. NA, DD 311/2, Sep 1803. The passage breaks off here, half way through the last line of a full page of writing.

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In October a wife’s fury at her husband’s attention to other women provoked extreme domestic violence. It started at Nottingham Goose Fair, at George and Dolly Hoe’s cheese stall. After a day of frustratingly slow sales, Doll sent her husband home to Clifton to do the milking whilst she stayed on. Taking a break herself, she found him down at Daykin’s gingerbread stall treating a little crowd of Clifton women to plum pudding; ‘she called him all to peces and them an all and all the way home’. There her husband knocked ‘hir down in the floor and beat hir well and made hir too black Eyes and abused hir in So bad a manor that She Lay by about a fortnite before she was able to doe aney thing’. Reports of the incident reached Clifton Hall: ‘Sir Ger Clifton Got a hearing of it and Swore George about it and told him nobody beat their whives but tailors’. Man to man, he called Hoe ‘a marey old rogue and rascal for beating[?] his Whife in such a manner and Georg to Excuse him Self said that he only did it for a bit of funn but the other Said that if he had a mind to have had a bit of funn with the wimmen he need not have beaten is whife in to the bargean’: it made him look ‘Like a Coward’. The magistrate managed extreme violence in everyday life by the denigration of tailors (weak and unmanly men) and the cross-class knock-about comedy of marital relations, shared by Clifton, Hoe, and Woolley. And yet Sir Gervase did send for George, did intervene, according to Woolley.24 (None of this is in Clifton’s notebooks.) Woolley believed that Hoe ‘cold not stop is wifes tongue without a good hiding beat and I believe he did not start it’. ‘George bares it with patience’, he concluded. He sounds urbanely amused about a very nasty incident; but he was, in fact, transliterating Tom Jones. He ‘bore it all patiently’, remarked Henry Fielding of a character castigated by the local magistrate for wife beating. ‘None but a coward ever struck a woman’, Mr Allworthy tells the man (who hasn’t in fact, hit his wife).25 In Woolley’s account, many women caught up in domestic and sexual conflict gave as good as they got, or at least, did what they could by way of retaliation. Some time in February 1813 Sall Holt was out on the town and on the pull. At the alehouse someone ‘happened to ask hir if she had Ever a hole in hir old hat which Caused a deal of Obsence [Obscenity] from hir’. She retorted that ‘she had a bigger [one] than he Could stop or aney man in the town’. According to Woolley she spent the next 24

25

NA, DD 311/3, 2 Oct 1804. E. Willoughby, The Nottingham Directory, Containing the Name, Profession, and Residence of Every Principal Inhabitant, C. Sutton for the Author, Nottingham, 1799 for the October fair ‘commonly called Goose Fair’. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. By Henry Fielding, Esq. In Three Volumes, T. Longman, B. Law & Son and 14 others, London, 1792, vol. I, Book II, Chapter 4.

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few days claiming physical as well as verbal abuse from the man who insulted her; said ‘that he had laid fast hold of hir and that she got away from him and [he] pulled hir Cap of and threw it upon . . . [a] hedge and then knocked hir down and said that he wanted to be naught[y?] with hir’. She told everyone who would listen ‘that she would have striped hirself to fite him but he dare not fite hir’. Woolley thought that it was all because ‘he would not be naught[y] with hir as she pleased to call it and she raised a great maney more lies about him’. She said that he told her that he had in fact ridden her from ‘pillar to poast till he was tired and he wanted some fresh’. By ‘fresh’, Sall ‘ment the searvant girl that lives along with him at Shaws’. When the girl got to hear of this it made her so ‘mad almost she roared and called poor tom all to pieces about it and tom declared that he had never said any such thing’. So down to the Holts together they went to sort things out, but found Sall not at home. ‘Tom spoak not so plesand to the old woman who answered the door, ‘so she dashed a sliping [skein] of yarn in is face and he dashed it in hir face again and gave hir a black Eye with it and the next day [a Saturday] she and Sall set of to Nottingham for a warant’, demonstrating perhaps, women’s greater willingness to take disputes like this to law. Tom ‘wished to have made it up and not Gone before the Jurtices’. Woolley surmised that ‘they thaught to have Got a deal of money out of him’. But Sall’s ‘Caracter appeared so bold’ to the magistrates and ‘then they Caut the old woman in so maney lies that they would not believe aney thing she said So they ordered tom to pay five shillings for the Expences and so it Ended’. The old woman had thought to get a new gown out of the incident, but she was disappointed; to save face she said ‘they did not whant to hurt him but onley to humble him’.26 Women fight men and other women throughout the six volumes. A decline of public violence is said to have taken place during the long English eighteenth century – between men, and metropolitan men at that.27 Decline has been measured for the main part by the criminal records and the incidence of homicide. Woolley’s evidence is of a very different kind, of highly formalised violent public exchanges between men and men, and women and women. Women were the private victims of male violence – except that Woolley (and indeed on one occasion, Gervase Clifton) knew the stories that came from behind closed doors.

26 27

NA, DD 311/5, Feb 1813. Robert Shoemaker, ‘Male Honour and the Decline of Public Violence in EighteenthCentury London’, Social History, 26:2 (2001), pp. 190–208; p. 191 and notes; John Tosh, ‘Masculinities in an Industrialising Society’, Journal of British Studies, 44:2 (2005), pp. 330–42; p. 334.

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In Woolley’s account women were sometimes public protagonists of violence, against each other, and less frequently against their husbands and partners. Woolley laid many incidents he described to sexual jealousy, as in 1804 when ‘Some time the Latter End of august George Smith and is whife fell out she was Jellous of him and marey hardy being Greater than she thaught they should bee and as hardy was Going up the town one day Smiths whife told hir she had Got a verey fine Cap on and wished she Cold aford to were such fine Caps and they too had a fine falling out upon the head of it and when they had Called one anothe all the hors and bitche they Could Lay their tongues to they parted and smiths whife went into the house and began to Call him all that She Could think on and told him that he baught moll hardy that fine Cap and when they was inraged as much as possable at Each other they began to throw pots at Each other till they had broak almost all the pots about the house and then he ran a way to Go for a Solder but Shee and all the Chillderen that Could run after him as far as the drift Gate that Goes out of Lambards Close . . . Screeting and Inreating and beging of him to Come back again and if he would She promised how Good she would be and what with hir and what with the Chilldren squealing he turned again and has to buy more pots for their own folley.’28 There is a compelling and rather horrible satisfaction about these stories of sexual violence and jealous rage; they are riveting narratives because the reader (and I presume the listener in the ale house) is involved by knowing them already: they tell of the stark passions of everyday life. When Woolley does not attempt analysis or explanation, they become inexplicable fragments of some larger sexual myth. At first, as you read (or listen) there is no explanation for, no context to, the Monday night in October 1803 when ‘Charles odget wanted to frig thomas hardeys Whife but She would not Let him and so he haunted about the house in his Shirt till about four oclock the next morning with nothing but is shirt and shoes on’. Lust strikes the participants as it does the gods of classical antiquity; there are no motives for that which is.29 But Woolley usually did attempt narrative explanation. The everyday swims into focus in the very next line: ‘the reason he was so bold is whife staid all night at nottingham Goose fair so he could have is fling but he could not come on for she went and slept with bradley and his whife’. And there was always a backstory, as here, of earlier couplings and other reluctant partnerships. He explained who Thomas Hardy’s wife was: ‘it is 28 29

DD 311/3, Aug 1804. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 152–75.

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the woman that went by the name of Witlock and thomas hardy was forced to marey hir because he ad been Creeping in at the window’. Moreover ‘She had a man with hir when Charles wanted [to frig her] but they Coud not for watching one another and the fellow frettened to baste Charles and so it Ended.’30 Woolley appears to have enjoyed the loud and aggressive behaviour of women like Sall Holt, or at least to have found in it nothing objectionable. He was – perhaps – disgusted by very drunk women (and men) beshitting themselves when in their cups; but at the peace celebrations in Clifton in October 1801 he had a high old time with a lot of very inebriated women. There were festivities in Nottingham on the Sunday when the news arrived from London.31 Woolley stayed in Clifton where ‘[t]here was a collection made . . . and they got about £2 10s . . . or there abouts and they had a leg of Mutton and some beef at Langfords it served them all day of Monday October the 12 and Tuesday the 13’. He reported no riotous behaviour until Tuesday night when ‘the wimmen had a tea drinking at Langfords’ and much revelry, ‘for they had 14 doz of bread and plenty of tea and Everything necessary for their Entertainment’. The tea party did not last long, for they had ‘Gethered about £2 5 or 6 Shillings . . . to spend in ale and very mery they were for they dansed around the Candle Sticks and up and down the room Jumbling one among another Just as if they were all mad and some Sung some smoked and some Swore while others Lied [lay down]’. They played fiddle with the fire shovel and tongs, and then ‘to finis off all one pised in a sertin mans hat’, put it on his head ‘and the piss run down his hair upon is shoulders while hir husband pised on the fire 30 31

NA, DD 311/2, 3 Oct 1803. The Treaty of London, signed for preliminary peace between the First French Republic and Britain was announced by the London press on Saturday, 10 October 1801. ‘Ratification of the Preliminaries of Peace’, The Times, Saturday, 10 Oct 1801, p. 2. See also ‘Peace’ and ‘Postscript’, Nottingham Journal, 10 Oct 1801, ‘The Ratification of the Preliminary Articles of Peace’, Nottingham Journal 17 Oct 1801. Also Edward Baines, History of the Wars of the French Revolution, from the Breaking Out of the War in 1792 to the Restoration of a General Peace in 1815, in Two Volumes, Longman and five others, London, 1818, vol. I, pp. 361–2. ‘The news of the peace being Confirmed Came in [to Nottingham] on Sunday morning by the true britan Coach and the mail Coach brought it in in the after noon about 2 oclock’, reported Woolley. On ‘Oct the 12 there was a very Grand alumination at nottingham Such a one as hath not been in the last Sentuary there was . . . Scarse a window that had Either Loril or Some thing in it there was many Sheep roasted but how maney I have not Learnt yet Some say forty and Some fifty but I think not so many but there was a vast deal of beef and mutton Gave away at the ale houses and a Great quantity of ale almost at Every public house that was of aney acount’. NA, DD 311/1, 12 Oct 1801. ‘The True Britain Coach, White Lion Inn Nottingham to Belle Sauvage Inn, Ludgate Hill . . . everyday . . . Cheap Travelling’, Nottingham Journal, 5 Jul 1800.

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shovel and tongues . . . They were Good Company all the night Long till about 2 o’clock in the morning.’32 Woolley kept a running account of Sall Waldram’s turbulent sexual life and her relationship with Tom Barker, describing first how on New Year’s Day in 1803 she ‘and barker fell out at Langfords and he kicked hir over the Shins’. She used the resources of the law against Barker as did many Clifton women, asking a local magistrate (not Gervase Clifton) ‘for a warrant but his Clark would not Let hir see his mr So She went to see a Lawyer and Got a Lawyers Letter for him’. Then Woolley provided the context, remembering how ‘Some time about the Latter End of December or the beginning of Janewary barker went to Sall Waldram and pulled all out and Sall took hold of it with hir hapron but She said it was so Short she Could not get hold of it or she would have Led him about the house by it but for all it was so short he called himself the peacock of Clifton.’ Sall said that she’d turned him out of the house, ‘but that is a thing I canot believe’, said Woolley. He certainly had left about 11 o’clock at night and ‘went to the wittick womans house’ in Glapton.33 ‘There he stayed till about one or a Litle after,’ said Woolley; ‘I don’t wonder at him Going there for his old hack is worn out So he is obliged to keep the old Charter up and now he has fixed upon a very fine Spot in Gabble row or St Charleses Street and it is a pitty he should not be comfortable in is fresh situation for it is just in the hart of the town.’ It is not clear when Barker kicked Sall and when she kicked him out. They had different stories about their falling out: ‘She [says] because she would not let him stay that night and he says it was because he would not Stay but it is hard to say which we may believe for in my opingon they are one as bad as the other.’ A pair like them seldom ‘ever agrees Long together and so it was between them’.34 32 33

34

For ‘good company’ as sociability, Phil Withington, ‘Company and Sociability in Early Modern England’, Social History, 32:3 (2007), pp. 291–307. ‘april the 23 [1803] thomas hardy went to nottingham and Got fresh and Got into the trent at the boat and then he came to Langfords and Staid while twelve oclock and then he went down to Gabble row in Glapton and Called [on] a person whoes name is Called wittick but it is a Cant name and She Let him in’. NA, DD 311/2, Apr 1803. I have been unable to find the meaning of ‘wittick’; it was a not-uncommon Midlands surname, but here Woolley felt the need to explain that it was a cant word. In mythology studies the word has some connection with witchcraft. NA, DD 311/2, Jan 1803. In 1805 Sarah Waldram of Clifton with Glapton swore a child to a very young man, William Bradwell (he was so young that his father’s consent was needed for the marriage). Bradwell Sr initially refused saying that the parish should pay for the licence in the case of a knobstick wedding. But he soon gave in and the pair were married in Clifton two days after her swearing the child. DR/1/5/40/167, Bishops Transcripts Clifton with Glapton for 1805, ‘Sarah Waldram m. William Bradwell 12 Oct 1805’.

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Woolley was highly amusing (he certainly amused himself ) in describing the stratagems of young men seeking out sex. In August 1805 two from Clifton went to Nottingham Races. They ‘baught a List of the Spoarting Ladies and at night they agreed to Go and See too of them they were to meet at Such a place at such a time’.35 But Gervas Reckless met up with ‘an old Companion from mansfield . . . and went to Sneiton feast with him in Sted of meeting Thomas Langford’ as arranged. ‘Langford staid wating and havering about till verey Late at night and then was forst to come home by him Self Like a fool as he was . . . daming and Swareing because he was dispointed of is miss and Company too on the rode.’36 Undeterred, the lads were back the next day with a different strategy. Woolley saw them at the race ground arm in arm, flaunting themselves around, ‘Just Like Some people of vast Great property and . . . above Speaking to their betters So I Leve you to Gess if they would Spak to their infearers’. When they’d splendoured their way around the course (without being taken any notice of by anyone, Woolley drily noted) they rambled off to a public house, where ‘fop Like they strutted and splanded about to show themselves till the sober part of the Companey was quiet Sick to see them’. Then the fine ‘Jentlemen must Go to the play’.37 Bustling up to the gallery in fashionable disarray, ‘their hats Set in Stile’, waistcoats unbuttoned to show the neckerchiefs they ‘had stuck in their besoms to make them Look Like a fann tale pidgeon’, they appeared to have forgotten the sporting ladies, and even the strategy of attracting some misses by their display.38 After all, said Woolley they were just a ‘Stokenor and Cobbler’ and everyone knew it, despite the gloves ‘which they wore for fear people Should know their profession and for fear that the Ladies should be frited at their Coars bare hands’. The Boys (and Woolley) knew all about the fashion-clothes of the fop – that is the taken-for-granted of his commentary. More interesting is Woolley’s 35

36 37

38

Lists of prostitutes working the provincial race meetings were widely available from at least the middle of the eighteenth century. P. Howell, ‘Sex and the City of Bachelors. Sporting Guidebooks and Urban Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America’, Ecumene, 8:1 (2001), pp. 20–50. Nottingham Races ran from Tuesday 6 August to Thursday 8 August. Nottingham Journal, 27 Jul 1805. NA, DD 311/3, 6 and 7 Aug 1805. Section of 1804 notebook covering 1805. This was Thomas Morton’s The School of Reform, or, How to Rule a Husband: a Comedy, in Five Acts, as Perform’d at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden, Longman, London, 1805. See Chapter 2. Also playing was ‘a Whimsical Description of Town [&] Country by Mr Adcock. To which will be added a new Comic Pantomic Ballet called Hurry Scurry: or the Tailors’ Rumpus’. Performance commenced on the 6th August– ‘being the first Race Day’ – and lasted the week. Nottingham Journal, 5 Aug 1805. Their ludicrous appearance provoked Woolley’s only extended simile; the Boys looked like ‘a fann tale pidgeon When she sets or walks upon the Ground to be taken notes of by all who pas by who pleas to stand and Look at a fine spread tail’.

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thesis about fashion-consumption, masculinity, and what came to be called ‘respectability’. Reckless and Langford performed their pretensions to gentility, or gentlemanliness, by how they dressed and how they behaved; Woolley was highly amused by their failure to convince their audience that they were anything but a stockinger and a shoemaker.39 Some theatre-goers may have managed to watch The School of Reform, which promotes an elegant strategy for married women seeking ascendancy over their husbands: confound all expectations by just keeping quiet. It was playwright Thomas Morton’s great success, praised twenty years on and in the twenty-first century for its introduction of low-life language and psychology to the stage. A central character is the low-born criminal, Robert Tyke; he is one of its three Lost Boys restored to their rightful place. When William Hazlitt saw an 1820 performance with Tyke played by a specialist in rustic Yorkshiremen, he called the play ‘the sublime of tragedy in low life’.40 (Woolley too, wrote many of his marital tragedies in the comic mode.) ‘Hurry Scurry: or the Tailors’ Rumpus’, also staged that night, may have represented working-class mores to a (partly) workingclass audience, but we are never likely to find out how, as this kind of mimed comic interlude was designed to evade theatrical censorship and no copy of it (if copy there was) has survived. Woolley wrote about none of this, only implying that he was familiar with theatre-going and knew when to laugh and when to applaud. He was watching the show up in the gallery, where the lads were looking out for the sporting girls; ‘I believe that the Ladies atracted . . . there atention more than the players’, said Woolley. Both of them had new curlicued ‘fashonable stick[s] in their hands as full of nobs and in and outs or bended in all the . . . forms Emagenable which they made use of to nap the Seats with when aney thing atracted their atention in the play but that was verey seldom for they under stood the play Jast as much as if one of their four footed brothers Long Ears’. When it was all over they were ‘so tired with showing their ignorance at the races and at the play that they Cold not Walk home that night’. They slept on a settle in an alehouse ‘and Come of from there about seven o clock the next morning without their brackfasts’. Gervas Reckless ‘went to bed and Lay till about five oclock in the afteroon and so too fools Spent their money and they was neither Company for themselves nor aney body Else’. 39

40

For fashion-consciousness in the old century, John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 303–19. For masculinity, consumption, and gentlemanliness, Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability, 1600–1800, Routledge, New York and London, 2002, pp. 139–70; p. 145. Jim Davis, ‘The Sublime of Tragedy in Low Life’, European Romantic Review, 18:2 (2007), pp. 159–67.

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In April 1803 John Brooks was not much more successful, though he got further than the race-day peacocks. After a day of strenuous drinking in first Ruddington and then at Langford’s in Clifton he met Mary Ketley.41 They went off together and ‘put up at the sign of the hearick in quintons Clos and there he mounted hir and would fain have holed hir but he Could not for his arse was as Giddy as his head so he bobbled about the hole till he was tired and then he Got of and Gave it up but there was a Sly Little dog stood behint the hedge and his mouth watered for a bit but when the Great bull dog was Gone of he Could not Come on for She slipped to hand directly and poor Jonney brooks was forst to be contented with the Sight and over here [overhear] the bulldog was forst to Go to nottingham as report says and wether he came on there or no I don’t now but he Came home the next morning there was more of this tale but I have [been too] long at it’.42 In the context of Woolley’s 100,000 words, this is an odd passage. He gives no indication that he was told this story by anyone else. He does not figure any kind of witness, except, perhaps, himself. The device of drawing attention to what is not said in an utterance (with ‘my tale is too long’) is a variant of apophasis: a means of mentioning by not mentioning. It was sometimes used in fiction to withdraw the narrator from scenes of a sexual nature. If Woolley himself was ‘the sly little dog’ behind the door, then he moved swiftly into his own writerly persona by telling (in his usual style) of what he had heard and not heard about Johnny’s antics in Nottingham later that night. And ‘but I have [been too] long at it’ is an abrupt ending, not only rhetorically, but literally, occurring in the middle of the line of writing at the bottom of the page. Here, perhaps, he wrote a scene in which he figured himself as the same kind of sexual player as all the right melads who throng his diaries.43 In Woolley’s diaries men persuade, court, entice, and force women to sexual activity. Or, as when you pat your thigh to bring a dog to side, a woman slips to hand, not caring much who her lover is for the occasion. Or – in the story as it is more frequently told – men and women simply go off with each other by some unrecorded agreement. Woolley understood men’s motives, or at least had an account of male psychology that

41 42 43

For Mary Ketley, ‘Quinton’s wench’, or general servant, see p. 103. NA, DD 311/2, 23 Apr 1803. A different explanation might have a frustrated Mary Ketley bringing herself to orgasm by masturbation; her hand slips to its task, like a sly little dog. That reading makes sense of Johnny having to bear the sight and sound of her pleasure.

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was so taken for granted that it could be turned into the high comedy of the lads’ failure to score during their Nottingham nights out in 1805. His diaries were framed by the requirement of church and state that the sexual life cycle of the poorer sort be noted; his long accounts of his neighbours’ and friends’ couplings and sunderings are the context he made to regular notes of fornications, pregnancies, births, and marriages, as son of the Reverend Clifton’s clerk. In accounting for Woolley as a man and a person, we have one possible, opaque account of the narrator as a sexual being, the dim outlines of an attitude towards the sexual life of others, the demographic fact that he did not marry, and, perhaps, his way of thinking about women. He thought more about women’s sexuality than he did about men’s. Female physiology provided one of the few intellectual puzzles that he worked through in writing. In 1804, with great attention to detail and dating, he reported that ‘Some time Erley this year marey the whife of John hold [Holt] miscaried’, precisely on ‘Satuarday febewary the 10 1804’. Holt’s brother Thomas told him ‘that she was dilivered of a Substance Just Like a monkey’. The brother-in-law’s theory was that early in her pregnancy a ‘monkey broak Loose from a Stal that stood in the market place in nottingham and fritned hir in such a manor when she was a breeding that it was the Cause of the Child having the resemblance of a monkey’. Woolley interrogated him: ‘the words that he told to me were that She Seartenly was braught to bed of a monkey for I asked him a second time over that she Cold be delivered of a monkey I thaught it was impossible that she Cold’, though ‘it might be something Like one’. But Holt ‘posetively declared that it was a monkey So I asked him no more questions about it’. He thought that ‘tho it might have the resemblance of one it Cold not have the real natur of a monkey’. Holt and he were working from different physiological models: ‘by is asarcions and by the way that he discorsed about it I found that is Ideas was that it was the real substance of a monkey’. He was so positive in his opinion that Woolley ‘did not think fit to Cary the argument any farther’, but was ‘Searting in my own mind that it was not the real substance but it might be the Likeness of a monkey’. He acknowledged that ‘those that Saw it are the Likeleist to know’, but the way Holt had come by his information was an important explanatory factor. Details had got confused along the way: ‘I think that nelley hardy Laid hir [was her midwife] and when she Got hom She told hir daughter in Law what is toms Sister and She told toms whife and So his whife told him and So he Come to know I Canot acount for it aney other way.’ As we discover more about the medical and physiological understanding of the poorer sort in late eighteenth-century England, Woolley’s extended discussion is an important reminder that

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body–mind theories were contested; that – in this case – men in alehouses debated the difference between ‘real substance’ and resemblance.44 He had an ethical position on abortion. In 1813 he recorded that ‘John Francis was to have been maried on Easter Thursday but it is said that She miscaried on the Tuesday so the weding was put of and they can go on as usual now.’ Woolley thought that his partner’s earlier miscarriages might have been induced, for ‘they have secretly Cohabitted togather for some years but as it is not openly seen they Can carey the fairs [affair] on under the mask of religion and when she happens to be prignant she Can take Sum thing to Cause abdoration and then the Coast is Clear’. His disgust was to do with their both being ‘religonests’; it would be shameful for them to live in ‘open adultory but as they have a secret way they think there is no sin in it’. This is one of the several passages on the hypocrisy of dissenters that punctuate the diaries. If you talked to the woman, ‘if you discoarse with hir about religon she will tell you She is Shore of Salvation and how happy she feels but I think a person that hozes and distroys the fruits of hir womb Can have but little pretence to heaven’. It was the same with ‘all such pretenders to religon . . . and I think that a person that taketh aney medeson to cause abdortion is little better than a murderer and then I leave you to Judge of hir reward who doeth it’. He hated their self-righteousness: ‘they [think they] are sertenly rite because they are meetingers or baptists but if a member of the Church of England was to doe so then such a one as she would be the first that would Cry shame and say they was shore to go to hell for it was an unpardonable Crime but it is a verey Comon case for the kettle to Call the fryeing pan Black a case which is Generely so with such Saints’. She had gone round to the neighbours the day after she miscarried to explain that she and Francis would not be getting married – not just yet. 44

For popular medical thinking, Irma Taavitsainen, ‘Dissemination and Appropriation of Medical Knowledge: Humoral Theory in Early Modern English Medical Writing and Lay Texts’, in Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta (eds.), Medical Writing in Early Modern English, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 94–114; Elaine Leong, ‘Recipe Collections and the Currency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern “Medical Marketplace”’, in Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450–c.1850, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2007, pp. 33–52; Mary Fissell, Vernacular Bodies: The Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern England, Oxford University Press, 2004; Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Allen Lane, London, 2003; Paul-Gabriel Boucé, ‘Imagination, Pregnant Women and Monsters in Eighteenth-Century England and France’, in George Rousseau and Roy Porter (eds.), Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment, Manchester University Press,1987, pp. 86–100; Roy Porter, ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: The Evidence of the Gentleman’s Magazine’, Medical History, 29 (1985), pp. 138–68. Woolley’s careful empiricism and interest in how knowledge came into being could be seen to underpin his later activity as a lay doctor. See below, Chapter 7.

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Woolley thought her motives were to show that she was not pregnant (they ‘would see whether she was with Child or not’); ‘but people knew she had been if she was not . . . then and but a verey little time before’.45 Faithless men and women, whores and hypocrites – deeply unhappy men and women bound together in cycles of abuse and violence – hurtle through Joseph Woolley’s 100,000 words. He pauses often to tell a good story, which may on occasion be tragic, though his more usual mode was wry comedy. And there were times when he sincerely contemplated the lives of others and how they were experienced. ‘[F]eb the 17 John Wilkeson the old huxter man died,’ he wrote in 1801; ‘and what makes me remark it he was neighbour to my master Launder and a very Lonley old man.’46 Later in the year he recorded that Joseph Burton of Gotham ‘was married to one of old Steven Sharps daughters . . . make me note this we were very much acqainted and a very fine young man he had had maney Sweet hearts but never dared to marey before he had fifty pounds paid down the day they were married and he is to have fifty pounds more I am informed’. Both families appeared happy (he used the formality ‘agreeable to the match’), and he concluded that ‘it may be better than worse’.47 Joseph Burton had done well; others let the chance of domestic security slip through their fingers. In August Elizabeth Rue had been married ‘to the fellow Sarvant that She Lived with . . . makes me note this was an old play mate of mine and the daughter of John rue and marey his Wife both respectable people of Clifton and was intended for the wife of Sam davy of bar[ton] but he made slip and so it was out of his power’.48 He thought much about the progress of romance this year. In April he transcribed from memory what turns out to be an epigraph to a disastrous relationship (and an actual epigraph on a tombstone in Old Dalby churchyard): ‘it was throw a woman I received/the wound which qwikley brought/my body to the Ground tis Shure in/time that She will have her due/the murdering hand Gods vengeance/will pursew the debt of I howed which/Caused all the Strife was but one/that Cost me my Sweet Life/She /frettened/to Give me a mark which made The cause Look very dark’. He dated this ‘1740’.49 Once, when making the initial transcription of Woolley’s diaries, I put musings like these from the early diaries together with his hilarious account of the boys’ night on the town and the Clifton Peacocks’ failure to 45 47 49

46 NA, DD 311/5, Apr 1813. NA, DD 311/1, 17 Feb 1801. 48 NA, DD 311/1, 26 Dec 1801. NA DD 311, 3 Aug 1801. NA, DD 311/1, April 1801. ‘frettened’ is inserted on the line below. We know he was in Old Dalby in 1804 for a night of strenuous drinking and brawling; he may have visited before. The inscription is given at http://lists.rootsweb.ancestry.com/index/intl/ENG/ LEICESTERSHIRE-PLUS.html. ‘I wonder what the story was?’ asks one of the many genealogists who have posted this epitaph. Perhaps Woolley was told in 1801.

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engage any Sporting Ladies at all. I thought about John Brooks foiled in Clifton and off to Nottingham to look for an opportunity there (drunk and incapable though he was). I annotated my transcription with ‘I think all these boys visit prostitutes in Nottingham of a Saturday night (thought this was a Monday, actually).’ And I wasn’t thinking of Clifton women, like Elizabeth Barnes or Mary Ketley, who, employed as domestic servants, may have accepted money for an activity – a bout – that they shared with their sexual partners. I was thinking of Nottingham’s anonymous, fulltime, working girls. I knew full well I was using late nineteenth-century understandings of sex, the sexual act, marriage, prostitution . . . that these people’s terms and understandings were vastly different from mine. I got quite excited by the first end paper of the 1804 volume, where in the middle of a blank page (and before ‘the account of money I have in my pocket at the beginning of the Feast week . . . 17s 4½d’, scrawled at the bottom) is the note ‘pains about the Loins’.50 I speculated about the incidence of venereal disease among all these Clifton and Wilford young men and women.51 It was odd, in a writer who had such facility in the naming of sexual parts and sexual acts, not to mention sexually transmitted disease. Had he not the language, there was a full vocabulary available from advertisements in the newspapers he read.52 But when he took to home doctoring after 1809, there was nothing in his accounts to suggest that he was ever asked to cure venereal infection. And the ‘loins’ reference almost certainly came from the Moore’s Almanacks in which his diaries are bound: each calendar in each volume gives the body part affected by the moon, in the column ‘Moore’s signs’, and loins are always included among the parts. But I had already added my speculations about all-year-round Sporting Ladies to the entries ‘paid foolishly’ that punctuate Woolley’s accounts.53 .

50 51

52 53

NA, DD 311/3, 1804. Kevin Siena, ‘The Clean and the Foul: Paupers and the Pox in London Hospitals, c. 1550–c. 1700’, in Kevin Siena (ed.), Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, University of Toronto, 2005, pp. 261–84; Bertrand Taithe, ‘Morality is not a Curable Disease: Probing the History of Venereal Diseases, Morality and Prostitution’, Social History of Medicine, 14:2 (2001), pp. 337–50; A. Fessler and R. S. France, ‘Advertisements on the Treatment of Venereal Diseases in the eighteenth and nineteenth Centuries’, British Journal of Venereal Diseases, 3:3 (1947), pp. 125–7; Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1500–1800, Harper and Row, New York, 1977, p. 600; Linda Evi Merians (ed.), The Secret Malady: Venereal Disease in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France, University of Kentucky Press, Lexington, 1996. A display advertisement for Dr Arnold’s Pills against venereal complaints ran weekly in the local press from 1800 to 1815, for example Nottingham Journal, 17 May 1800. ‘the 16 paid foolishly 8s 2d’, NA, DD 311/4, Sep 1809; ‘the 6 pd foolishly 4s 4d’, ‘the 10 paid foolishly, 4s 2d’, DD 311/5, Feb, Apr 1813. These were Saturday nights; but then his Nottingham expenditure was almost always on a Saturday.

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Then there was the poem ‘The Prostitute’ which the highly correct Nottingham Journal published in its weekly ‘Selections from the Work of Genius’ column – a sentimental yet accomplished piece that invites contemplation of ‘a lost sister’s solitary bier’ and the life-story that brought her to that pass.54 It was then that I began to care, as Joseph Woolley cared, about what people might think of me, for I gave the appearance of being as interested in the sexual life of Clifton and district as he was, my interest the more prurient for being pursued two hundred years on. I – we – cannot know about Joseph Woolley’s single state, his sexuality, or his sexual relationships. I can make suggestions about his remaining unmarried by reference to the birth-order of the Woolley siblings, the death of a half-brother that made him the eldest boy, the longevity of his parents and their dependence on him, the great changes that took place in stocking manufacture during these years, the particularity of tenantry on Gervase Clifton’s lands, and above all, to the sexual conventions of the time. I can quote the demographers and historians who tell us that about four in ten eighteenth-century people fell into the category ‘never married’ – slightly more women than men ‘never married’; but it is still a calculation that shows Woolley to be not unusual among his peers.55 (Demographers usually discuss these men and women as ‘celibate’; Woolley might well have had a laugh at that.) I can describe how deeply he was affected by the betrayal and pregnancy of his dead bother’s wife, and I can report on what he wrote about the sex life of others. I can put what he wrote in some kind of context. But as for his own sexual life, it lies concealed deep beneath the words he put on the page. Joseph Woolley wrote what he wanted to write and omitted what he did not care to display. And yet . . . the question of voyeurism suggests itself, if only because of the way I have reported on his diary writing. There are two (possibly three) incidents in which men watch couples engaged in sexual activity, recorded in six diary volumes. If Woolley watched couples coupling (or trying to) then he did not do it alone – except perhaps, on one occasion in an upper room (a view from behind a door, another man’s failed attempt with Mary Ketley). When he entered Clifton and Glapton bedchambers he did so in imagination. He had been told about the marital behaviour of his (usually) extraordinarily inebriated neighbours – told a good story, which he told again on the page. Drink is much 54 55

‘The Prostitute’, Nottingham Journal, 12 Dec 1801. Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian Britain, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2009, pp. 49–82, 208; E. A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 192–284; Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800, Cambridge University Press, 2003.

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implicated in his stories of outdoor sexual activity. With a group of companions, walking back from a friendly society meeting, or from Nottingham, a group of men (only once including Woolley) encounter sexually active couples just off the road way. Did couples intertwine close to paths because they didn’t always have free access to indoor space, and there weren’t a lot of freely accessible open spaces? Or because they simply could not wait? When one couple was disturbed by Woolley and his companions they appear to have run away in a panic (because of the audience? Or because of issues of reputation, or fidelity? Woolley did not name names). But they did have somewhere to go. Woolley heard later from the man that ‘some where in Glapton’ the two of them met again for ‘a rare bout’ lasting until four in the morning. Did she let him in to her (parents’) house, or did they find a more secluded field? In another case, not witnessed but reported by Woolley, he wrote that passers-by decided not to intervene. Samuel Hardy and Alice Priesley were in a location where these things happened: The Grove, or walkway, that led from Wilford to Clifton. Everybody was on the way home from Nottingham Races. ‘Those watching’ may have included Clifton women (wives and daughters) who had their day at the races along with the men. ‘Best leave them to it’, is what you still say when you discover couples having evidently consensual sex en plein air.56 Perhaps this was the couple’s last opportunity (behind a tree) before they reached Clifton. In Woolley’s report, those who decided against intervention appear to have made some assessment about the willingness and consent of the woman. Woolley presents all these incidents as ordinary, though noteworthy (and amusing, and potentially embarrassing) scenes of everyday life. And really, these speculations are not for us to make, just as ‘diaries – repetitive, rough, elliptical . . . are not for us. We are voyeurs when we read the diaries of others.’57 We are not however, placed in the position of voyeur when we read the justicing notebooks of Sir Gervase Clifton, as we shall now do, even though they describe the same kind of affective, social, and sexual life as Woolley described. But the magistrate did not write a diary; his volumes comprised the semi-official records of a public man.

56

57

For outdoor sex in an earlier period, Mary Thomas Crane, ‘Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 9:1 (2009), pp. 4–22. Julie Rak, ‘Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary’, in Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, pp. 16–26; p. 20.

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A lawyer may, perhaps, think Mr [magistrate] Allworthy exceeded his authority a little in this instance. Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (1792), Vol. 1, Book IV, Ch. 11.

In Clifton village – in Glapton, Barford, and Wilford, all across the Clifton estates – people talked law to each other. They took the disputes and antagonisms of everyday life to the magistrate, and talked law to him. Some of them constructed personal histories in the light of the law they knew about, in order to have the magistrate put it into effect on their behalf. Joseph Woolley reports this kind of law-talk in his diaries, and there is much corroboratory evidence of it in the magistrate’s own records. Talking law – and writing within its frame – was not of course, confined to the Clifton estates. The Nottinghamshire communities that produced Luddism displayed a high level of what would now be called legal- or law-consciousness.1 Other magistrates’ notebooks besides those of Gervase Clifton demonstrate ordinary people’s pragmatic use of the law throughout the long eighteenth century, their informed use of magistrates’ courts, and the shaping of their stories to fit the criteria of the law there administered.2 Read together, Woolley’s diaries and Clifton’s 1

2

Kevin Binfield (ed.), Writings of the Luddites, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD and London, 2011, pp. 47, 65–71. Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, University of Chicago Press, 1985, pp. 37–62; Sally Engle Murray, Getting Justice and Getting Even: Legal Consciousness among Working-Class Americans, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1990; David M. Engel, ‘How Does Law Matter in the Constitution of Legal Consciousness?’, in Bryant G. Garth and Austin Sarat, How Does Law Matter?, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 1998, pp. 109–44; Anthony Musson, Medieval Law in Context: The Growth of Legal Consciousness from Magna Carta to the Peasants’ Revolt, Manchester University Press, 2001. Peter King, Crime and the Law in England 1780–1840: Remaking Justice from the Margins, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 56–7. For the dissemination and reception of legal thought in the long English eighteenth century, Wilfrid Prest, ‘The Experience of Litigation in Eighteenth-Century England’, in David Lemmings (ed.), The British and Their Laws in the Eighteenth Century, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2005, pp. 133–54; Christopher Brooks, ‘Litigation, Participation and Agency in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England’, ibid., pp. 155–81.

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Figure 5. Sir Gervase Clifton’s (only) recorded magisterial business in 1803

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notebooks suggest something of what they said about the law, when standing in Clifton’s parlour, and drinking down at the Coach and Horses afterwards. This law talk was not so much the genteel exchange evoked by ‘conversations in the law’ as a noisy, clamorous, and often verbally violent making of a ‘conversible world’. ‘Conversible worlds’ were social and cultural spaces created by the verbal exchanges between equals, or citizens.3 But nobody talking law to Sir Gervase Clifton, or talking about his legal practice, was a citizen. This conversible world was made by women, and working men, and the poor and paupers. Magistrates’ courts and single justices’ parlours like Clifton’s were where most eighteenth-century people gained their experience of the law.4 The framework knitter’s diaries suggest that the law-experience acquired in this way was worked over, expanded and consolidated in the everyday conversations between family members, friends, and neighbours, and in the altercations and quarrels that Woolley reported. So we can move outside the assize courts, prisons, and market-square hanging places, in which much experience of the law has been articulated on their behalf, to alehouse conversations in which men and women appropriated and disseminated knowledge about the law – and about the magistracy that administered it.5 Woolley does not appear in Clifton’s writing (he was not a complainant or witness in any case recorded by the magistrate), but his very absence from the magistrate’s records has something to say about the kind of man he was and how he understood himself to be, in relation to the law. In November 1806 Sir Gervase Clifton was visited at Clifton Hall by one of his poorer neighbours, ‘a pauper of the village of Wilford’. (Wilford was within Sir Gervase’s manor, about three miles from Clifton.) William Kirwin was attempting to sort out complicated domestic arrangements within the framework of the law that governed his family’s life. He told the magistrate about his mother-in-law, a widow currently living in Tollerton. ‘She is in a very distressed state,’ he said. He and his wife wanted her to come and live with them ‘so that she may be better taken care of & kept from want’. He had asked the Wilford overseer for 3

4 5

Jean Meiring, ‘Conversations in the Law: Sir William Jones’s Singular Dialogue’, in The Concept and Practice of Conversation in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1688–1848, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, 2008; John Mee, Conversable Worlds. Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762 to 1830, Oxford University Press, 2011. Also Farina Mir, The Social Space of Language: Vernacular Culture in British Colonial Punjab, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2010. Peter King, ‘The Summary Courts and Social Relations in Eighteenth-Century England’, Past and Present, 83 (1984), pp. 125–83. In Crime and Law, pp. 3–4, 10–11, Peter King explains why there has been such historical concentration on the criminal law as opposed to ‘justice as it was delivered on the ground’, as does Prest, ‘Experience of Litigation’, p. 136.

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permission to take her in, but had been refused. The family had tried to help after her husband died: her son and family had moved into her cottage on the understanding that ‘they would take care of her during her Life & allow her good victuals drinks firing & good cloathing’. Something had gone wrong with that arrangement, but we are not to know what, or how, as the entry in Clifton’s notebook breaks off here. But there is enough to see that Kirwin was highly aware of local ratepayers and tensions between parishes in regard to their financial responsibilities under the old poor law: he said that what he proposed would keep his mother-in-law from ‘troubling the . . . parish of Wilford’. He emphasised her financial independence: on marriage she had ‘brought a many good with her & such as a beds & other goods’. He knew that a justice of the peace was a point of appeal in the vast, complex edifice of ancient statute law (poor and settlement law) that dictated the way he lived his life.6 We can make out something of William Kirwin’s understanding of these matters from the incomplete transcription of what he said and the strategies he used in telling his story; far less of Clifton’s – from the action he did not take, and what he did not have his clerk record.7 The most salient point about Joseph Woolley’s relationship to the law is that he was not a man like William Kirwin. Neither he nor any member of his family was ever in receipt of poor law benefits, though the poor law was much on their mind: all their strategy after the death of Joseph’s bother Edward Woolley was to keep his widow and children from the parish; the information that Samuel Woolley recorded in the parish books (via Joseph’s diaries) was the data used to put the poor law into operation for many of their neighbours. Clifton’s justicing notebooks are typical records of the everyday administration of the law in long-eighteenth-century communities, though his cover a longer period of time (more than forty years) and appear more fragmentary and intermittently kept than many that have survived.8 Like Clifton’s, these very rarely contain abstract 6 7 8

As he told his story, he may have had in mind magistrates’ known willingness to make ‘concessions to the poor’. King, ‘Summary Courts’, p. 128; Crime and Law, pp. 30–1. NA, M8050, 17 Nov 1806. Elizabeth Silverthorne (ed.), The Deposition Book of Richard Wyatt, JP, 1767–1776, Surrey Record Society, Guildford, 1978; Elizabeth Crittall (ed.), The Justicing Notebook of William Hunt, 1744–1749, Wiltshire Record Society, Devizes, 1982; Michael McGarvie, (ed.), The King’s Peace: The Justice’s Notebook of Thomas Horner, of Mells, 1770–1777, Frome Society for Local Study, 1997; Gwenda Morgan and Peter Rushton (eds.), The Justicing Notebook (1750–64) of Edmund Tew, Rector of Boldon, Publications of the Surtees Society, vol. 205, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2000. Also Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1984; King, Crime and Law, pp. 15–39.

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cogitation on the law: they were practical records, kept for administrative purposes.9 Woolley’s unique account of Clifton’s behaviour as a magistrate – a view from the other side – make his justice books a more valuable source than they might otherwise be. Woolley’s own diaries started out as practical and mundane as the magistrate’s, their first function being to keep accounts of income and expenditure over several years; but the law – legal thought and language – entered Woolley’s consciousness and conversation, and inscribed some part of his identity. This is to be expected perhaps, of a man who grew up and worked in a Midlands stocking-making community. Nottinghamshire framework knitters were highly conscious of the legitimacy of their trade – ‘recognised and chartered by a king and empowered to regulate itself ’ – and throughout the long eighteenth century conducted labour and wage negotiations with hosiers and manufacturers in reference to the provisions of a 1663 charter of incorporation, to statute law, and to equity.10 During the Nottinghamshire Luddite disturbances of 1811–12, many local framework knitters wrote their anonymous letters, petitions, and posters in language that evoked legal writs and magistrates’ warrants.11 Woolley left no record of the extraordinary year 1811–12, but in ordinary times he was deeply interested in what went on in Clifton’s parlour on justicing days, often reported on it, and sometimes provided a detailed back-story not available from the magistrate’s notes. He may have spent time in the Clifton Hall justice room as spectator, or accompanying neighbours and friends, but he was never subjected to the law the magistrate administered, nor did he act as witness in any proceedings he or Clifton recorded. But he wrote about the magistrate in action: about cases, hearings, and procedures that are absent from the magistrate’s own records. Gervase Clifton had been active as a magistrate for all of Joseph Woolley’s life (Woolley was born c. 1773). Between 1772 and 1815 the magistrate recorded about 250 items of magisterial business. The majority of them were not ‘cases’ (in the judicial sense, brought by one party 9

10

But see Anon., ‘The Journal of a Gloucestershire Justice, A. D. 1715–1756. Journal of the Rev. Francis Welles, Vicar of Presbury, Gloucestershire, and Justice of the Peace for the County of Gloucester, A. D. 1715 to 1756. Folio. MS’, The Law Magazine and Law Review or Quarterly Journal of Jurisprudence, 11 (1861), pp. 125–42; 12 (1861), pp. 99–126; 13 (1862), pp. 247–91. Welles pondered points of law raised at quarter sessions. The justicing books of Thomas Parker (kept 1805–1840) contain just one note of his legal thinking in the 653 items he recorded. Shrewsbury, Shropshire Archives, 1060/168–71, Justicing Notebooks of Thos. N. Parker, 1805–40. For Welles, Parker and Clifton, Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 172–98. 11 Binfield (ed.), Writings, pp. 20–32 Binfield (ed.), Writings, pp. 47, 65–9, 71, 133.

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against another), so it is simplest to call them incidents. It is not possible to be certain about the total of 250, as in the two notebooks (which were probably bound out of smaller ones and loose-leaf sheets) there are about twenty fragments – notes of names, one line of what may have been a deposition, for example – that do not fit with any of the longer entries. There was possibly a much more detailed record in now-lost, unbound pages; narratives that reached the end of what appears broken off in in medias res (like William Kirwin’s). Perhaps in his clerk’s notes there was once a complete account of what actually happened, in documents signed and issued, and orders made. But this is speculation. Many eighteenth-century commentators believed that a magistrate’s main function was to arbitrate and mediate in local disputes, which Clifton clearly did, sometimes recording the financial penalties on disputing parties he had fixed upon. He often noted that a matter had been ‘settled’ (as shall be discussed), or in modern terms, that a ‘solution to a problem’ had been found.12 But he did not often note the legal documents he may have signed and issued.13 Perhaps that kind of record-keeping was the function of his (unknown) clerk or secretary. The notebooks were his own: he used them to make the odd personal entry, or a note about the management of his own lands and estate. A careful copying of the correct form of words to be used for ‘Deputation or Appointment of a Game keeper’ was for his own purposes, ‘within my said manor of Clifton’. The two volumes also contain items to do with his office and the system he maintained, as when he copied out the Constables’ Oath, the oath to be declared by one ‘who craves the Peace against another’ (as so many Clifton people did), pro forma directions to the Land Tax collectors, and lists of tax surveyors. This kind of administrative material is located at the beginning and end of the two notebooks, suggesting that along with cut-out and pasted-in sets of blank precedent forms showing eighty forms of procedure, and a list of warrants that might be executed by a constable, there was some attempt to index them. But they appear a haphazard record, made by different hands, odd sheets and pages from one notebook bound in the other, with 12 13

King, Crime and Law, p. 22. As did some other provincial magistrates of the long eighteenth century. Berkshire County Record Office, D/ED 031, Papers of Robert Lee and William Trumbull as justices (the former acting in Surrey as well as Berks), 1735–9; Lincoln’s Inn Library, Misc. Ms.592. Manuscript Diary of Philip Ward of Stoke Doyle, Northamptonshire, 1748–51; Warwickshire County Record Office, CR300/36, ‘Memorandum’, containing brief entries of an unnamed Justice of the Peace in north east Warwickshire, 1761–6; Wiltshire Record Office, 383:955, ‘Justice Book’ kept by R. C. Hoare as justice, 1785– 1815; East Sussex County Record Office, AMA 192/1, Notebook of Richard Stileman of Winchelsea JP, 1819–27.

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Table 1. Incidents noted by magistrate Sir Gervase Clifton, c. 1770–1815 CATEGORIES OF INCIDENT 1. Relating to the poor laws 2. Relating to the employment relationship, including under the apprenticeship system 3. Involving interpersonal, non-lethal violence; threat and defamation 4. Arising from social and economic regulation 5. Involving sexual and domestic violence 6. Involving property and its appropriation

number 60 35 34 31 29 28 217 total

random, incomplete entries, and many undated ones (this last probably is a function of separate bundles of papers having been bound after the event). Their unreliability as to date order is possibly due to someone’s attempt to categorise incidents; for example, to gather together in one section settlement examinations which had originally been recorded on separate sheets of paper. The pasted-in and hand-written lists of legal topics in both volumes suggest that Clifton used them as portable reference books. He did carry them around with him: attending ‘the Norton Licence Meeting for Victuallers Sep 5th 8th 12th and 15th [1772]’ he made a little doodle, but recorded none of the licensing business.14 Removing the personal notes, the odd, the stray, the unfinished business, the list of local tax assessors . . . leaves 217 incidents that he dealt with ‘at law’, or in the light of the law. By adapting the categories devised by Peter King in his account of summary justice (delivered by petty sessional courts and magistrates sitting alone) between 1729 and 1814, we can put the justice room incidents recorded by Gervase Clifton under six broad headings, expanding from King’s five ‘core categories of hearings’ in order to separate out the cases of sexual and domestic violence from the other incidents of non-lethal, interpersonal violence Clifton heard told (see Table 1). These categories ‘worked’ for the analysis of single-justices’ and summary court records across the long eighteenth century because they arose from the events and cases magistrates recorded. They are used here (and expanded) not in order to compare Clifton’s administration of 14

NA, M8050, 176. Three stray personal jottings: ‘Mr Jardin Professor of Philosophy~University of Glasgow’ (George Jardine, Professor of Logic and Philosophy, University of Glasgow, 1774–1826); a recipe for leather polish(?); someone to be at Eton College (his sons’ school) on a certain day.

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justice with theirs, but because they ‘work’ for the partial, fragmentary records he kept, for the background Woolley provides to them between 1800–1815, and for the emphasis on sexual and domestic violence in both men’s records. These categories also reflect the social behaviour and interpersonal relationships that preoccupied Joseph Woolley across his six volumes of diaries. Incidents involving sexual and marital violence have been separated out from interpersonal, non-lethal violence in general, because both Clifton and Woolley heard about so much of it. Under the headings above, the largest category of entries was to do with Clifton’s management of the poor law system, in encounters with people like William Kirwin. He recorded thirty-three settlement examinations over the years. Together with his general involvement in local overseers’ maintenance of their parish poor (eighteen entries), unmarried pregnant women naming the father before him at the behest of parish officials, and men complaining that parish officers no longer supported the bastard child they had taken on at marriage (nine entries), the poor law business – in its broadest sense – accounted for about a quarter of the entries (not of his activity as magistrate; we simply do not know how much of that was omitted). In 1784 ( probably 1784) ‘John Smith laid an Information against the overseers of the poor of the parish of Lambley.’ Smith told about ‘having married a widow Burch with one child and they promised how good they would be to him if he would marry her. he married her and the overseers went and told the Justices it was a Bastard Child and upon that they Granted him but one shilling per week. but when it was set right by her of Lambley That it was born in Wedlock they Justices allowed him one shilling & sixpence and they now refuse to give him anything’. There is no date: an indication that nothing happened in regard to Smith’s complaint, that Clifton may have restricted himself to hearing the man out and recording what he said.15 With parishes and overseers closer to home, he was sometimes more active. In November 1772 he heard the complaint of Hannah White ‘against the Overseer of the poor of the parish of Costock for not finding her work or an Allowance where with all to find . . . herself the necessarys of Life’. He further noted that ‘She has had a Bastard Child and was removed from the parish of Wilford’, and that he had ‘made an order upon the parish of Costock of 2s 6d pr week so Long as the Woman remained unable to get her own Livelyhood’. Four years later he returned to the page to add that ‘there is nothing proseding in Whites afayrs’.16 In 1777 15 16

NA, M8050, 86. Lambley is some twelve miles north east of Clifton on the other side of Nottingham. Costock is six miles south of Clifton. NA, M8050, 10 Aug 1772; 22 Jul 1776.

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he heard from Sarah Pagett of Barton in Fabris, who gave the information that she was ‘poor and impotent and not able to provide for herself and Child and that she did apply to the overseers of the poor of the said parish to be relieved but they have refused the same’. He ‘settled to allow the Woman & Ch 1s 6d[?] per week and a Ton of Coals’, noting that ‘she in harvest time Earns 3s 9d per week if she works a whole week’.17 Relations with rate-conscious overseers were displayed in the notebooks. Transcribing what they said (and probably being seen to do so) was an important part of Clifton’s negotiation of local systems of authority and a display of his own public persona, as with ‘John Butler of Clifton overseer of the Poor & Benjamin Deverill & Richard Morris two of the church wardens of the said parish’, sometime in 1807. They told him about ‘Widow Giles a poor person belonging to [Clifton] . . . but now living in Barford . . . and whome the said parish Clifton pay the sum of Eight shillings per week towards the maintenance of herself and four or five small children’. The parish officers considered ‘themselves very much burdened by such large allowance [and] are of opinion that there might be some means found to relieve the . . . parish of part of such heavy payment and at the same Maintain . . . Widow Giles in such an ample manner as she now is’.18 These are the parish officials’ view of Mrs Giles’ lavish lifestyle, transcribed verbatim. The notebooks were not a place for the deposition of Sir Gervase’s opinion on the matters before him. He did once scribble in pencil on the blotting paper that separates the bound sheets that someone (it is impossible to determine who) was a ‘Loose Idle & Disorderly fellow but a Dangerous profligate one & one whose Evidence will never stand Good in Law nor who will ever have an Oath Adm[itted] in the County of Nottingham’.19 But the statutes (poor and settlement legislation) required the use of pejorative language like this, as in the designation ‘loose Idle and Disorderly’ person, when the magistrate made an order or recorded an information. It was also used by ‘John Duffy Overseer of the Poor of Sutton Bonnington . . . who Says John Rose Labourer . . . a Pauper is very able to work and maintain himself and familly but instead of that lives a loose Idle and Disorderly Life constantly beating and illusing his Wife and familly and causing the same actualy to become Troublesome and seek relief of the said Parish owing entirely to his said Idleness’.20

17 19 20

18 NA, M8050, 31 Jul 1777. NA, M8051, 26. NA, M8050 (blotting paper between two pages dated 1773). NA, M8050, 22 Apr 1773.

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After the poor law business, employment disputes made up the second largest category of entries.21 He noted thirty-five employment incidents over the years. On the second page of the shorter notebook covering 1805–10, an anonymous (anonymous because of the way the pages are bound) father was reported as having been to ‘Thos Redferns house very Drunk’. He said he had gone to return some earnest money because ‘his Daughter had altered her mind and would not come to her place’. Clifton then noted that the daughter paid Redfern’s expenses ‘and Satisfied [him] & was sett at Liberty they parted by consent’.22 The young woman had evidently changed her mind about working – in all likelihood as a domestic servant – for Mr Redfern.23 Under master and servant legislation Clifton had no jurisdiction in the case of a domestic servant (as opposed to a servant in husbandry) refusing to come to her hire. But as contemporaries frequently remarked, magistrates did intervene in the domestic service relationship – ‘they do it every day’ – and had done so since the end of the seventeenth century.24 The domestic service disputes heard by Clifton have been discussed elsewhere.25 They were a small proportion of the total employment incidents he noted, perhaps five or six of a probable thirty-five. In Clifton’s notebooks it really is very difficult to determine who was a menial servant and who a farm worker, either because all parties had an interest in believing that all ‘servants’ were servants in husbandry, 21

22 23

24

25

For legislation governing labour relations, Douglas Hay, ‘England, 1562–1875: The Law and Its Uses’, in Paul Craven and Douglas Hay (eds.), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2004, pp. 59–116. For eighteenth-century ‘law of master and servant’, Simon Deakin and Frank Wilkinson, The Law of the Labour Market: Industrialization, Employment and Legal Evolution, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 62–3. NA, M805, ‘this day of May 1805’. Maybe she talked to someone about a servant’s life at Redfern’s place: ‘September the 9 [1804] John fletcher was bured at barton’, wrote Woolley. He ‘lived many years at Gotham and he married a woman named potter . . . and she died very Soon after and he went to Sarves again and Sold his household Goods & Lived Several years after that with mr thomas redfern at Gotham and he had a Child by ann hemsley the old taylors daughter Got him some money and after that he followed . . . one of the Clarks of the parishes daughters and till the day of is death for he was not able to stand is place nor any Sarvitude so he Left’. NA DD 311/3. Hay, ‘England, 1562–1875’, p. 87. Nineteenth-century legal commentators thought that most eighteenth-century magistrates had behaved like Clifton: assumed the legal fiction that all servants come before them were servants in husbandry over whom they had some jurisdiction. James Barry Bird, The Laws Respecting Masters and Servants, Articled Clerks, Apprentices, Manufacturers, Labourers and Journeymen, W. Clarke, London, 1799, p. 3; Thomas Walter Williams, The Whole Law Relative to the Duty and Office of a Justice of the Peace. Comprising also the Authority of Parish Officers, 3rd edn, 4 vols., John Stockdale, London, 1812, vol. III, p. 893. Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 172–198.

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or because the nature of women’s paid work in a predominantly rural area like south Nottinghamshire made meaningless the distinction between husbandry and household labour.26 In a single-servant household a maid did all sorts of work, indoors and out (though anyone would have recognised Sir Gervase Clifton’s housemaids as housemaids, and nothing else. But Clifton Hall represented a tiny proportion of servantemploying households across the country). Clifton noted a more typical employment dispute in 1807, between John Lonsdale, butcher of Ruddington, and three labourers hired to hoe the seven acres he had put down to turnips (‘for the sum of Forty Shillings and a Quart of Strong Beer with what small beer they chose to drink each day’). The men ‘entered upon the contract and agreement’ and received part of their wages having done only half the agreed job ‘& . . . not . . . in a good and workmanlike manner’. They said they would ‘not compleat the said contract and agreement’. Lonsdale wanted a warrant issued ‘to make them fulfill the said hiring as according to Law’. It was now 31 August. Procedures were not recorded; but in September Clifton returned to the page to note that the three men had agreed to finish the job and pay all expenses (for issuing a warrant and a constable’s delivering it).27 Like John Lonsdale, petitioners and complainants appear to speak ‘Law’ and ‘the law’ to Clifton, as in 1775 when Mary Hardy complained that ‘John Hardy her Husband beats abuses her and her child without cause or provocation and contrary to Law’, or as in 1779, when Ann Stevenson of Barton in Fabris said that John Stevenson had ‘assaulted her and kicked her over her instep without cause or provocation and contrary to Law’, or when in 1784 Mary Elliot said that as she was going into the yard of the farm where she worked, William Roulston ‘took and dragged her by the Arm out of the yard and damed her and . . . struck her and kicked her over the leg and head and otherwise much abused her, contrary to Law’.28 But this was probably not what any of these people actually said (any more than a woman declared herself ‘poor and impotent’). This was a legal statement of their narrative; it was the form of language to be used on a warrant or a summons. And Clifton’s writing ‘according to Law’ or ‘contrary to law’ is no guide to his legal thinking, 26

27 28

Griggs, of Kelvedon, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Nottingham, with Observations on the Means of Its Improvement. By Robert Lowe, Esq. Drawn up for the Consideration of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement, C. Clarke, London, 1794, pp. 2–23. NA, M8051, 31 Aug 1807. NA, M8050, Feb 1775; 28 Dec 1779; 28 Jun 1784. The Hardys had been this way before. Noted on ‘March 28th 1774 John Hardy Stockiner for Misbehaving him self against his Wife & Child paid the Constable for the Warrant’. NA, M8050.

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or to the law he put into effect, even though the handbooks and manuals he may have owned told him what was case law and what was statute law very clearly indeed. They listed offences alphabetically (‘Assault, what’) and referred to the judgements providing key rulings on the matter – some of them very ancient rulings indeed.29 During the course of the eighteenth century many offences at common law were reiterated in new statutes which also defined new offences, and even more statutes were passed specifying new punishments for existing common law offences; later editions of Richard Burn’s Justice of the Peace provided useful appendices listing statutes passed in the last session of Parliament.30 Clifton is likely to have owned the twelfth edition of Burn: it was published in the year he started to record his activity as a justice of the peace (1772), and the pasted-in indices to his notebooks suggest he had a copy of this edition to cut up. It gave the advice that Burn had been reiterating since the first edition of 1755: that ‘statute . . . doth not take away the common law, and therefore [a] party may . . . take his remedy by the common law’, that a prosecutor ‘is at liberty to proceed either at common law or in the method prescribed by the statute’.31 This was advice to the parties appearing before a magistrate, not directly to him; but if he used a manual like Burn’s, Clifton knew something of the mutable boundaries between common and statute law. It is said that the gap between what the manuals laid down and what magistrates actually did widened in the early nineteenth century; that copies of guidebooks like Burn’s, even if owned, may have languished unread (‘they could hardly be expected to wade through these huge manuals at regular intervals’), that a guidebook was anyway simply a convenient starting point for the pragmatic business of settling things between the parties before magistrates, and that few across the country ever recorded 29

30

31

Joseph Shaw, The Practical Justice of Peace: or, a Treatise Shewing the Present Power and Authority of that Officer . . . Compiled from the Common and Statute Law, the Fifth Edition . . . in Two Volumes, Thomas Osborne and Edward Wicksteed, London, 1751, vol. I. Burn also made the distinction clear: The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer. By Richard Burn, LL.D. One of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the County of Westmorland. The Eighth Edition. In Two Volumes, A. Millar, London, 1764, Vol. I, p. 76. For law literature ‘in which legal topics were arranged alphabetically, and in which cross-references were the height of systematisation’, Meiring, ‘Conversations in the Law’, pp. 130–2. The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer. By Richard Burn, LL.D. Chancellor of the Diocese of Carlisle, and One of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland. The Fourteenth Edition: to Which Is Added an Appendix, Including the Statutes of the Last Session of Parliament (20 G. 3.) and Some Adjudged Cases. In Four Volumes, T. Cadell, London, 1780. Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer . . . The Twelfth Edition. In Four Volumes, T. Cadell, London, 1772, vol. I, p. 24.

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the legal or statutory basis of their action.32 But, in considering Clifton’s uses of the law as recorded in his notebooks, ‘action’ is not a very useful term. We simply do not know how often he acted in the incidents he recorded (or started to record). His legal imagination may not be reflected in his notebooks at all. But he did use the term ‘contrary to law’ on nine occasions. Language-use may be some guide to his legal thinking (as it is in Joseph Woolley’s writing). For two of these incidents, he was proceeding with statute law in mind: there was no other way he could have acted when in January 1773 the Rempstone Overseer of the poor complained against William Roper about ‘his having behaved himself in a bad and unbecoming manner . . . on the 19th [when] at night he turned his Wife out of his house and left her to the parish when he was in a parish house – and moreover refused to employ himself in work being appointed thereunto by the Overseers of . . . Rempstone contrary to Law’. Like the Kirwins’, the Ropers’ life was entirely bound up in the poor laws: how and where they lived, and their relationship one with the other, was dictated by seventeenth-century statute law. Had Mrs Roper not been one of the Rempstone poor, and had she complained to the magistrate about her husband’s ill-treatment of her, then Clifton could have intervened in her difficult life by common law. In 1775, when Mary Hardy complained that ‘John Hardy her Husband beats abuses her and her child without cause or provocation and contrary to Law’ then, if this had gone anywhere he could only have moved matters forward by means of the common law.33 But the Ropers were parish poor, occupying a parish house, with work-task imposed on the husband under the poor laws; their story on this occasion was told and heard in reference to statute law – perhaps the vagrancy laws – which made it an offence to leave a family dependent on the parish.34 Two service/employment incidents in which Clifton used the phrase ‘contrary to law’ also indicate the ‘sheer multiplicity of different types of legal input that could contribute to “the law”’ he worked with.35 In 1784, when Francis Willis of Barton in Fabris complained about his worker 32 33 34

35

King, Crime and Law, pp. 9, 22–3, 27. It is entirely unclear whether or not the law was put into action on behalf of Mrs Hardy; this entry is a fragment. NA, M8050, 24. NA, M8050, 20 Jan 1773. Mr and Mrs Roper were interpellated by the poor laws here. But in other circumstances a pauper might use the law autonomously. In an incident described by Woolley when two men doing a prescribed work task on the road got into a fight, one of them ‘fetched a warrant for [the other who . . .] paid him 4 Shillings to make it up withe him and So it is Settled’. NA, DD 311/1, 9 Jun 1801. If this was settled before Sir Gervase Clifton, he did not record the incident. Clifton’s probable use of vagrancy law in the Ropers’ case was pointed out by Joanna Innes. King, Crime and Law, p. 27.

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Thomas Wilson ‘leaving . . . before the Expiration of his Term and contrary to Law’, then Clifton could have proceeded under 5 Eliz. c. 4 – had this been a servant hired under its terms, or if it was possible to conceive of Wilson as a servant in husbandry; or under new statute law from the reign of George II, which in 1766 had attempted to clear up confusions in the Statute of Artificers by applying its provisions to a wide variety of trades and thus making it an offence for ‘any . . . person contracting for any time or times whatsoever’ to quit before the end of the agreed term.36 But the one-line, undated fragment suggests that Clifton did nothing, issued no warrant as the legislation said he might, did not commit Wilson for three months as it also provided. It is not clear that he ever saw Wilson; or maybe something happened between Willis and Wilson, which may have been provoked in the magistrate’s presence, but not by ‘the law’.37 In 1776 when servant boy William Thomas complained that his master Matthew Hale had beaten him (with a cart whip) ‘in a cruel manner without cause or provocation and contrary to Law’, the information was given by an older servant man. The boy was very young. They had both travelled some distance to tell the story to Sir Gervase, from Granby, fourteen miles east of Nottingham and Clifton. Burn’s Justice (should Clifton have consulted it) was discreet on the question of ‘How far the master is allowed to beat the servant’, simply referring the magistrate to the ‘books of authority concerning the office of a justice of the peace’, in this instance Dalton’s Justice (‘published in the reign of king James the first’, as Burn pointed out).38 There was no statute law for Clifton to proceed under in a complaint of assault by one individual against another.39 Assault was a very broad category within common law; it included physical attacks on others using weapons, implements, fists or feet, or holding up something like a pitchfork ‘in an angry or threatening manner’. Some handbooks advised that if a complainant had been terrified by gestures or shouting, then that might also be considered as assault at common law, though that was not Dr Burn’s opinion.40 In 1781 a Bradmore labourer was accused of 36 37 38 39

40

6 Geo. 3 c. 25 (1766); Deakin and Wilkinson, Law of the Labour Market, p. 63; Burn, Justice of the Peace (1772), vol. IV, pp. 139–40. NA, M8050, 122. NA, M8050, 30 Jun 1779; Burn, Justice of the Peace (1772), vol. IV, p. 120; Vol. I, p. xiii. There was an enactment of 1766 (6 Geo. 3 c. 23 s. 11) making it a felony punishable by transportation to assault someone in the street with the intent of damaging (and actually damaging) their clothes. Burn, Justice of the Peace (1772), vol. I, p. 107. Burn, Justice of the Peace (1772), vol. I, p. 106: ‘Not withstanding the many ancient opinions to the contrary, it seems agreed at this day that no words whatsoever can amount to an assault.’ Many Clifton people did not concur in this view, as this chapter later relates.

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milking ‘one red and white cow the property of . . . George Dickenson without his leave or knowledge and to his great Loss & detriment and contrary to Law’. It would have taken much perusal of Burn’s Justice to determine which law this contravened.41 The other three actions written ‘as contrary to law’ were assaults, as when John Winfield of Ruddington stated that two fellow framework knitters, displeased ‘at his doing . . . two dozen and half of Hose in so short a Time and [for] so little money colered him threw him down upon the Ground and otherwise assaulted him contrary to Law’.42 This was a workplace dispute which the stockinger explained in very great detail (it will be discussed in a later chapter). Both the stockinger and the magistrate appeared to know that the only thing ‘at law’ here was the assault.43 The outcome of the assault on Mary Elliot in the yard of the farm where she worked (above) was recorded by Clifton – another indication perhaps, that when no outcome was noted, nothing happened within ‘the law’ either statutory or common. ‘Roulston paid the Constable’ (for the time involved in fetching him before the magistrate) and also paid Elliott ‘for her days work and it was dismissed’.44 In 1785 a servant man from Normanton on the Wolds came to Sir Gervase to complain about an alehouse keeper in Plumptree (Plumtree) ‘assaulting him . . . knocking him down and otherwise much Abusing him without cause or provocation & contrary to Law’.45 The term was also used in recording a Monday night incident in Gotham in 1793, when a framework knitter had his arm broken by a blow from a heavy stick wielded by a Ruddington man. The context was riotous assembly – ‘a number of People in a Riotous and unlawful manner assembled in . . . Gotham at an untimely hour of the night namely about twelve oclock to the terror of the . . . town’. An ‘unlawful, riotous, and tumultuous assembly of persons to the number of twelve or more’, could have been proceeded upon by Clifton under statute law (the Riot Act of 1715) had he known about the incident in Gotham, and had he been there. But 1 Geo. 1 c. 5 was not at issue here. Under common law, riot happened when three or more people assembled together to do 41

42 43

44

NA, M8050, 4 May 1781. Taking wheat from a field, or fruit from a tree, was not common law theft (though stealing fruit and vegetables were offences under an Elizabethan statute). Taking produce from a barn was. Richard Burn had much to say about fruit trees, nothing about misappropriating the milk of someone’s cow. Burn, Justice of the Peace (1772), vol. IV, pp. 371–4. NA, M8050, 26 May 1779. In the old century stockingers were not as reluctant to take a trade dispute before a magistrate as they were forty years later. Great Britain. House of Commons. Second Report from the Committee on the Framework Knitters Petitions. 1812 (349)II.267, p. 273. But Winfield spoke to the assault, not the stocking question. 45 NA, M8050, Jun 28 1784. NA, M8050, 8 Jun 1785.

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something unlawful, and then did that unlawful thing. But neither common-law nor statutory-law understandings of riot were invoked here. Someone had been assaulted during a street brawl on a Saint Mondaynight, and neighbours had noticed the uproar.46 How significant is this language use? Clifton used the term ‘contrary to law’ when he was making reference to common law much more than he did with statute law (at a ratio of two to seven). But he used the term infrequently, and on some of the occasions described here, he may have been recording the words of the overseers, ‘poor’, framework knitters, farm servants, wives, husbands, and street brawlers standing before him. And the recorded words of these people – if that’s what they are – is no certain guide to their own consciousness of law, statutory, common, or otherwise. But men and women knew what it was that they must demonstrate to the magistrate (as did William Kirwin try very hard to make his family life fit criteria by which he knew the law could operate).47 In the ten or so statements Clifton heard over the years concerning indecent assault and assault with intent to commit a rape, he only once invoked ‘the law’, and this may have had something to do with the complainant’s own way of telling. In 1779 Ann Handley, wife of Sutton Bonnington labourer William Handley, made oath that as ‘she was going down sutton street to look after her Husband she mett Cornelius Bowring of Sutton aforesaid framework knitter who asked her where she was going – and she told him she was going down the street he asked her for what and she would not tell him he then laid hands on her and began to pull her about but she got away from him And as she came back he mett her again and laid hands on her and assaulted her and put his hands up her coats pushed her against the wall and very much abused her – contrary to the Laws in such case made and provided’.48 Clifton recorded sexual offences in very great detail, in one occasion writing out beforehand and underlining his questions to the complainants, three women who had been strolling around Sutton Bonnington fields when a local man exposed himself and otherwise conducted ‘himself in a very improper and indecent manner to wards them’ ‘[D]id he unbutton his Breeches upon seeing you coming or was he 46

47 48

Richard Burn, The Justice of the Peace, and Parish Officer . . . Continued to the Present Time by John Burn . . . the Eighteenth Edition . . . in Four Volumes, B. Cadell, London, 1793, vol. IV (unpaged: ‘Riot, Rout &c’). NA, M8050, 21 Nov 1795. Drew D. Gray, ‘The People’s Courts? Summary Justice and Social Relations in the City of London, c. 1760–1800’, Family & Community History, 11:1 (2008), pp. 7–15. NA, M8050, 20 Apr 1779. Indecent assault was an offence (at common law) established during the eighteenth century. It was codified and made a statutory offence in 1861 in the Offences against the Person Act.

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making water[?]’, the women were asked; ‘did he when you come up to him turn round to you with his breeches unbuttoned did you see his private parts – how long did he stand in that Indecent posture & wherabouts was it in the field . . . Did he as you say in the Information put Sarah Rawsons Cloaths over her head so as any one might have seen her private parts[?]’.49 Clifton issued a warrant on this occasion, noting (how many days later is not clear) that all was settled and the man had paid damages to the three women. From his earliest days as a magistrate, Clifton heard tell of men approaching women whose husbands were away. Women came to the magistrate because their assailants had got much further than did Charles Hodget in his haunting around Mrs Hardy’s house in October 1803, all ready in nothing but shirt and shoes, but never getting in.50 The men complained about to Sir Gervase entered houseplaces and bedrooms and forced themselves upon women. In September 1780 a framework knitter of Plumtree came into Ann Saunders’ room ‘where she l[a]y about six oclock . . . being fast asleep he woke her and asked her where her husband was’ – ‘in the house was not he and he said he never saw anything of him and he then said will you let me have a bout with you and she said no you shall not if you meddle with me I will tell my husband of . . . you’. He said he would meddle; ‘he then laid his hand on her throat . . . and with his . . . other hand he threw the Bed Cloaths quite off of her he then got between her Legs and she said John You throttle me upon which he took his hand away from her throat he had unbuttoned his Breeches and put his private parts into her . . . ’.51 In 1783, in Barton in Fabris, a blacksmith came into Hannah Flower’s house ‘between the hours of nine and ten oclock in the morning when her husband was from home and said where is John is he gone to Nottm(?)’ – ‘Yes he was’, she replied. Checking that there was no one else around he ‘began to pull her about and she begd him to be quiet and walk about his business he said if she would let him have one kiss he would go and medle with her no more upon that he did and he seemed to be going away but turned himself about to her with his private parts in his hand and said he would make her have it and told her to take hold [of] it’.52 In Joseph Woolley’s annals of sexual behaviour there is the same sudden, unannotated eruption of male desire. Woolley and Clifton could be said to relate the same kind of sexual story from Clifton and district, c. 1770–1815, though we may have to conclude that the male behaviour 49 50 52

NA, M8051, n.d.; entry between one for May and one for November 1805. 51 See above, Chapter 5. NA, M8050, 26 Sep 1780. NA M8050, 6 Oct 1783.

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recorded is the product of a certain type of story-telling, and no evidence at all of sexual feeling or attitude. Woolley’s and Clifton’s sexual narratives were produced in different ways. In the justicing room, these women’s stories (all the stories told) were produced by questioning. What wasn’t to the point (the point of making the law work to have an effect in the world) was not asked; or if told, not recorded. On the pages of the magistrate’s notebooks all stories, including sexual stories, were told paratactically (the ‘and-then, and-then’ structure; clauses and phrases laid out in sequence without the use of coordinating or subordinating conjunctions). Many episodes of Woolley’s writing also used parataxis; but he had done something with the content before he committed it to paper. In the past – last night, in the Coach and Horses perhaps – he may have asked questions about the outrageous behaviour he heard tell; but he wrote in the past tense, which inscribed explanation as well as story. Their conditions of production ensured that there could be no motivation, no overarching explanation, to stories told at law in Clifton’s justicing room. Joseph Woolley recorded a similar number of fights and assaults (involving men and men, and women and women) over a mere six years as the magistrate did over forty, though as we have seen, in Woolley’s telling, fighting was a way of settling disputes. The end-stop of his stories is the end of the fight. The assaults complained of before Sir Gervase were conflicts that had not been settled outside the justice’s parlour. In modern times, working-class use of law has been described as a way of both getting justice and ‘getting even’ (though perhaps the historical comparison should be accounts of working-class violence in the seventeenth and late nineteenth centuries rather than with twentieth-century North America).53 In some of the grievances heard by Sir Gervase, there was no law to use, but complainants may have known that and not cared very much. By telling of the assault, naming the perpetrator, they used a justice system for their own purposes, in which narration (even a narration shaped by questioning) was a form of retribution. Some very few got monetary compensation. These men and women were autonomous users of the law. Their actions were voluntary. They were not the same kind of legal subject as William Kirwin, or the other thirty poor and pauper men and women in Clifton’s notebooks forced to law under the Act of Settlement. Stephen Caunce has said that ‘the radical tradition 53

Murray, Getting Justice; Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘“Being Stirred to Much Unquietness”: Violence and Domestic Violence in Early Modern England’, Journal of Women’s History, 6: 2 (1994), pp. 70–89; Ellen Ross, ‘“Fierce questions and taunts”: Married Life in Working-Class London, 1870–1914’, Feminist Studies, 8:3 (1982), pp. 575–602.

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[of history-writing] tends to assume that legal processes have never had anything to offer the poor’.54 But the complainants of South Nottinghamshire who crowd Clifton’s notebooks were people who believed that they could get something out of the law. Local people also came to Clifton to swear the peace against neighbours and workmates who had verbally assaulted and defamed them. There was as much bad-mouthing recorded by the magistrate over the years as by Woolley.55 In 1772 Penelope Maltby of Gotham spoke against Dorothy Smith and Ann Maltby for ‘calling her names and abusing her when she was going quietly about her business’. Mrs Maltby said that she was ‘afraid . . . lest they should do her some injury’.56 In 1807 ( probably 1807; this is in the short second notebook) when Clifton examined Elizabeth Hallam and Ann Riley of Wilford about their claim that another woman had ‘called them both Names and will not let them live peacable & quiet in their Habitation and is of generally [bad] repute amongst her Neighbors of behaviour ill Towards the Inhabitants & particularly in behaving ill Towards [them]’. Clifton did not name the accused – she is just ‘She’ – a sign perhaps that he thought this a matter outside any legal framework.57 One magistrate, publishing yet another guide for his brethren in 1781, thought that most of what they heard was ‘hardly reduced to, or determined, by any rule of law’.58 Perhaps Joseph Woolley observed the everyday life of the law and Sir Gervase’s long magisterial career in the last decade of the old century, but as it is, the two records coincide for six years, during which Woolley made thirty-six entries concerning the magistrate. (The last three concern Clifton’s final illness, death, and burial.) The framework knitter’s diaries are particularly useful for tracking Sir Gervase’s movements between London, Bath, and Clifton Hall. There is no other way of knowing, for example, that in August 1801 ‘Sir Gervas Clifton Came from London to Clifton for the Shooting season’, or that in 1812–13

54 55

56 58

Stephen Caunce, ‘Farm Servants and the Development of Capitalism in English Agriculture’, Agricultural History Review, 45 (1997), pp. 49–60, this quotation, p. 56. ‘Cases for defamation, often at the instance of ordinary members of the parish community, remained one of the mainstays of ecclesiastical court business into the nineteenth century. As the influence of ecclesiastical justice waned in the second half of the eighteenth century, more of this kind of business came the way of the local magistrate.’ Mark Smith, ‘The Hanoverian Parish: Towards a New Agenda’, Past and Present, 216:1 (2012), pp. 79–105; this quotation, p. 97. 57 NA, M8050, 30 Apr 1772. NA, M8051, 33. Ralph Heathcote, The Irenach: or, Justice of the Peace’s Manual. II Miscellaneous Reflections upon Laws, Policy, Manners &etc &etc. In a Dedication to William Lord Mansfield. III An Assize Sermon Preached at Leicester, 12 Aug. 1756, privately printed, London, 1781, p. 188.

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Clifton was absent from his estate ‘verey near Eleven months’.59 Woolley recorded Clifton’s activities as a land owner, landlord, and employer – his swearing in of tenants, his discharging of them, his sacking of servants.60 Clifton people dreamed about Sir Gervase in his aspect as a landlord, as well they might. In 1804 Woolley noted ‘a remarkable dream that was dreamt one night in Clifton John rue dreamt that Sir Ger Clifton would turn him out of his cottage’.61 There is an entry concerning the magistrate’s personal and sexual life, as noted, and a series of detailed entries about the new rector of Clifton (also confusingly called ‘Clifton’ though no relation to Sir Gervase’s family). Woolley described Sir Gervase taking the side of local people against him (or that is how Woolley interpreted what the magistrate did) on several occasions, to be discussed in the next chapter. Unsurprisingly, none of this appeared in the magistrate’s notebooks. But Woolley also recorded Clifton ‘at law’ in seven incidents, only one of which was recorded by the magistrate. This was in October 1804 when Thomas Wooten of Clifton reported the loss of a one pound note – ‘on or about Whitsunday’, so four months before – saying that he suspected that it had been picked up by Gervas Aram Jr, also of Clifton.62 According to Woolley, Sir Gervase was told some of the back story: about a September conversation in the pub and the Barton man who – in his cups – asserted that Aram found and kept the note. But Woolley knew far more: about the three days of drinking at the Clifton feast that broke the secret of the missing bank note, Aram’s wavering story about where he had found it (‘Sir Ger questening him Several times over’), and how many pockets it had lodged in between June and October. ‘Sir Gerv Cold make nothing of them [all]’, remarked Woolley, and ‘So it Ended’.63 It would be helpful to know whether the magisterial matters noted by Woolley but not by Clifton were entirely at random, but the nature of both their notebooks make this difficult to determine, not least because Clifton’s entries were made contemporaneously with events (they were written ‘to the moment’, in eighteenth-century literary terminology), whilst Woolley wrote up during gaps in his working year (he made up his accounts weekly, on pages set aside for that purpose). As a writer, he recalled what stood out for him over the past month, or past year; he provided for his own reflectiveness and used the past tense.

59 60 61 63

NA, DD 311/1, 144, 31 Aug 1801; DD 311/3, 118; DD 311/5, 8 Jan 1813. DD 311/2, 19 Apr 1803; DD 311/3, 99, DD 311/5, 8 Jan 1813. 62 DD 311/3, Jan 1804. NA, M8050, 8 Oct 1804. NA, DD 311/3, 8 Oct 1804; M8050, 8 Oct 1804. Dating of these two entries suggests that Woolley was present when Clifton questioned the men.

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He employed narrative form, story-telling devices, and often showed himself attempting the telling of a good tale. (He did tell a good tale.) The entries concerning the magistrate were remembered because they interested him, or he had heard a compelling story in the alehouse, or because he knew the people involved. Woolley started the bank-note story dramatically (and from the perspective of a law-user, or lawconsumer) with ‘October the 8 there was a Justising match between thomas wootten . . . and Gerves aram juner about the finding of a pound note Some time this Spring’. But this turned out not to be the game that ‘match’ suggests. Two days later Woolley recorded that on ‘the 10 of October Gerves aram received a discharge from Sir Gerves Clifton to turn out of is place if he did not turn is Son out on account of that note of Wootons’. The story had not ended ‘at law’, in either Clifton’s justice room or his inconclusive ‘Taken & made before me the day & year above Written Gervas Clifton’. It ended with Clifton exercising his right as landlord. This is not something we could learn from the magistrate’s own notebooks. Woolley wrote as informal law-reporter about six other justicing events involving Clifton, which the magistrate himself did not record. The banknote story concerned ‘property and its appropriation’, the smallest category of incident noted by Clifton (though the table above shows that all non-poor law cases took up the magistrate’s time in roughly equal measure). This was not so with Woolley the reporter, who noted two property-related incidents unrecorded by Clifton. (One of them is discussed in the next chapter.) Excepting a poor law incident, Woolley’s interests are distributed in the same way as the magistrate’s: one each to do with the poor law, with employment, interpersonal violence, social regulation (also discussed in the next chapter), domestic violence – and two ‘property’ incidents. In August 1804 Woolley reported on a women’s gleaning dispute. This involved inter-personal, non-lethal verbal violence. In the harvest field things had come to a very high level of verbal abuse (‘the other began to say that she was as big a lier as any in the town and agerervated hir as much as possable till they began to Call one another anames and scrutinis Each others Carecters . . . [one] being very innoyed she Called . . . [another] a damd Stinking bitch wich the other thought was a Cant name for a hore . . . ’).64 Martha Price went to Sir Gervase for a 64

Mrs Price may have meant that a cant word was doubly and deeply offensive. But Joanna Innes has pointed out that she may also have thought that its being ‘cant’ brought namecalling within the realm of the law. This may, then, have been a reference to (or folk memory of) earlier ecclesiastical court proceedings, in which insults against women had

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warrant ‘but he Granted her a Summons to Come in the next morning’. They all arrived with the deputy constable and a full complement of witnesses. According to Woolley ‘Sir Gerves Clifton Examined first one and then a nother and he Cold make nothing of eney of them’; the constable thought that ‘one was just as bad as the other . . . it was nothing but a field tattle’. The magistrate determined that one of the women ‘was the agresser [and] Said that she must Give . . . [the constable] a Shilling for the Summonse wich she did’. ‘[W]eather they were better friends than they were before I don’t know’, wrote Woolley; they were certainly told not to bother the magistrate with this sort of thing – ‘not to Come there on aney Such arend again’. Clifton put the law into process; he acted as a magistrate on this occasion; but this incident was not recorded in his notebooks.65 Something of Martha Price’s legal thinking is discernible: she wanted a warrant issued against Sall Page; she got a summons.66 Martha Price took matters as far as she could, and it cost her. Sir Gervase was active in the everyday life of Clifton this month: he heard about the Hoes’ altercation after Nottingham Goose Fair, discussed above, and Dolly Hoe lying abed for two weeks after her husband’s assault. No one went to Clifton Hall about this incident of domestic violence; rather ‘Sir Ger Clifton Got a hearing of it and Swore George about it and told him nobody beat their whives but tailors.’67 Reading Woolley’s diaries, we can surmise that Sir Gervase was more active as a magistrate than his own notebooks reveal; and that he managed community and domestic relationships in Clifton and environs in the interstices of common and statute law, and with assumptions about cultural and sexual norms shared with his poorer neighbours. His own record of magisterial business appears to have been largely confined to poor and labour law business and to questions of assault and theft in which his common law remit was clear. But according to Woolley, he did

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to denigrate their chastity to be justicable. See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London, Oxford University Press, 1998, for insults between women brought to the ecclesiastical courts; King, Crime and Law, p. 17 for eighteenth-century popular assumptions that magistrates’ courts had assumed the role of ecclesiastical courts. I am grateful for this observation. NA, DD 311/3, 22 Aug 1804. The justices’ manuals would not have been very helpful to either her or Clifton. Burn told magistrates that he did not find it ‘any where clearly settled, how far slander, or scandalous words are cognizable before justices of the peace’; anyway, this was clearly an example of the way in which ‘the common people are wont to call one another knaves, and rogues, and whores . . . I do not find it asserted by any good authority, that justices of the peace have any jurisdiction at all in such matter’. Justice of the Peace (1772), vol. IV, pp. 183–4; NA, DD 311/3, 29 Sep 1804. NA, DD 311/3, 2 Oct 1804.

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not record all his activity under statute law, as the one poor law case recorded by Woolley – one forced marriage – reveals. ‘Sept the 29 [1803] thomas hardy was taken before Sir Ger Clifton’, noted Woolley; ‘and he wrote his mittermus because he would not marry moll robbins but when he found he must Go to prison if he did not marry her he Confessed and he was taken to Langfords [the Coach and Horses public house] and he was guarded’.68 None of Woolley’s very long account, including much trouble in getting a marriage licence from Nottingham magistrates, is in Clifton’s notebook, perhaps because the page detailing it was lost or not bound in the volume; perhaps there was never a record in the first place. Perhaps incidents like these were not recorded because Clifton knew full well that he was not supposed to conduct settlement or bastardy examinations as a single justice, and about the scandal attaching to forced pauper marriages.69 In Tom Jones the narrator remarks of an irregular bastardy examination with shotgun wedding in prospect that ‘a lawyer may, perhaps, think Mr Allworthy exceeded his authority a little in this instance. And, to say the truth, I question, as there was no regular information before him, whether his conduct was strictly regular. However, as his intention was truly upright he ought to be excused . . . since many arbitrary acts are daily committed by magistrates, who have not . . . [his] excuse to plead for themselves.’ The magistrate-novelist Henry Fielding may explain the absence of these two incidents from Clifton’s pages, and the manner in which Woolley wrote about them.70 But that could not have been the reason for another incident recorded by Woolley but absent from Clifton’s records. In 1815 he issued a warrant at the request of a local couple for the arrest of a former gardener they suspected of poisoning their poultry (a property incident). ‘Some time in

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NA, DD 311/2, 29 Sep 1803. Keith Snell, The Parish and Belonging. Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 136, 143–4 for settlement examinations before single justices, and men ‘cajoled into marriage by the parish’. The examination of Moll Seagrim by Justice Allworthy occurs in the first volume of the edition that Woolley is most likely to have bought: The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. By Henry Fielding, Esq. In Three Volumes, T. Longman, B. Law & Son and 14 others, London, 1792, vol. I, pp. 156–7. Other magistrates were as pragmatic as Clifton about statutory limitations on their powers. In 1751 Northamptonshire JP Philip Ward heard the complaint of a watchmaker that his apprentice had assaulted him. ‘I granted a Warrant agt the Apprentice to be brought before Me but it seemed to me upon second thoughts that I as a single Justice can neither punish him upon s. 21 of 5 Eliz c. 4 nor upon the 4 s. of 20 Geo. 2 c. 19. but concealing my want of power I had the words of the Statute read over to him and he immediately desir’d he might be admitted to ask his Masters pardon upon promising never to offend more and so was forgiven’. Lincoln’s Inn Library, Misc. Ms. 592. Manuscript Diary of Philip Ward of Stoke Doyle, Northamptonshire, 1748–51.

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feb Joseph Cartwright had some of his Hens and is Cock poisoned,’ wrote Woolley. ‘He laid it to a person that did . . . [a neighbour’s] Garden and the man Being Inecent He sent them a Lawyers Letter and the Cartwrights went to Sir Ger Clifton for to show him the Letter and have his advice about it and Sir Gr Granted him a warrant to have him up.’71 After the gardener had been committed it ‘Come out’ that the man ‘had Laid some posison for the rats and they had not Eat it and He swept it up and threw it upon the Dung hill and it being spread upon the Bread and butter the hens Eate it’. They had been poisoned by accident. It was a serious business, as Woolley remarked: if the Cartwrights ‘Could have transported the man they would’. As it was they ‘had all the Expences to pay . . . a deal of money and Sarved them Rite’.72 But the best explanation for Woolley’s noting events that Clifton did not record, is that the magistrate’s two volumes are made up of randomly collected, selectively-bound notes from many years of magisterial activity. What’s not in them, and is in Woolley’s, is arbitrary and a matter of chance. Woolley always knew what he thought about the operation of the law in the neighbourhood – its fairness of application, who won, who lost, who got their just deserts, and when a magistrate had behaved inappropriately. It was ‘a very Scandelous thing . . . to fetch a warrant for Such a trifling thing’, he wrote in November 1801, at the end of an interminable story about a holiday fight that got out of hand (‘the day apointed for a hallarday and to be Commemorated by making . . . fires and Shooting we had one at Clifton’).73 Woolley wrote law’s language; legal formulations and phraseology were used to record many happenings in and around Clifton, and far beyond. He did not like to write what he was not certain of, and noted dodgy sources. Of a street brawl in February 1801 after the night watch had knocked a man down ‘and broak his head in a very Shocking manner’, he wrote that ‘I am told that he blead 2q of blood but I don’t believe my informer.’74 He used the formulation ‘by some person or persons unknown’ throughout all six of his volumes; he frequently 71

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Joseph Woolley reports three ‘lawyer’s letters’ obtained by locals between 1800 and 1815. As in this case, they were paid for by people who could not (or believed they were not going to) get satisfaction from the ordinary administration of the law. There were evidently local attorneys offering this service. A ‘lawyer’s letter’ was a figure, or a trope of late eighteenth-century literature in general and the joke book in particular. See The Wit’s Museum. Or an Elegant Collection of Bon Mots, Repartees, &c. Rational and Entertaining. Many of Which are Original. Printed, and Sold by All Booksellers in Town and Country, London, 1789. This aspect of turn-of-the-century law consciousness deserves further research, as does the relationship of the lawyer’s letter to the threatening letters issued by Luddites in their 1811–12 campaign. 73 NA, DD 311/6, Feb 1815. NA, DD 311/1, 5 Nov 1801. NA, DD 311/2, 29 Sep 1803.

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began a narrative with ‘as I am informed’ or ‘as I understand’. He did not often reveal his sources, but if he forgot where he had heard particular details, he said so. He used the wording of depositions and informations (‘the Said Belton’; ‘in willford aforsad’); he wrote of proceedings before Clifton as someone at home with legal vocabulary and procedures. He knew what magistrates in quarter sessions could and could not do as well as he knew about Sir Gervase’s remit in his justicing room. He thought about his neighbours’ canny use of the law and the different magistrates they approached in the hope of having it work to their advantage, and their many disappointments in this regard. Reading his long and convoluted accounts of fights and brawls and drunken altercations in ale houses, is not unlike reading the valiant attempts of Gervase Clifton to keep track of who said what to whom in a harvest field, who called whom a dirty stinking bitch, and where, and whose wound had bled so copiously over the town street the night before. ‘The said Mary Merrin’, and ‘on Tuesday last past at Wilford aforesaid’ are practical attempts of the magistrate (or clerk) to keep control of uncontrollable narratives. They were (and are) low-level techniques of writing universally practised by legal personnel, to make narrative coherence out of inchoate reported experience; to keep track of who is doing what and saying what to whom, so that some usable story about events might put the law into operation. The interesting insight provided by Joseph Woolley’s diaries is not that he may have learned this way of managing his writing from experience of listening in the magistrate’s parlour (that is not known), but rather that the long stories he heard whilst working at his frame, or walking into Nottingham, or drinking down the Coach and Horses, or in more dignified inebriation at the meeting of his Friendly Society, were structured in the way of all stories – including legal stories – in early nineteenth-century Nottinghamshire. In his writing, and in the dialogic relationships of everyday life that his writing records, the law inflected what Woolley thought, and what he said, and how he said it. This was not the way Sir Gervase Clifton wrote, either in his justice’s notebooks or in his brief appearances in the vast archive of his family’s lands, profit, and name.75 None of Clifton’s private writing has survived, to allow consideration of these two men on more equal terms. There were fewer levels, in, or about, Sir Gervase for the law to be in. In Woolley’s life and writing, the law really was at every bloody level.76 75 76

University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Clifton of Clifton, Cl A 572/1–3. E. P. Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays, Merlin, London, 1978, pp. 288–9.

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Eighteenth-century legal philosophers did not have men like Joseph Woolley in contemplation, but there was an attempt, by one at least, to explain a magistrate like Gervase Clifton. In 1769 the legal theorist John Taylor discussed questions of character and identity in public officials and private (ordinary) people. The ‘Persona . . . or Character, of a Magistrate, Guardian, etc.’ was different from that of father and son for example. For the public official operating in social life, a persona was analogous to a stage performance – ‘a character to put on and off; a convenient Method of Considering, an useful Way of Conceiving, such or such a Citizen, in order to carry on the Business of the Public more advantageously’. But that persona had nothing to do with, did ‘not enter into the Legal Notion of his Real Circumstances or Condition’. On the other hand, being in the relationship of father and son, or master and servant, or landlord and tenant was ‘something intrinsic in regard to the Circumstance and Operation of the Law’.77 The law shaped the relationships and identities of ordinary men and women, but the legal office of magistrate was something performed by Clifton. The ‘real’ Sir Gervase, his character, his feelings, his convictions and opinions, is not to be found in the performance, in life or in the writing of it. In role, he carried out the business of the law. But legal philosophy and theory apart, there were contemporary notions, widely available, of different ways in which the office of magistrate might be performed, in real life and in time and social circumstance.78 Fielding’s Tom Jones proceeds by a structured comparison of two ways of being a justice of the peace, in Magistrates Allworthy and Weston. But there appears to be nothing much to say of Clifton’s character or personality or life history in comparison with Woolley’s. We cannot imagine how Gervase Clifton imagined being a magistrate because of lack of evidence; but that does not mean that there was no imagining to be done. And textually, here and now, in this book, Clifton is diminished and flattened by comparison with the framework knitter, for Woolley made his identity, in writing of his own experience and that of his friends and neighbours. Experience of the law was part – of course not all – of this process of self-fashioning. Clifton, on the other hand, appears 77 78

John Taylor, Elements of the Civil Law, 3rd edn, Charles Bathurst, London, 1769, pp. 407–8. Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain, Resulting from Their Respective Stations, Professions, and Employments, B. and J. White, London, 1794, pp. 386–214. Norma Landau, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760, University of California Press, Berkeley and London, 1984, pp. 333–63, for ‘models of the model justice in the earlier century’.

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already made, already fashioned.79 In modern discussion of working people’s legal consciousness, a wedge has been driven between the law as a pre-existent system of meanings, and law-consciousness as those people’s patterns of language and action, made out of their understanding of how the law works.80 Legal-consciousness scholars have framed their inquiries by the binaries of power and resistance, hegemony and counter-hegemony. But as Woolley’s evidence suggests, there are other schemas to employ for the legal and social history of the long eighteenth century, so that law is not the pre-existing structure out of which subjectivities are made and stories told, but rather is the story itself. Woolley lived, worked and wrote in a context in which the law was understood as a solution to the problem of labour relations in the stocking trade. The consistent plea of its workers between 1800 and 1820 was for Parliament to legislate on their behalf.81 The Law of Framework Knitting was extensive.82 Seventeenth-century legislation, recently restated, underpinned every reckoning Woolley made of the stocking shapes he knitted, the price he paid for seaming, what he earned by them, and outgoings on frame-rent. It governed (though he did not say this) most moves he made in his working life.83 On the evidence of his notebooks, Sir Gervase Clifton had nothing to do with this law, noting only the distant echo of its transgression in a knitter’s broken arm, or report of a brawl in the town street outside the Coach and Horses. The Luddite Disturbances of 1811–12 do not feature in the 79

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For honesty as character in the poorer sort, underwritten in employers’ testimonials (characters), Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below, Duke University Press, Durham SC and London, 1993, p. 27. On patrician ‘honour’ and plebeian ‘honesty’, Michael McKeown, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1987, pp. 131–75. I. Kostiner, ‘Taking Legal Consciousness Seriously: Beyond Power and Resistance’, paper presented at the annual meeting of The Law and Society Association, Chicago, May 2004, www.allacademic.com/meta/p116866_index.html Great Britain. House of Commons. Report from the Committee on the Framework-Knitters Petitions, 1812 (247)II.203; Second Report from the Committee on the Framework Knitters Petitions, 1812 (349)II.267; Report from the Select Committee on Framework Knitters Petition; Together with the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before Them, 1819 (193)V.401; Report from the Select Committee on Masters and Operatives; together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, 1860 (307)XII. 444. Burn, Justice (18th edn, 1793), vol. II, unpaged: ‘Frame work Knitters’; Bird, Laws, pp. 66–7; Williams, Whole Law, Vol. 3, pp. 280–1; William Toone, The Magistrate’s Manual; or, A Summary of the Duties and Powers of a Justice of the Peace. To Which Is Added a Copious Collection of Precedents of Summonses, Warrants, Convictions, &c, Butterworth, London, 1813, pp. 164–5; Gravenor Henson, The Civil, Political and Mechanical History of the Framework Knitters in Europe and America, Sutton, Nottingham, 1831, pp. 257–425; Stanley D. Chapman, Hosiery and Knitwear: Four Centuries of Small-Scale Industry in Britain, c. 1589–2000, Oxford University Press, 2002. Binfield (ed.), Writings, pp. 20–32.

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writing of either man. Their silence is not simply a matter of absent documentation, or, in Clifton’s case, absence from his estate. Rather, as we shall see, their silences can be made to speak to everyday goings-on in the world that produced Luddism. In the everyday world of the Clifton estates, Sir Gervase Clifton was not only a magistrate, and his authority did not solely derive from the law. As landowner and landlord he had a Church of England living to bestow, as Woolley frequently pointed out. Woolley drew particular attention to the conjunction of social and ecclesiastical powers that framed life for his family and many of his neighbours, as shall now be discussed.

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Now therefore there is utterly a fault among you, because ye go to law one with another. 1 Corinthians 6:7.

O happy Wilford, Clifton and Barton! Who is a people like unto thee? Anti-Conventicle, The Protestant Address to the Inhabitants of Nottingham and its Vicinity, 1800.

According to Joseph Woolley the Reverend William Clifton was ‘presented to the rectory by Sir Gervas Clifton barent of Clifton’ in September 1803, and very soon fell out with his patron – and everyone else in the parish.1 Woolley described the death, funeral, and will of the former rector in very great detail; the departed Abel Collin Launder very quickly became a measure of how much times, spiritual and earthly, had changed in Clifton.2 Launder had been generous to the parish, giving barley to the poor during the hungry year 1800–1 and a substantial amount of corn [wheat] in January 1803.3 In the early twentieth century there was memory enough of the new 1803 rector for a local historian to report that Launder’s replacement was an arbitrary choice: ‘was in no way related to the [Clifton] family . . . his patron met him by chance at an inn, and offered him the vacant living, partly no doubt on account of his name’.4 William Clifton moved into the rectory with his wife and 1 2

3 4

NA, DD 311/2, 17 Sep 1803. ‘August the 29 the revd mr abel Collin Launder died at his house at nottingham about one o’clock in the fornoon he died in is studey in a too armed Chair . . . he died of the Gout’. NA DD 311/2, 1803. Launder, Abel Collin (1749–1803), Rector Elton on the Hill, 1750–1803; Tollerton, 1753–1755; Clifton with Glapton, 1754–1803, Clergy of the Church of England Database, Person ID 94079. Woolley made nine entries about him in the year after his death. As for the Revd Mr Clifton, little is known; he does not appear in the Clergy database. But see University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections, AN/IM 208/2 – 214/4, Abstracts of names of clergymen, taken from Induction Mandates, 1699–1942, AN/IM 212/2/69: ‘Clifton, William, Rector, Clifton . . . Patron Sir Gervase Clifton of Clifton, Bart. . . . 16.9.1803’. He had been about a bit before the Clifton tenure which he retained until his death in 1830. NA, DD 311/1, 8 Mar 1801; DD 311/2, Jan 1803. Rosslyn Bruce, The Clifton Book (Nottingham), Henry B. Saxton, Nottingham, 1906, III.

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Figure 6. Clifton Hall, from Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire, by John Throsby, 1797

daughters: he lived in Clifton, as the very old and ill Reverend Launder had not done for many years.5 An important factor in the change experienced by local people was his constant presence – and his vigorous attempts to make the most he could out of the land and property attached to the living. The Woolley family was directly affected by the financial restructuring he undertook in the early part of 1804, as we have seen.6 William Clifton wanted a higher return on the grazing land that Samuel Woolley had had under an arrangement with Mr Launder. The Woolleys were not the only sufferers. Two weeks after the new rector’s arrival,

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One of Clifton’s children died a month after his arrival. ‘October the 7 Charlotte Clifton daughter of William Clifton was bured aged 19 years William Clifton rector of Clifton Caused a vault to be made for his fameley on the Charncel belonging to Clifton Church’. NA, DD 311/2, 7 Oct 1803. He intended to stay. On march the 4 [1809] the revd william Clifton Bured his youngest daughter and the only remaining daughter he had She died on Child bed and the Child did also and was bured’. NA, DD 311/4. For Launder’s residence in Nottingham, n. 2 above, and NA, DD 311/1, 1 Apr, 12 Apr, Dec 1801. See Chapter 3.

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Woolley noted ‘September the 19 [1803] mr marting had a discharge / him from the revd William Clifton to quit his farm at a fortnits notes’; in November ‘mr Clifton began to pull down mr martins blacksmith shop and some out buildings to make a brue house and other Convenences for him Self’.7 In September 1804 a man was thrown out of the house he had rented from Reverend Launder: ‘mr Clifton . . . turned him out and he was forsed to go into one of the hospitall houses till Such time as the parish Cold build him one’.8 There are many entries like this. The first sermon the new rector preached in St Mary’s was to the text Matthew 7:25 (‘Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not life more than meat, and the body than raiment?’).9 This was an augury of things to come, perhaps, and certainly a tactless prescription for times of harvest failure and food shortage. And Clifton people cared a great deal about what they ate and what they drank. In May 1804 the dawn of a new disciplinary regime was noted by Woolley, though we are not to know if the new stocks erected in Clifton were ordered by the Rector or by the churchwardens. Woolley’s first observation was about their manufacture (‘Some time in may or then abouts Either a month before or a month after I Canot tell but wee had a new Stocks put up or it might be in april I will not say but it is the Second stocks that I can remember being put up in our parish boath by the same man William quinton the first was bad and the second not much better’). Then he wrote that ‘I am fond of good order but I wish them that gave it [the order for them to be made] to be set in them first . . . ’.10 By the autumn of 1804 village – and magisterial – relations with the Rector had already reached a nadir. There was Sunday trading trouble when he ordered the Wilford butcher to stop Sunday deliveries of meat to Clifton. According to Woolley George Harpham retorted that as long as ‘other butchers did he should’; moreover he had seen another butcher’s lad ‘coming up to Clifton with meat on a Sunday morning and he asked him whear he was a Going with it and the boy told him that he was a Goin to parson Cliftons’. Hypocrisy exposed, ‘the old parson . . . [had been]

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NA, DD 311/2, 19 Sep, 21 Nov 1803 (these two entries are not chronological). NA, DD 311/3, Sep 1804. NA DD 311/2, Oct 1803, ‘The revd William Cliftons text the first Sunday he preached was from the 6 Chapter of mathews gospel and the 25 vers he preached the first time on Sunday September the 18th’. Woolley made no comment. He did occasionally have something to say about preaching, remarking of a March 1803 Nottingham sermon that it was ‘a very able discorse’. NA DD 311/2, 2 May 1803. But this was to 1 Corinthians 4:5 – generous in spirit compared with William Clifton’s message. NA, DD 311/3, May 1804.

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So angre that he Called him a Sorsey fellow and told him that he would tell Sir Gerves Clifton and So he did’.11 The magistrate took on the role of mediator, one which he had often to perform in relation to the Rector. Sir Gervase’s first move was to go ‘owr to harphams and order . . . [him] not . . . kill aney more meat if he did he would turn him out of the farm’. (Harpham was one of his tenants; Harpham’s son did the delivery run.) Perhaps the question of Sunday observance and ecclesiastical law was on his mind as he rode to Wilford. There was statute law from the reign of Charles I to bring to bear on the question of Sunday butchering, and common law considerations as well: statute law had been adjusted by a judgement of 1739, on the grounds that an indictment against a butcher exercising his trade on a Sunday had not been against the form of 3 Charles 1 c. 1, and that to do so was ‘no offence at common law’. Or so Dr Burn’s Ecclesiastical Law would have informed him, had he possessed a copy.12 But his role as magistrate and mediator was strongly inflected by his position as landlord. The intervention of a Wilford gentleman may have influenced him to give the butcher ‘Leive to Go on as he did before onley he must not Send meat to Clifton on a Sunday morning’. (When? Woolley was not clear on this point.) As far as Woolley was concerned, this was a satisfying conclusion, for ‘the old parson Cold not have is will’. (None of this incident to do with social regulation is in the magistrate’s notebook.) Sir Gervase acted out of local knowledge and a fine assessment of community and neighbourly relations (and out of a growing dislike of the great cuckoo he had lodged at the Rectory). By some stretch of the social historian’s imagination we could see Harpham’s assertion that he was going to go on in the same way as long as others did, as a statement of common right, or at least, custom and practice; but this was not a proclamation uttered to Sir Gervase (at least, not that we know of) and it was not what appears to have influenced him in his final decision to allow the butcher to go on as before – only not to bring the makings of Sunday dinner into Clifton before the end of morning service. Then there was trouble with the Rector’s gardener who, when he left service, took with him a clothes box provided by Mrs Clifton, believing it to be a gift. ‘[T]he old parson fetched a warrant for him and would have 11 12

NA, DD 311/3, Oct 1804. Richard Burn, Ecclesiastical Law. By Richard Burn, LL. D. . . . The Sixth Edition; with Notes and References by Simon Fraser, Esq. Barrister at Law. In Four Volumes, T. Cadell & W. Davies, London, 1797, vol. II, pp. 412–13; Sir John Strange, Reports of Adjudged Cases in the Courts of Chancery, King’s Bench, Common Pleas and Exchequer, from Trinity Term in the Second Year of King George I, to Trinity Term in the Twenty-First Year of King George II . . . In Two Volumes, privately printed, 1756, vol. I, p. 702.

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trans. Ported him if he Cold hav done but he [the gardener] had too many friends . . . [the Rector] Could doe nothing.’13 This troubling affair (involving property and its appropriation) ‘was settled before Sir Gerves Clifton’. Woolley noted this; the magistrate did not – and there is evidence that the diarist was present when the gardener was questioned, for he noted the magistrate’s tone of voice and demeanour. Sir Gervase was already wearying of William Clifton. ‘[W]hen they Came befor Sir Gerves he began to talk very mild to the Gardenor about the box and asked him if he was willing to deliver the box to mr Clifton.’ As ‘Sir Gerves was talking to him in this manner mr clifton put in and Said to Sir Gerves he stole the box but Sir Gerveses reply was that the docter must hold his tongue for it was no such thing as Stole it was intierley a mistake he Could See very plain and So that Stoped the docters mouth he Spoke but once more after . . . the old docter was very much dispointed’, said Woolley. Sympathetic and kind Sir Gervase may have appeared, but the gardener ended up a loser here.14 The Reverend Clifton was a man with employment trouble – partly because he was so keen to use the very latest master and servant legislation to his own advantage. In October 1805 he and a local carpenter had words about the latter’s not turning up as arranged to fit some door hinges at the Rectory. (This was William Quinton, the maker of the village stocks, and the tradesman who had fitted the lock to the ‘stolen’ box the year before, and refused to take the sum from the gardener that Sir Gervase had dictated for its removal.) Clearly now a case of a workman/servant refusing to come to his hire! The Rector turned Quinton away and got someone else to do the job. Quinton didn’t care, said Woolley. He was working on Sir Gervase’s new stables and would not leave that job to attend to the parson. ‘It is . . . Like all the rest of is rouges action’, remarked Woolley; ‘he wanted to doe quinton all the hurt 13 14

NA, DD 311/3, 29 Sep 1804. Sir Gervase said that the man must take his clothes and remove the new lock he had had put on the box; ‘if he would not agree to this he must Send him to prison and he must stand a trial So the Gardenor agreed to it’. The magistrate set the expenses very high at 7s 6d, though the gardener made a deal with the carpenter (for removing the lock) and he ended up paying only 3s 6d. Presumably Sir Gervase didn’t know that. Or decided not to ‘know’ it. Four years later in 1809 Woolley reported on the rector having yet more trouble with a gardener. ‘[H]e turned him out of is house after he had been one year when he Came first he was to have had as much Ground as would Cut hay for too Cows and he braught too Cows and put them in the pasture but he would not find him aney Ground for winter . . . and he must Leave is house so the man was obliged to sell is Cows at a Great disadvantage it was said that he sunk as much as ten pounds before he Came that he sold most of the best of his Goods to raise money to Come and when he had been there one year was turned out in such a rascaldy action the old parson had done’. NA, DD 311/4, Mar 1809.

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he Cod with Sir Gerves and he thaught that if he Cold Git quinton to neglect Sir Gerveses work he should have a fine flaw against him but Quinton was too fast . . . for the old rogue and would not oblige him So to be revenged he turned him off’.15 The magistrate also had employment trouble. We have seen Harry Allen turned away from Clifton’s London house for sleeping with the cook. That was in 1813. In 1803 Sir Gervase had demonstrated a keenness rivalling the Rector’s to go to law in a service dispute. He had dismissed a manservant, following this up with a bad character (reference). The man brought an action for damages in the high courts and was awarded £20. The judges confirmed that a master giving a bad character of a servant was not liable to damages unless he acted out of malice, but malice here had been proven: ‘on the trial . . . it came out in evidence, and was not rebutted by Sir Gervas, that he . . . had not only written a letter . . . giving a bad character, but had . . . gone to another person, requesting him not to recommend the servant to a place’. He had also attempted to stop the person from giving evidence at the trial. Sir Gervas appealed against this decision; but the Court of Common Pleas judges confirmed the original judgment: ‘this was malice’.16 But throughout Woolley’s diaries ‘malice’ is attributed to the Reverend William Clifton, never to Sir Gervase. He reserved his greatest invective for the Rector: ‘He is a nasty old rascard and it is a pity if he is not met with it at Last for he as a Great maney villenious streeks.’ He was shocked by the reference he supplied for the gardener in the clothes-box case: ‘the old rogue sent such a Carector to the mast[er] were the young man went to Live as never was hear all the damest Lies that Ever is mallis Could invent but the gentle man knew the old parson so well that he took no notes of it . . . it is pitty that he could not have Sent the parson to the Jail for stopping is Cloaths but it is all over’. Then, a week after the clothes-box incident, in October 1804, ‘a parsel of the top of the town wimen and John oldham went to ask Sir Gerves 15

16

NA, DD 311/3, Aug 1805. Labour law (occasionally) cut both ways as Woolley (almost) remarked: ‘he [the rector] for Get to pay him is bill but that dont hurt much for when the other wants it he will be forsed to pay it’. Bury and Norwich Post; or, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex and Cambridge Advertiser, 7 Dec 1803; Derby Mercury, 8 Dec 1803; The Times, 28 Nov. 1803, ‘Court of Common Pleas, Nov. 26. Rogers v. Clifton’. For employers’ ‘characters’ and the law, Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 199–217. Woolley mentioned a coachman of Sir Gervase (‘a verey proud prodegal fellow . . . that . . . was Sir Gerveases Coachman and thaught that aney bodey durst not tuch him being Such a fine man’) but his name was Turton, not Rogers. Clifton’s servant-trouble was in his London house; but it is unlikely that Woolley didn’t know about it, for he read the papers.

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Clifton to Let the rode that the old parson ordered to be to be stopt up to be opened again’. Blocking the pathway had made travel-time to the fields much longer for Clifton people.17 John Oldham and the women ‘told their tale’ to the magistrate. He asked the old man ‘how Long he Cold remember it being a road and John told him that it had been a road for eighty years to his noledge and Sir Gerves said that it Should be a road still and ordered the old parson’ to have the contractor stop work. And so ‘the old parson was forst to unstop the road . . . he Cold not have is will in that but was Got over with a few old wimmen’, wrote Woolley. He listed the women’s names in a triumphal roll call. Sir Gervase drew on the common-law and common-right memory of elderly villagers – that is how Woolley saw things (and as a battle of will between the Rector and the parish).18 In this county of vast estates, Sir Gervase Clifton was only a smalltime player. The term ‘The Dukeries’ – the large tract of central Nottinghamshire containing the estates of five dukes – was first used in the eighteenth century.19 But for an economic historian like J. D. Chapman writing in the 1930s about the factors underpinning Nottinghamshire’s early industrial development, it was the ‘squirearchy’ – men like Clifton – who counted, in their powerful combination of landownership, magistracy, and role in county administration. He called this system of local government ‘the tempered despotism of property’.20 The ancient Clifton family had been in the business of land acquisition and consolidation since medieval times. The family’s 17

18 19

20

Woolley had foreseen problems with the rector’s plans as early as August: ‘the 10 George Carlile Cut is knee as he was stoping the rode over the parsons Sheep Closes he was Lame for a bout a week and some people Said that it was a pittey that he had [not] Cut the parsons Legs of in sted of cuting imself for it had been a rode Ever since the memory of man and how Long befor nobody Can tell but the parson is not willing to Let it be a road for any Longer and it puts a maney people very much about for he made old Luke hallam stop his stile up that lay into barkers home Close and barker was forst to stop the stile up at the bottom So there is no rode down there to nether Gate as there allways use to be . . . it makes it very ill Convenient for the milkers in the Summer when they Go a milking to the pasture for all the top End of the town went down nether Gate and up the Cop Leas amd all about Cross hill went down barkers Close and up the Copleas but now they are forst to Go down the town from about the Cros hill and up the pastuer Lane and those at the top End of the town are forst to Come down the town or Else down neather Gate which makes it a deal about and in raney weather it is very dirty but there is not aney body that does opose it [at] presant’. NA, DD 311/3, 10 Aug 1804. By October they did – oppose it. NA, DD 311/3, 6 Oct 1804. R. J. Waller, The Dukeries Transformed: The Social and Political Development of a TwentiethCentury Coalfield, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1983; Adrian Gray, Sherwood Forest and the Dukeries, Phillimore, Chichester, 2008. J. D. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century: A Study of Life and Labour under the Squirearchy [1932], 2nd edn, Frank Cass, London, 1966, pp. 45–78.

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private accounts peter out in the eighteenth century; henceforth Clifton acquisition and appropriation by enclosure is to be found in the public records of parliament.21 Private enclosure acts brought the family the formal, modern possession of its acres. Also, throughout the eighteenth century the family pursued loans and mortgages on the estates and land and capital brought by marriage settlements (some dating back to the seventeenth century) through the high court of Parliament.22 In his 1797 survey of Nottinghamshire, John Throsby noted that although the manor of Clifton had long been held by the family, ‘it was inclosed about the year 1765. It contains rather more than 1200 acres.’ Wilford, enclosed at the same time, was 1800 acres.23 A more modern survey (counting Barton-in-Fabris, which was enclosed at the same time as Clifton-with-Glapton and Wilford) suggests that Sir Gervase was in possession of some 3500 acres at the time he started to act as a justice of the peace in the 1770s.24 He was lord of the manors of Clifton and Wilford. According to Joseph Woolley he held a manorial court in Clifton, perhaps with more regularity than he reported, for Woolley’s diaries were not kept for every year between 1800 and 1815.25 In any case, Sir Gervase kept a tight grip on tenant discipline: in March 1804 his ‘tenants having a half years rent in hand he made them pay it a Long with the alf years rent that they had to pay at Laday day so they paid [a] years rent instead of alf a one and he made John butler pay another repayment of 20 pounds . . . and discharged him from dining with him and the other farmers for some misbehaviour about plowing the pasture’.26 And yet in Woolley’s view, the baronet was a better landlord than was the rector, though perhaps

21

22

23

24 25

26

Great Britain. Parliament. An Act for Dividing and Inclosing Several Open Fields, Meadows and Commons, within the Lordship or Liberty of Wilford, in the County of Nottingham, London, 1765 (5 Geo. III. c. 67). Also 30 Geo. III, c. 42 and 32 Geo. II, c. 55. Josiah Brown, Reports of Cases, upon Appeals and Writs of Error, in the High Court of Parliament; from the Year 1701, to the Year 1779, His Majesty’s Law-Printers, London, 1779, vol. III, pp. 52–60, vol. VII, p. 24. John Throsby, John Thoroton’s History of Nottinghamshire: Republished with Large Additions by John Throsby; and Embellished with Picturesque and Select Views of Seats of Nobility and Gentry, Towns, Villages Churches and Ruins, 2nd edn, 3 vols., privately printed, Nottingham, 1790, vol. I, pp. 112–16. Chambers, Nottinghamshire in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 333–53. NA, DD 311/2, Apr 1803, ‘the 19 there was a Cort held at thomas Langford for Swaring Sir Ger Clifton tenants and for taking acknowledgement of them and making Laws for the parish to go by’. When Woolley finally got out from under the Reverend Clifton and became one of Sir Gervase’s tenants, he ‘paid at the Cort for being sworn in tennant 2s’. NA, DD 311/5, 6 Sep 1813. Christopher Jessel, The Law of the Manor, Barry Rose, Chichester, 1998. NA, DD 311/3, Apr 1804.

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only by default, and because William Clifton was such a bad and arbitrary one. And Sir Gervase was really not there very much.27 In these circumstances of ownership, property, and power, what did it mean that Sir Gervase had ‘a living’ to bestow on William Clifton? In the late eighteenth century (and earlier) a parish was both a civil and ecclesiastical unit of administration, both roles inextricably linked within the same territory.28 Thus a parish was also a place – an extent of land marked off for administrative and other purposes. The operation of the old poor law in Clifton demonstrates this dual role: the churchwardens kept the parish records and accounts; they appointed the parish clerk who recorded the data of church and state. Overseers brought unmarried mothers and putative fathers before the local magistrate; all attempted to make those in receipt of poor relief live less high and well.29 In Clifton, as elsewhere, a churchwarden might be the same person as the constable, as Woolley sometimes noted.30 To the modern eye the amalgamation of civil and ecclesiastical function – or the number of lay personnel involved in church organisation – may appear surprising. If vestrymen met to pass the annual parish accounts, it was on church premises; vestrymen fixed the annual church rate and poor rate; they appointed parish constables, sidewardens, and overseers of the poor.31 But we sometimes read late eighteenth-century parish organisation at the end of a long

27

28

29

30

31

Clifton opinion was divided on the question of Sir Gervase as landlord. In December 1804, Woolley described how one man had been entered tenant ‘for that Cottage insted of is father he had had it of his father by agreement Ever since is father run a way and Sartenly deserved it for he was first to Settle all is fathers afairs while he was of but Some people thaught that it was hard that he should take it from old Luke and Let it to is Sone as old Luke stood tenant before’. NA, DD 311/3, Dec 1804. Woolley noted the rector’s absences, sometimes twice over: DD 311/3, ‘Sept the 16 [1805] the old parson Clifton went down into Seaforth’; ‘Sept the 14 the old parson Set off from Clifton to Go into sufolk’; DD 311/5, ‘aug the 17 or 18 [1813] the Revd William Clifton arrived at Clifton after being away the greater part of a year’. K. D. M. Snell, The Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 366–447; Mark Smith, ‘The Hanoverian Parish: Towards a New Agenda’, Past and Present, 216:1 (2012), pp. 79–105. James Barry Bird, The Laws Respecting Parish Matters. Containing the Several Offices and Duties of Churchwardens, Overseers of the Poor, Constables, Watchmen, and Other Parish Officers . . . The Second Edition, Improved and Much Enlarged . . . , W. Clarke and Son, London, 1799. NA, DD 311/3, ‘august 14 1805 mr bengeman deveral was Constable and Gerves reckless deputy Constable’; Nottingham University, Cl 171/2/10–18, Bingham Deanery, Clifton with Glapton, Churchwardens. Benjamin Deverill was churchwarden between 1804 and 1808, Gervas Reckless between 1805 and 1807. Michael Snape, The Church in an Industrial Society: The Lancashire Parish of Whalley in the Eighteenth Century, Boydell Press, Woodbridge, 2003, p. 25; Alistair Mutch, ‘Custom and Personal Accountability in Eighteenth-Century South Nottinghamshire Church Governance’, Midland History, 36:1 (2011), pp. 69–88.

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nineteenth-century development that separated church and state at the local level. The elision was nothing strange to Joseph Woolley. In June 1801 he reported that on ‘June the 30 there was a Confermation at St marys Church [Nottingham] there was 40 young people was Confirmed out of Clifton there was Some disturbance and the mair has the milatary out there was not much mischeaf done only Some Gowns belonging to the young Women and the Coats belonging to the young men that went to be Confirmed there was Some of the rabbel happrended and Sent to the Jail John price of Clifton was Sent to the Jail for Some abusif Langwag that he made use of to the mair but through the Good will of mr brown the Cuerate of Clifton and mr Lambert the Church wardings of Clifton he was Set at Liberty the Same night’.32 Confirmations were often an occasion of riotous behaviour (in the sense of revelry, rather than disorder). On this occasion the mayor of Nottingham (a magistrate by right of office) called in the civil power. Woolley saw nothing odd in the Clifton curate and a Clifton churchwarden acting together on behalf of a parishioner.33 But the magistrates before whom churchwardens and overseers named miscreants, absconding fathers, and people refusing to undertake parish work, were not of the parish in the same way as were either paupers or parish officials. Magistrates were not parish officials. Gervase Clifton lived in Clifton (for some of the year) in the way that everyone lived in, or belonged to a parish, but he administered the law as part of a national system. We have seen him visited in his justicing room by residents of parishes up to twenty miles away. The village of Clifton was hard by the hamlet of Glapton; the ecclesiastical parish was Clifton with Glapton, under the diocese of York. The lords of the manor of Clifton were patrons of the Rectory, by tradition and long usage. They did not own the parish Church of St Mary, or the dwelling-house, land, and other property attached to it. These were the ‘temporalities’ – the church properties and possessions

32 33

NA, DD 311/1, 30 Jun 1801. For confirmation (‘being bishoped’) as a kind of popular festival, Robert Cornwall, ‘The Rite of Confirmation in Anglican Thought during the Eighteenth Century’, Church History, 68 (1999), pp. 359–72. Robert Lambert was Clifton churchwarden in 1801. He was replaced by his son later in the year. Nottingham University Special Collections, AN/Cl 174/4/3–5. I cannot trace ‘Mr Brown’. Later in 1801, reporting on the fever that had swept Nottingham in the spring – ‘Some days Eight funerals at Saint marey Church’ – Woolley noted that ‘revd mr brown had it and a Long and sever fit of illness he had for 14 or 15 weeks . . . makes me note is illness he is the Curate of the parish of Clifton for the reverend Lauder and the Charety School . . . in nottingham . . . the blew Coat Charety School at the bottom of the High pavement’. In August 1803 he noted that on ‘August the 7 Luke hallam and marey Stevens was maried in Clifton Church by the revd mr brown Curate’. NA, DD 311/2.

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within the parish – which belonged to the Diocese of York. In some remote era of time, the Cliftons of Clifton had probably bestowed these properties on the church – long before it was the Church of England. The right of patronage had belonged to the original donor of the properties, but centuries later, Sir Gervase’s right of patronage (his ability to bestow the living of St Mary’s) amounted to no more than permission to present (nominate) a clergyman to the bishop as someone fit for the office to which the temporalities were attached. It was the bishop who found the person (William Clifton) fit (or not fit), and it was suitability for the spiritual office attached to the living that a bishop must inquire into (not fitness to occupy a glebe house, or fitness to receive tithes and other revenues).34 The right of a cleric to the ecclesiastical revenues of a parish was on the condition that he discharged certain duties. But that was a contract, or arrangement, between him and the bishop, or the church at large, with which Sir Gervase Clifton had nothing to do. A patron had no way of getting rid of a troublesome priest, should a patron ever think of so doing. The Reverend William Clifton stayed put until his death in 1830. Shortly after the Rector’s death the glebe land attached to the living of St Mary’s Clifton was reckoned at 220 acres, and the net income of the benefice £405 per annum.35 What the income was in 1803 we do not know; we do know from Joseph Woolley that on his arrival in Clifton he set about maximising the profits of the benefice. We also know from Woolley that there was a farm on the Rector’s acres, a sheep close, grazing land for cattle that he rented out, a fish pond in the glebe-house (Rectory) yard, and an orchard attached. We also know from Woolley that Mr Clifton grew barley in another of his closes (fields) and that he derived an income from several properties in Clifton. This was a small agricultural enterprise, as well as a reasonable living. And the only two men to pay the land tax in Clifton were Sir Gervase and the Rector.36

34 35

36

G. F. A. Best, Temporal Pillars: Queen Anne’s Bounty, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and the Church of England, Cambridge University Press, 1964, pp. 46–52. John Curtis, A Topographical History of Nottinghamshire (issued in parts), Strange, London, 1844, Part 1, pp. 60–2. Also Great Britain. Parliament. Account of Benefices and Population; Churches, Chapels, and Their Capacity; Number and Condition of Glebe Houses; and Income of All Benefices Not Exceeding 150 per ann. Together with Abstracts of the Same. Returned by the Archbishops and Bishops to His Majesty in Council, 1818 (005)XVIII.137, p. 211; Great Britain. House of Commons. Report of the Commissioners Appointed by His Majesty to Inquire into the Ecclesiastical Revenues of England and Wales. 1835 (67) XXII.15. NA, QDE 1/4, Land Tax Assessments, 1781–1832. John Broad, ‘The Land Tax and the Study of Village Communities’, in Michael Turner and Dennis Richard Mills (eds.), Land and Property: The English Land Tax 1692–1832, St Martin’s Press, New York, 1986, pp. 62–70.

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Both Sir Gervase and William Clifton possessed an earthly power based on land and real estate ownership. Both of them exercised it through their behaviour towards their tenants, servants, and other workers. The Reverend Clifton also had spiritual powers which derived from his office. The obligation to discharge its duties (the care of souls, the sermons the established church expected, performance of the rites of the Church of England, and, as one lord chief justice opined, the obligation to actually live among his parishioners) was a spiritual obligation.37 But in Clifton, between 1800 and 1815, as elsewhere, the spiritual could not be divided off from the temporal in the modern secular manner, though many attempted to do so. In 1799 Lord Chief Justice Kenyon had declared in King’s Bench that in every ‘well constituted Government, there must be an attention to the service of God’. Indeed, ‘religion must always be in strict alliance with the State, otherwise it is impossible, humanely considering things, anything can go on profoundly’.38 That proclamation is the best way to understand the spiritual, earthly, and legal powers played out between the rector and the magistrate and the people of Clifton during the time Woolley kept his diaries. It was the magistrate’s and the clergyman’s pronouncements on Methodism and how they behaved in regard to local Methodists that shaped Joseph Woolley’s religious context – and what he believed and thought about God, the law – and power in general. Joseph Woolley did not particularly like Methodists and dissenters. He reported with distaste his conversations with a local woman who, typical of ‘such Saints’, testified long and hard about her certainty of salvation, ‘and how happy she feels’. It was the same with all ‘religionists . . . meetingers or baptists’: ‘all such pretenders to religon’ were hypocrites, and unbearably self-righteous.39 In 1801 he copied out with great care ‘a recipt how to make a true methodist’ (‘take of the herb of hypocrisy and the root of Spiritual pride: take 2 hands full of ambition 37 38

39

Steedman, Master and Servant, pp. 89–90. ‘Law Report’, The Times, 10 May 1799. For turn-of-the-century anxieties about nonresident clergy, Best, Temporal Pillars, pp. 198–201. A whole series of prosecutions against clergy for non-residence (like this 1799 one) prompted suspension of the laws against it at the start of the century, and then in 1803 the passage of a revised residence statute. William Scott, Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable William Scott Delivered in the House of Commons, Wednesday, April 7, 1802, upon a Motion for Leave to Bring in a Bill, Relative to the Non-Residence of the Clergy, and Other Affairs of the Church, Cobbett and Morgan, London, 1802. Also A. C. Wood, ‘Clerical Non-Residence in Nottinghamshire, 1803–38’, in Thomas Mathews Blagg (ed.), A Miscellany of Notts Records, Thoroton Society Record Series 11, Thoroton Society, Nottingham, 1945, pp. 42–67; W. M. Jacobs, The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680– 1840, Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. 95–112. NA, DD 311/5, Mar 1813.

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vain Glory and imprudence a sufficient Quantity boil them over the fire of sedition . . . ’), carefully noting who gave it to him.40 But his sarcasm and invective was directed at their behaviour and canting language; he understood very well the tenuous and vulnerable position of Methodists in Clifton – anywhere on Sir Gervase’s estates. In August 1815 he described how the rector had intimidated one of them: ‘Mr Clifton had is Garden Robed and he thought that some of George hoes people had robed it . . . [as] they had some work about it and old George being a methodist [the] parson told him that the over Righteous people was not always the Honestest and it frited old George so [and] his famely that he Left off Going to the meeting and Goes to Church.’41 Methodists in Clifton were very worried. In October Woolley noted that ‘Mr Hopwell Declined Haveing the Mthodist meeting at is Hse but it was Because he durst not have it there aney Longer so the flock met at George Smiths in the morning what they call the Class meeting and then they dispersed some to one place and some to another and too of them came to Church.’42 George Hoe and friends were frightened for good reason: Clifton had been a site of conflict between the established order and Methodism for fifteen years. It is unlikely that Woolley did not know about Sir Gervase Clifton’s long campaign against Methodism which he waged as a magistrate, landlord, and in the public press, or about the national context to this local war of religion.43 In 1800 a display notice appeared on the front page of the Nottingham Journal, cautioning the public against attending meetings at which ‘certain Preachers exercis[ed] their Religion in the open air, and in unlicenced houses at Wilford, Clifton, Barton, and other neighbouring parishes within the county of Nottingham’. The term ‘contrary to Law’ was used. The ‘Caution’ reiterated the law on the question of unlicensed preaching: ‘Upon information which the Churchwardens are bound to give, the Justice is obliged to put the law into 40

41

42 43

This appears to be a version of ‘The Fanatical Discordum’ from Scotch Presbyterianism Display’d, or, the Folly of Their Teaching Discovered, 1738, a comic work. The recipe could be used to satirise any kind of political or religious enemy of the established order, as in A Tory Pill, to Purge Whig Melancholy; or, A Collection of Above One Hundred New Loyal Ballads &c, Written in Defence of Church and State, London, 1715. Also Thomas Brown, ‘Letters Serious and Comical’, in The Works of Mr Thomas Brown, 9th edn, Vol. 3, Wilde and 12 others, London, 1760. Brown’s works were widely reproduced, and the formula, or recipe, often repeated. NA, DD 311/6, Aug 1815. For ‘occasional conformity’, James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-Century Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 69–79. NA, DD 311/6, ‘Sunday Oct the 22’, 1815. W. R. Ward, Religion and Society in England, 1790–1850, B. T. Batsford, London, 1972, pp. 21–104.

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execution,’ it said. The notice described what had happened to George Alvey, a preacher from Arnold (‘this day . . . convicted before me in the penalty of £10 for preaching aforesaid’), and to George Merrin of Wilford, one of the congregation (a penalty of five shillings). The notice was inserted by Sir Gervase Clifton, who thought ‘it proper to publish this caution, to prevent the unwary from incurring the like penalties’. It was published at a high point of national panic about the preaching of dissent.44 Then the paper wars commenced. In his pamphlet riposte to the ‘caution’, the anonymous ‘Anti-Conventicle’ had a lot of fun with Sir Gervase’s prose style (‘the writer seems to be fond of Ciceronian or Miltonian periods, which you please’); he said he had been obliged to insert punctuation to make the writer’s meaning intelligible.45 He had a good laugh at the idea of preaching as an open-air exercise (‘not strictly in the theological style’). He pointed out that though the law in which the magistrate instructed his readers was still on the statute books, ‘very few such cautions have been given since the days of Queen Mary of blessed memory, and the reign of Charles the second’. And why did not the magistrate name his enemies? Catholics didn’t go in for openair preaching; most clergymen of the established church would rather die than do so – so it had to be that ‘some of the dissenting Preachers . . . have been exercising in the open air’.46 Sarcasm exercised, ridicule exhausted, Anti-Conventicle moved into sombre mood. ‘The honourable writer of the Caution has considerable property in these towns,’ he revealed; ‘and it said that he declared that no house belonging to him should be licenced [for preaching]. What can be done? The tenants must either worship in houses subject to the penal acts, or exercise their religion in the open air.’47 If a gentleman’s tenants kept his property in repair and paid their rent, then he had no more right ‘to forbid the inhabitants to sing hymns, say prayers and preach in them, than to . . . regulate the hours of eating drinking, and sleeping . . .’ Clifton’s exercise of legal power was arbitrary and vicious: ‘The Goth and the Vandal are still in the land!’ And then he moved to ‘the practical part of the business’: ‘Poor George 44

45

46 47

Nottingham Journal, 19 Jul 1800. For itinerant and open-air preaching and the campaign against it, Deryck W. Lovegrove, Established Church and Sectarian People: Itineracy and the Transformation of English Dissent, 1780–1830, Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 14–40. There were proposals for legislation proscribing itinerant preaching in 1800 and 1811. Anti-Conventicle, The Protestant Address to the Inhabitants of Nottingham and its Vicinity, Occasioned by the Caution, Published by Sir Gervas Clifton, in the Nottingham Journal, July 19th, C. Sutton for the Author, Nottingham, 1800, p. 3. Anti-Conventicle, Protestant Address, p. 4; Lovegrove, Established Church, p. 133. Anti-Conventicle, Protestant Address, p. 7.

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Alvey!’ – ‘this laborious worthy Man’. He had had to sell up to pay the fine – no one came to buy – a gentleman took his household goods ‘out of pity for the Sufferer, and has let him furnished lodgings’.48 Echoing Lord Chief Justice Kenyon, but from an ecumenical perspective, Anti-Conventicle argued that all religion ought to be encouraged by government ‘because it is favourable to social order and happiness’. ‘Let religion alone’, he cried; give all ‘liberty to exercise their religion openly, without the terror of pains and penalties fit only for a Spanish inquisition’. Every ‘Gentleman of public spirit should not only abhor and detest the very idea of religious persecution; but give the Public Worship of God, in every place, all the support in their power’.49 After the ‘Caution’ and this response, a silence fell on Clifton Hall. Sir Gervase appears in the London press as head of a pressure group whose aim was to improve postal service between London and Nottingham (and other provincial towns) but it was not until 1810 that he ventured into print again, at another moment of high anxiety about the promulgation of dissent.50 Perhaps his was an offended silence. Who enjoys criticism of their prose-style? He was to be satirised again for it in 1810, when there was greater word-length to ridicule than there had been with his notice of Caution. In 1800 ‘Anti-Conventicle’ had published with Charles Sutton, a staunch Methodist and by 1810 editor of the Nottingham Review. In 1810 Gervase Clifton, alias ‘Layman’, chose the Nottingham printer/bookseller Samuel Tupman for his pamphlet Observations Upon Two Letters Addressed to Sir Gervas Clifton. (Tupman was shortly to launch his anti-Jacobin newspaper the Gazette.)51 Clifton went into print to attack what he called a pamphlet, written by William Edward Miller, Minister of Halifax Place (Wesleyan) Chapel in Nottingham.52 Where Miller published on the question of Methodism in Clifton is not known, but it was very clear what provoked the magistrate’s ire and his twenty-two page response.

48 49 51

52

Anti-Conventicle, Protestant Address, p. 9. 50 Anti-Conventicle, Protestant Address, p. 11. See n. 46. For the Nottingham Gazette, see Chapter 2. A Layman, Observations Upon Two Letters Addressed to Sir Gervas Clifton, Bart., by Mr Miller, Minister of the Halifax Chapel, in Nottingham. By a Layman, Tupman and Son for the Author, Nottingham, 1810. Clifton confused William Edward Miller with another Miller whose ‘memoir’ he said he had read in the Methodist Magazine for 1801 – a Robert Miller of Dewsbury. ‘The Experience of Mr. Robert Miller’, Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine, 24 (Jun 1801), pp. 237–41. William Miller (Nottingham) is mentioned in George B. Smith, History of Wesleyan Methodism, 5th edn, 3 vols., Longman, Green & Dyer, London, 1866, vol. II, p. 358. Because of mistaken identity, Clifton accused Nottingham Miller of having perjured himself. A Layman, Observations, p. 8. But there was more at stake here than this slander, which neither party appears to have noticed.

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Mr Miller had ‘obtained permission to address the Baronet, by letter; he afterwards wrote a second epistle: and finding this produced no alteration in Sir Gervas’s opinion . . . he determined to give them to the public, making no apology for this act’.53 Private communications had been made public. Miller’s letters had been about preaching in Clifton; Sir Gervase’s/Layman’s public response was written in indignation ‘at the barefaced imposition, which such methodist preachers . . . practice on their credulous followers’.54 Had the Methodists of Clifton who invited Mr Miller to speak ‘ever been seen in the habit of attending their parish church?’ asked Sir Gervase. Had they ever listened to sermons preached there? Heard Bible read? Did Mr Miller teach them more? What advantage did they gain? Had Mr Miller himself ever heard the clergyman of Clifton do duty in the church? Everything he purported to offer was available from Clifton parish church and the established church in general.55 On page 11 of Mr Miller’s pamphlet there were ‘slanderous and unfounded insinuations against the clergymen of the establishment’.56 Mr Miller had also claimed that ‘Sir Gervas Clifton was displeased with his intrusion into that village, and consequently drove him thence.’ Miller had said that liberty of conscience was not permitted in Clifton; but he could not possibly understand what liberty of conscience meant, said Layman, ‘or he would never have prostituted the term for the purpose of exercising the palpable breach of confidence, which is displayed in the publication of a private correspondence between two individuals’.57 Layman/Clifton turned to history (‘past times’) to underline the treason implicit in Miller’s argument, making reference to the Methodists’ ‘elder brethren [the Puritans]’ who drenched the land in blood and murdered a king. Miller was preaching rebellion or ‘I have studied the laws of England to little purpose!’ Layman cited the Biblical texts which should force Mr Miller to ‘Look at the History of England in the days of Cromwell’ – ‘it requires but little penetration to discover a modern resemblance to this ancient picture’.58 He transcribed the gospels in their original Greek and passages from Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity to argue that Andrew Miller must be censored: ‘Unless . . . such writers as Mr Miller be silenced, unless the Nobility, and Gentry, and all the Landed Interest of the County, will exert themselves to support the Church, and to stay the progress of such mischievous publications as the one under review, the day will arrive when they shall . . . feel in vain the impolicy of their present 53 55 57

A Layman, Observations, p. 6. A Layman, Observations, pp. 5–6. A Layman, Observations, p. 7.

54 58

A Layman, Observations, p. 3. 56 A Layman, Observations, p. 17. A Layman, Observations, pp. 9–11.

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indifference to matters of religion, as connected with the state.’59 He reminded his readers of the eighteenth of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (which did in fact allow wide latitude of interpretation for nonconformists, ‘setting out only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved’).60 It was the passages on conscience and liberty of conscience that roused ‘Flagellator’ of Southwell to some rather heavy-handed wit at Clifton’s expense – laughter at his ludicrous composition framed reaction to both his excursions into the republic of letters.61 ‘Flagellator’ published in The Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor, which title speaks for itself and was available in Nottingham.62 ‘The Nottinghamshire Layman in Querpo’, announced Flagellator, with the byline ‘To Bedlam with him, is the man grown mad? shakespeare’.63 After some words of assurance about not being on the side of the Methodists, his ‘considerable indignation’ at ‘their unexampled and rapid accumulation’, and admission that like many of his readers he conceived ‘the political existence of my country [to be] at stake’, he let rip on the ‘rubbish’ of Sir Gervase Clifton’s pamphlet, starting with its ‘malignancy of language, the important tone of expression, the arrogance of dictation, the contumely of decision, that flow through the whole of this most execrable pamphlet . . . the most outrageously virulent attack that perhaps ever issued from the pen of Clerico-magisterial despotism’.64 The passages on conscience were particularly risible; the like ‘never before fell from the pen of any human being unadorned with a crown of straws and sceptre of cat-tail’; in other words, a fool. He begged his readers’ patience in his quotation of a long passage from Observations, in which Sir Gervase had written that ‘conscience’ was not to be understood as a man’s opinion or persuasion, but rather as ‘knowledge which he obtains by some written law, or rule, or reason . . . conscience, therefore, as its title denotes (cum and scio) is comparative knowledge – it is the judgement which a man passes on

59 60

61 62 63

64

A Layman, Observations, pp. 11–12 ‘Of Obtaining eternal Salvation only by the Name of Christ: They are also to be accursed that presume to say, That every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the Light of Nature. For holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved’. The Book of Common Prayer, ‘Articles of Religion’, no. 29. For ‘Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’, see Chapters 2 and 11. It was advertised by its proprietors as available in Nottingham in 1813 – maybe not before; Nottingham Review, 12 Nov 1813. The Nottingham Journal did not carry notices. Flagellator, ‘The Nottinghamshire Layman in Querpo’, Satirist, or Monthly Meteor, 8 (Mar 1811), pp. 198–203. ‘Querpo’, ‘Cuerpo’: from either the Saxon or the Greek, said the dictionaries: in a state of undress, naked, in the buff; exposed . . . Flagellator, ‘Nottinghamshire Layman’, pp. 198–99.

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his own actions compared with some law’. The conclusion was, as Flagellator pointed out using Clifton’s own words, that ‘where there is no law, there is no conscience’.65 If this was not written ‘after dinner – If this be not the affusion of Oporto or Nanz’, well then – Flagellator would eat his hat. A few more words about clerico-magisterial despotism, and drinking, whoring, perjuring, hypocritical clergymen, and he signed off, leaving Sir Gervase ‘braced up in his waistcoat till the ensuing month’ (a nice little dig at his own title), though it appears that no more followed on the topic of Clifton dissent, either in the Satirist, or anywhere else.66 These published exchanges between the Methodist, the Magistrate, and Flagellator give a fine insight into one lay magistrate’s thinking about the law – not on his everyday administration of poor law and settlement law and authority in questioning petty thieves and wife-beaters, but rather his abstract cogitation on ‘Law’, and ‘the law’. Much social history describes the indissoluble connection of church and state in English polity from the sixteenth century onwards, and even more the experience of living under the legal regime thus produced. But it is rare to find a magistrate actively reflecting on such matters. We must take account of Clifton’s addressee (Edward Miller the Methodist) as well as his critic’s (Flagellator’s) depiction of him as highly educated but maybe not very bright; but nevertheless here is some of Clifton’s thinking about the law. It was a context to everyday life in Clifton, as lived by Joseph Woolley, George Hoe, and their neighbours. But Flagellator did not hold up for scrutiny Clifton’s account of ‘experience’ – which was odd indeed, for it was indication that he was even more dismissive of the mental and spiritual life of Clifton people than in his views on ‘conscience’. In his untraceable pamphlet William Edward Miller had evidently written something about his experience of God, and his conviction of God’s existence. But, said Layman, wielding etymological and philosophical knowledge as power, ‘to talk about the experience of an abstract moral truth, is to use a language altogether unintelligible’. He gave Mr Miller a philosophy lesson based (as indeed were John Wesley’s lessons) on the empirical psychology of John Locke. (Layman was so keen to demonstrate his superior skills of argument to Mr Miller, that he ignored the common source that informed both their arguments.) ‘The term experience is properly applied to that knowledge, which men acquire by trial and practice’, Clifton wrote. ‘But how can a man be said to know 65 66

Flagellator, ‘Nottinghamshire Layman’, pp. 202–3; Layman, Observations, pp. 7–8. He continued to flagellate the clerico-magisterial nexus, in the Satirist and elsewhere, and he wrote some searing pieces on clerical magistrates themselves; but this was his first and last comment on Gervase Clifton (or his prose style).

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by experience that there is a God?’ A man – Mr Miller – found truth revealed in the Bible, so what he did was believe something, rather than having experience of it, and ‘which operation of the mind was Faith, and not experience’.67 Frederick Dreyer has commented on the unwillingness of twentieth-century historians to treat Methodism as a set of ideas, or a form of thought: ‘the typical Methodist [of the historical imagination] is . . . someone who feels much and thinks little’. But John Wesley was ‘a man with something to say’, and what he said was grounded in the empiricism of John Locke.68 By extension, his followers can be understood as people who found something to think with in Methodism. Hard indeed, to be told by a man of Sir Gervase’s power, that you might not think as you thought, and that your experience was not experience at all. In 1815 George Hoe’s anxiety was about the material consequences of such an attitude to Methodism and Methodists, and Joseph Woolley understood full well the social and religious regime that produced Hoe’s palpable fear when the Reverend Clifton dropped his little hint about righteous people ‘not always [being] the Honestest’. And what of Joseph Woolley? He described faith and belief in Clifton in relation to dissent – to Methodist Hoe’s wise decision under threat to conform to the Church of England by taking his family to the parish church on Sundays; or in relation to the ‘meetinger or baptist’ who lived in sin and had (perhaps) aborted her child.69 There are no expressions of his own faith in the diaries. But if we are to acknowledge that the absence of God from the pages of an eighteenth-century clergyman’s journal is no necessary indication that he did not hold deep religious views, then we must surely extend the acknowledgement to an ordinary member of the established church whose father was one of its lay personnel.70 67 68 69

70

A Layman, Observations, p. 15; Frederick Dreyer, ‘Faith and Experience in the Thought of John Wesley’, American Historical Review, 88:1 (1983), pp. 12–30. Dreyer, ‘Faith and Experience’, p. 12. It would be interesting to know if Hoe conformed (however briefly) by taking the sacrament of Holy Communion according to the Anglican form. But we do not know how often William Clifton dispensed it, and taking it may not have been a particular difficulty for Hoe. Many eighteenth-century Methodists had no problem with Communion, and did not see themselves as ‘dissenters’. For the union of church and state as present social reality during the almost-continuous period of war from 1783–1820, William Gibson, The Church of England, 1688–1832, Routledge, London and New York, 2001; also Edward Royle, ‘The Church of England and Methodism in Yorkshire, c. 1750–1850: From Monopoly to Free Market’, Northern History, 33 (1997), pp. 137–61. For these questions in an earlier period by Jeremy Gregory, ‘“In the Church I Will Live and Die”: John Wesley, the Church of England and Methodism’, in William T. Gibson and Robert G. Ingram (eds.), Religious Identities in Britain, 1660–1832, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2005, pp. 147–78. Steedman, Master and Servant, p. 6. James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson: the Reverend James Woodforde 1758–1781, ed. John Beresford, Oxford University Press, 1924; William Holland, Paupers and Pig Killers: The Diary of William Holland:

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He was frequently in St Mary’s Clifton, as recorder, semi-official clerk standing in for his father, and sometimes as a pall-bearer at a funeral. ‘[M]ay the 22 William hardy had the prayer of the Congregation of Clifton Church’, he wrote in May 1803; ‘baptisms and Churchings and burens for this year’ was one of his headings for a page of the 1804 diary.71 He recorded thirty-three churchings of women over the years, the large majority in the years before the 1809 diary.72 He was concerned to mark off the old clerical regime from the new: ‘the Churchings was after the revd mr Launders death and I here note them that there may be no mistake’ he wrote at the end of 1803.73 He noted funeral arrangements in detail – the number of pall-bearers, the occasions on which they were all-female, the gloves distributed among the mourners at very grand funerals, the number of peals rung, the fee to the ringers, the size of coffins. He knew the internal layout, architecture, and furniture and fittings of St Mary’s Clifton very well indeed. He often wrote as one who was present in the church. He was interpellated as lay official of the Church of England in 1803 when there was a Visitation of Bingham Deanery held at St Mary’s Church, Nottingham. Visitation notices for Nottingham Archdeaconry were published in the local press; the visitation process addressed ‘the present Churchwardens of every parish with their Sidewardens and Assistants . . . and Parish Clerks’.74 Woolley may only have been acting parish clerk, but he was there, commenting favourably on the sermon – and on the dinner: ‘may the 2 [1803] was the visetation and . . . the too other Church wardings and me and the Curat dined at Stevensons the sign of the talbot with several other parish ofisers and a very Genteel dinner we had and the Expences Came to about ten shillings Each man’.75 He commented on the Visitation sermon here (‘a very able discorse’) and there is room for the reader to compare this comment with his silence on the new Clifton Rector’s first Sunday

71 72

73 74 75

A Somerset Parson, 1799–1818 [1984], Jack Ayres (ed.), Sutton, Stroud, 1997; Francis Griffin Stokes (ed.), The Blecheley Diary of the Reverend William Cole, 1765–67, Constable, London, 1931, all devoted more words to dinner than divinity. NA, DD 311/2, May 1803; DD 311/3, 1804 (undated entry – p.78 of the volume). This could indicate either the waning popularity of the ceremony, or that Joseph Woolley was no longer playing a part in the official record-keeping of Clifton parish. His recording of burials also declined after 1809, but not as dramatically. He noted thirteen burials in 1801, fourteen in 1803, twelve in 1804, two in 1805, twelve in 1809, eight in 1813, and five in 1815. Over the years he also noted sixteen funerals outside Clifton. NA, DD 311/2, Sep1803. Nottingham University Special Collections, Bingham Deanery, Clifton with Glapton Cl 171/2/1–30; AN/V 378/181–285, Bundle of Visitation Processes, 1771–1856. NA, DD 311/2, 2 May 1803. The Clifton records for 1802 and 1803 are missing from the Bundle of Visitation Processes, AN/V 378/181–285.

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service. ‘Did Mr M. ever hear the clergyman of Clifton do duty in that church?’, asked Sir Gervase rhetorically in 1810.76 On the evidence of his diaries Joseph Woolley would have had an affirmative answer to that one, from every Sunday over fifteen years (and probably beyond); but he had nothing to say about them, except for once, in 1801 when his entry was about the pains of church attendance in cold weather as much as the clergyman’s discourse. It was the era before William Clifton’s arrival; both Mr Launder and his curate were ill; a supply clergyman (or ‘galloper’) had been found to do the duty. He arrived about 11 o’clock and ‘went throo the duty prety well till he got into the Lamentations and when he had Gone a little on the Subject he . . . turned over two Leaves in the book . . . and with turning back again he turned one Leaf too far back and So phittering imself that he Could not find im Self right So after Some Serch he Said he was not able to Go on aney further and Came out of the pulpit So flustered that he had work to Git into the vestery . . . [after] he had set down Some time he recovered from the Consternation he had been in and so the Chase being redy he Got into it and home he went and I think that it very well Satisfyed most people for it was a very Cold day’.77 He told one – very mild – anti-clerical joke, again in 1804, and repeated one rhyming satire on the sexual proclivities of the clergy in 1803.78 76 77

78

A Layman, Observations, p. 6. NA, DD 311/1, 20 Dec 1801. Woolley noted what he was paid – 2s 3d. ‘Gallopers’ were peripatetic priests, usually without a living of their own, who filled in when a regular incumbent was absent. Anthony Russell, The Clerical Profession, SPCK, London,1980, p. 53; Judith Jago, Aspects of the Georgian Church: Visitation of the Diocese of York, 1761– 1776, Associated University Press, London, 1997, pp. 165–6; Steedman, Master and Servant, pp. 91–94. A mild and not very funny joke concerning a conversation between a young cleric and a smart young country boy tending some pigs. Woolley captures well a clergyman’s patronising, de haut en bas tone of voice. The punch-line is when the boy thinks ‘it time for him to ask some questions So he began by asking the man if he was a parson and he says pray sir ant you a parson and the parson told him he was to and a damd fine parson too to teach folks the rode to heaven and does not no the rode to the next town too miles of & the parson went of satisfied’. Satisfied that the common people speak in the manner of the joke-books? That peasant boys are sharp-witted? I find the earlier part when the parson asks whose pigs they are, much funnier: ‘[T]he boy made answer . . . they were the Sows and the parson said he was a fine boy and asked him whose boy he was and the boy told him he did not know but if he would tent the pigs he would Go home and ask his mother then the parson said he was a Good Lad’. Quite a few in Clifton did not know the answer to that one. NA, DD 311/3, Sep 1804. The four-line fragment ‘the parson of mortlake/with too stones and a Stake/Stoped my worter Lake help/Lord for Gods sake’ (DD 311/2, Jun 1803) was a catch song. It appeared as a funny story (in rhyme) in a local jest book: ‘Of a Comical Method the Courtier takes to relieve the Widow of Mortlake, against the Parson of the Parish who had stopped up her water-gap’, The Pleasant and Delightful History of the Frolicksome Courtier, and the Jovial Tinker, ni, Derby, 1798, pp. 9–12. A Widow appeals to a King against an accumulating prelate – ‘he

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His involvement with the Church of England was as one of its lay personnel;79 his role was administrative, and his diaries reveal the mechanics of church and state operating as one under old poor law, with the number of couples ‘asked to church’ enumerated, the number of knobstick weddings he recorded, and the base children baptised. His is not a document out of which a modern idea of faith or belief can be read. But routines and festivals – church services, the churching of a woman, the village feast, the tolling of the bell, the ringing for a wedding – were all manifestations of a popular adherence to the Church of England that was not expressed by church attendance and participation in the sacraments alone (if at all).80 Our understanding of eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury lay and ‘popular’ Anglicanism is framed by the development of secularism and a formal separation of church and state. Callum Brown has argued that Britain was not a secular society until the mid-twentieth century – that the routines and rhythms of formal Christianity framed time and consciousness for many people who never set foot in a church, between about 1800 and 1950.81 Joseph Woolley did set foot in St Mary’s Clifton, many times. But faith is not to be discerned from the way in which the established church measured out his days. What we can discern of a belief system is to be found in his assessment of social life lived under a particular landowning and ecclesiastical regime. Whether or not he ‘believed in God’, or what his personal theology was, are not questions to ask of his diaries. They are about what he knew – and questioned and analysed – of an ideological and legal regime that affected the lives of men and women like him, including the Methodistical ones.

79

80 81

would have no woman’s water-course stopped against her will for never a Parson in England; and thereupon an order was immediately made that the barricade should be removed; to which the parson was forced to submit, but not without much mumbling’. A bit dirty? A little bit anti-clerical? A replaying of Sir Gervase, Parson Clifton, and the Blocked Road incident? For ‘The Parson of Mortlake’ as popular song, Catalogue of the Allen A. Brown Collection of Music in the Public Library of the City of Boston,Trustees of the Library, Boston, 1916, vol. XVI, p. 7, ‘The Parson of Mortlake. Catch [for four voices]’. In 1801 he reflected on the role of parish clerks after a scandal to do with the Barton one. ‘It becomes a minister to Look into his Clarks Conduct as well as his peopl that belong to his parrish’, he wrote. The clerk’s behaviour was the minister’s responsibility. NA, DD 311/1, Apr 1801. Snape, Church in an Industrial Society, pp. 15–41. Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000, Routledge, London and New York, 2000.

8

Getting and spending

Write, and cast Accounts . . . and a little expert at my Needle. Samuel Richardson, Pamela (1792), Vol. I, p. 2.

The fictions that Joseph Woolley borrowed and read had little to say about the economy of everyday life: the idea that The Monk might demonstrate the material base of Ambrosio’s schedule of sexual corruption is risible. The economic world of Tom Jones is open to view, and thus unremarkable. The estates and incomes of its squires and landowners support the plot and the activities of all its protagonists in one way or another. The financial basis of their (fictional) existence is to be understood by just looking around you – at the very similar arrangements that pertained in Clifton and district in Woolley’s time. But Pamela, by way of contrast, has much to say about money, about getting and accounting for it (less about spending). Pamela is a girl of the poorer sort, fitted well for economic survival by her parents, who have taught her to read and write, do simple accounts, and a variety of plain and fancy needlework; they have found her a job that allows her to use these skills. She makes much of her accounting abilities in her letters home, mentioning the little store of money and goods she has acquired. She tells Mr B. that when she becomes his wife, she will keep his household accounts.1 Readers who have inherited a history of realism in the novel along with the novel itself, find this as unremarkable as the sunny and open display of the economic base to Tom Jones. Nevertheless, Pamela is an important marker of the way in which one aspect of economic thinking developed around the poorer sort. During the course of the long eighteenth century poor men and women came to be ascribed life-histories and forms of selfhood,

1

Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue rewarded . . . In four volumes, J. F. and C. Rivington, B. Law and 16 others, London, 1792, vol. I, pp. 2, 78, 86–7; vol.II, pp. 16, 61–3, 330. Writing and accounting provide Pamela’s family history: descent through social space after brothers die leaving debts unpaid; turned out of home by harsh creditors; ‘my Father understood a little of Accounts, and wrote a pretty good Hand’; he sets up ‘a little Country-School . . . without Success’, is ‘forc’d to take to hard Labour’.

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accounted for in terms of incomings and outgoings and getting and spending, all recorded with the minute particularity of Samuel Richardson’s design of Pamela’s character and personhood. The poorer sort were monetary selves imagined by their betters.2 In Pamela – and in the character Pamela’s language – the two meanings of ‘account’ merge, to indicate something like a theory of the novel itself. Here an ‘account’ is both a record of income and expenditure, and the written narrative that Pamela produces. Modern world histories of written language tell the same story as Pamela: where the origins of writing systems can be discerned, lists (of goods and stock) and records of barter and exchange are their starting point. Jack Goody, who investigated the one writing system that is known to have emerged in the twentieth century, that of the Vai people of Liberia, notes that a majority of its early records were compiled by men who had worked as cooks and who had been required to keep kitchen accounts during their working life.3 Joseph Woolley’s writing originated in his accountingkeeping, and here again, the two meanings merge: he kept detailed accounts of his income and outgoing every month of every year for which the journals survive; he also kept a written record of local births, marriages, and deaths for his father the parish clerk. From both these ‘accounts’ emerged a written narrative of everyday life. But the narrative would most likely never have come into existence had he not kept monetary accounts. This was voluntary record keeping, of his own financial activity and his own money. There was no employer here requiring him to keep accounts. Given the fluctuating income provided by stocking-making, he was wise to maintain them. The House of Commons Select Committees on the Framework Knitters’ Petitions heard from several Nottingham workmen about ‘dishonourable’ manufacturers who took advantage of a framework knitter’s anxiety when he brought in the finished stockings, flashing before the worker ‘his name . . . with some figures at the end of it, in his book . . . the workman must either be distressed for the money which is owing, or take work out at an abated price’. John Blackner (framework knitter and historian of Nottinghamshire) thought that many hosiers used book-keeping as a form of power.4 But Joseph 2 3

4

Deborah Valenze, The Social Life of Money in the English Past, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 260–78 for the triumph of ‘the monetary self’. Jack Goody, The Interface between the Written and the Oral, Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 212. Also Philippe Lejeune, ‘Counting and Managing’, in Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, pp. 51–60. Great Britain. House of Commons. Report from the Committee on the Framework-Knitters’ Petitions. 1812. (247)II.203, p. 230.

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Woolley never noted prices agreed with a master or a hosier; he recorded what he had received for the finished goods, with the formula ‘work came to’ (1801), or later in his career, with (for example) ‘2 pare of maids hose shapes 4s 4d’ (1815). Like the majority of his colleagues then, he relied on memory and the honesty of the hosier for fulfilment of their agreement. The major plea of Nottinghamshire framework knitters in their 1812 petitions was for a published – or at least prominently displayed – schedule of prices to be paid for types of stocking. Manufacturers found much to object to in this proposal, for the main part claiming that it would increase their book-keeping and office expenses.5 In the incomings pages of his diaries Woolley recorded personal financial transactions and the major part of his income, not an employment or piece-work agreement. He recorded nothing until it was in the past and done: money received; money spent. He used much more ink in recording his outgoings than he did for his incomings: on average income occupies a third of the space of expenditure, over all the diaries. And he always recorded monthly expenditure first, followed by income. He spent, and wrote about spending, and then he briefly recorded what had come in that month. Textually at least, he earned to spend – to live and have a good time. And more than textually: Nottingham manufacturer Mr Hooley thought that as framework knitters had ‘a sedentary life . . . perhaps it should be required that they should take their amusements. On Monday they go fishing or take their amusement. A good quick hand does not work on a Monday.’6 Joseph Woolley always kept Saint Monday, though he did not call his heaviest drinking day of the week by that name, (and he never appears to have gone fishing).7 When Nottinghamshire framework knitters spoke their complaints to parliament, no one suggested that stockingers should keep their own accounts of price agreements with hosiers, or suggested account-keeping as a way of managing irregular and uncertain household incomes (though the latter were extensively discussed). The power of accounting was understood to lie with the manufacturers. And yet there was a flourishing advice literature on book-keeping in the second half of the eighteenth

5

6 7

Report from the Committee, pp. 218, 222–6; Great Britain. House of Commons. Second Report from the Select Committee on the Framework-Knitters’ Petitions. 1812. (349)II.267, pp. 269–72, 289–90. Second Report, pp. 285–6. Douglas A. Reid, ‘Weddings, Weekdays, Work and Leisure in Urban England 1791– 1911: The Decline of Saint Monday Revisited’, Past and Present, 153 (1996), pp. 135–63. Fishing was not a leisure activity to pursue legally in Clifton even though it stood on the bank of the River Trent: Sir Gervase owned the fishing rights on all of his manors and actively policed them. NA, M8050, 30 Jun 1772, also p. 182.

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century. Young ladies (who were to manage household accounts in their married state) and young men (not gentlemen) about to be launched into commercial society were the social categories interpellated by it.8 Gentlemen observers of poverty (not yet transmogrified into the nineteenth-century social investigator) occasionally asked the poor to keep household accounts for a period of time, though more often said that they had ‘collected’ data on expenditure from poor parents.9 Very precise advice was targeted at middle-class householders and commercial men and women: the section on ‘Book-Keeping’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica appears to have been widely known. It told commercial and domestic readers that for proper account keeping, they should always keep going a Waste Book, a Journal, and a Ledger, all at the same time. The Waste or Day Book was to be ‘an exact register of all occurrences’ as they took place. Later, a fair copy of these should be made in the Journal, in the same order but in a more technical style. Then on a regular basis, all this material was to be collected together in the Ledger ‘under proper titles’ with expenditure and income on opposite pages, and items divided into Personal and Real Accounts.10 This was a counsel of perfection, and no private person appears to have followed it. Like Joseph Woolley, they compiled their accounts for highly individual purposes. Moreover, the day-book method is vastly consuming of time and money. Ink and pens, the notebooks in which he wrote, and other loose paper had to be purchased by Woolley. (Ink does not appear to have been one of the perks of being the parish clerk’s son.)11 Like most 8

9

10 11

John Greig, The Young Lady’s New Guide to Arithmetic. Being a Short and Useful Selection, Containing, Besides the Common and Necessary Rules, the Application of Each Rule, by a Variety of Practical Questions, Chiefly on Domestic Affairs . . . , 2nd edn, privately printed, London, 1800; Martin Clare, Youth’s Introduction to Trade and Business, 18th edn, G. Keith, London, 1769; George Fisher, Accomptant, The Instructor: or, Young Man’s Best Companion. Containing Spelling, Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic, in an Easier Way than Any Yet Published; and How to Qualify any Person without the Help of a Master . . . , J. and A. Duncan, Glasgow, 1797. David Davies, The Case of Labourers in Husbandry Stated and Considered in Three Parts, G. G and J. Robinson, London, 1795, pp. 170–240. Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England: Gender, Work and Wages, Boydell, Woodbridge, 2002, pp. 41–2 discusses the plebeian household accounts collected by Davies and Sir Frederick Morton Eden. ‘Book-Keeping’, Encyclopaedia Britannica; or, a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, Compiled Upon a New Plan, Edinburgh, 1771. Or perhaps it was. The diaries record only two purchases, one in September 1801 (‘the 10 pd for ink 0s 2½d’) and a second in August 1809, which is impossible to disaggregate from ‘pd for a book and ink shaving news 1s 3d’. NA, DD 311/1, 10 Sep 1801; DD 311/4, 19 Aug 1809. The time of year is significant. Woolley did a lot of his remembering, accounting, and writing up in the autumn and the lead-up to Christmas. He noted paying (1d) for quills for the first and only time in 1813. DD/3111/5, 1 Jun 1813. He could easily have made his own. Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist

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private account keepers, Woolley kept running accounts: there was no double entry, and he only intermittently balanced them by comparing income to outgoings over a period of time, doing so at the end of 1801, 1804, and 1813, that is, in half of the extant notebooks. He did not make daily, or even weekly, entries on the pages reserved for his accounts. Each separate list of things bought, or stocking shapes sold, is in the same handwriting, with graphology and ink-quality highly consistent within the entry. He must have worked from memory, or maybe from the innumerable, tiny scraps of paper that other account-keepers of the period used and then discarded once the entries were made.12 But any worker producing goods independently under a verbal arrangement with an employer at some miles distant had to have a very good memory. Woolley probably wrote up his accounts monthly. From the third volume of the six discussed here, and in transcription, a typical month’s entries look like this, for the month of June 1804:

the 1 spent at Langfords the 2 spent at Nottingham the 2 Club and spent and William mee Whifes funeral the 3 spent hensons ruddington the 4 spent at Nottingham the 5 spent at hensons ruddington the 9 Shaving and news the 9 spent at Langfords the 9 my bord frame rent and Seaming the 15 spent at Langfords the 10 spent at Gotham burtons the 16 spent at Nottingham the 16 paid my board and frame the 17 spent at Gotham the 19 spent at Langfords the 23 spent at Langfords the 23 my board Shav news the 24 spent at daulby feast the 30 my board 2 weeks frame the 30 seaming and shav new £2

12

1 1 1 0 2 3 0 0 6 0 1 1 6 1 0 1 4 10 6 0 14

1 1 9 10½ 9 9 2 6 2 6 6 7 4 4½ 9 1 8 9 6 10 0

Self: Autobiography and Self -Identity in England, 1591–1791, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 74 for the cost of writing. Also John O’Neil, A Lancashire Weaver’s Journal, 1856–1864, 1872–1875, ed. Mary Brigg, The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, Skelmersdale, 1982, which was kept only in times when ink, paper, and a table could be afforded, and not at all in bad times. Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 65–98.

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Incomings were less detailed: the 9 work come to the 16 work Come to the 30 work came to the 30 brought over £2

14 14 11 1 10

2 2 4½ 0 8½

This month his expenditure exceeded his income by 3s 4d. He knew the language of accounting, as in ‘brought over’, but he did not reckon up profit or loss by the month. On the occasions when he surveyed his financial year he used a different language, in December 1804 noting that he had ‘Saved this year £0 10s 1½d’, and in 1813 ‘Cleared this year £3 3s 4¼d’. How Joseph Woolley ‘learned’ this form of accounting is probably the wrong question to ask. It is a common-sense reckoning of the money that came into and left his hands over a period of time. It was invented as much as acquired. We can probably rely on Samuel Richardson and modern historians of eighteenth-century education, who suggest that poor children, were they taught to write in the first place, were also shown how to inscribe numerals, the marks for representing pounds, shillings, and pence, the rules of addition and subtraction – and how to operate in base 12, a form of mental calculation rarely performed after the decimalisation of British coinage in 1971.13 If he ever did exercise the rule of subtraction in months other than December, he would have known that he was more often in the black at the end of a month than not. Sixty-seven months are accounted for over the six diary years – not the full seventy-two, for there is income or expenditure missing for five months. In thirty-one months he made less than he spent; in thirty-six months his income was greater than his expenditure. But there was little point in making these calculations every four weeks. Everyone (including gentlemen considering the framework knitters’ petitions in 1812) knew that income in the trade was irregular and

13

Susan Cunnington, The Story of Arithmetic: A Short History of Its Origin and Development, Swan Sonenchein, London, 1904; Louis Charles Kapinski, The History of Arithmetic, Russell and Russell, New York, 1925; Leo Rogers, ‘The Mathematical Curriculum and Pedagogy in England, 1780–1900: Social and Cultural Origins’, Histoire et épistémologie dans l’éducation mathématique, REM de Montpellier, (1995), pp. 401–12; John Hersee, ‘Multiplication is Vexation’, paradigm, 24 (1997), pp. 24–33. Also, British Society for the History of Mathematics, bshm.org.uk. Ian Michael, The Teaching of English from the Sixteenth Century to 1870, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 605–20 suggests that all literacy instruction manuals were based on the early hornbook, which laid out letters (lower and upper case), syllables, and numerals, on one surface. Learners ‘read’ figures in the same way as words.

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fluctuating, according to the time of year and mode of payment for the individual production of goods by the worker. In 1812 the select committees on the framework knitters’ petitions heard for the main part from Nottingham knitters in silk and worsted, and from lace makers and manufacturers. Committee members, and witnesses, and their counsel used the language of ‘wages’. Knitters in the town, often working frames together in a large shop on subcontracted work, used this vocabulary.14 Joseph Woolley never used ‘wage’ or ‘wages’ of his own income, reserving the terms for the earnings of domestic servants and harvest workers (like the ‘Lincolnshire lumpers’).15 The absence of ‘wages’ from his accounting lexicon is perhaps a reflection of his circumstances as a knitter, first for a small master in a small village and later on his own frame at home. In either case, in the early nineteenth century ‘wage’ did not carry its modern connotations of regularity of payment or even of cash. In general, it meant what a person got, in order to live (and carry on working).16 What came in was conceptually inseparable from what the money or other form of payment was for, which was getting by: of the Lincolnshire lumpers Woolley wrote ‘they Come home very much in the dumps with doing onley one job of work upon the rode that they Said that they Got as much by that as bore their Expences and a Little into pocket and I think it was a little that they Got into pocket when their expences was paid for they all Come home drunk’. When Woolley himself did harvest work he recorded payment, as in 1804, with ‘the 19 [Sep] for two days harvest work 4s 0d’.17 These payments were listed along with five payments for ‘the work’ of stocking-making. He reckoned everything that came in 14

15

16 17

Second Report, pp. 1–30, 34–5. The select committees discussed here and in the next chapter (two in 1812, one in 1819) were bill committees, convened to consider petitions to parliament and the case for (in 1812) the framing of legislation to answer the petitioners’ grievances. Petitioners (in 1812 they were first framework knitters, then hosiers and manufacturers) led proceedings, answering a series of questions most likely rehearsed with their legal representatives. The minutes of evidence do not show who asked the questions of Nottingham knitters. The majority probably came from counsel, but some were clearly put by MPs. Great Britain. House of Commons. Journals of the House of Commons. From January the 7th, 1812, in the Fifty-Second Year of the Reign of King George the Third, to July the 30th, 1812, in the Fifty-Second Year of the Reign of King George the Third, vol. 67, pp. 381–3, 392, 476, 513. I am very grateful for the advice of an anonymous reader regarding bill committees. ‘Sir Ger . . . turned hir away and made hir a present of one Guinea he pade her wages’, NA, DD 311/1, 7 Sep 1801; of the Lincolnshire lumpers, ‘all the work was taken thereabouts and there was nothing Like the Wages that they expected’, DD 311/3, 27 Aug 1804. Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 304–31. NA, DD 311/1, Sep 1801. Also DD 311/3, 28 Aug 1804 when he recorded in the diary ‘I helped him [Farmer Barker] he Got the first Lode of Corn in the town’, he then

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during a month, as in January 1801: ‘Jan the 3 work come to 2s 4d . . . Jan the 5 won of John barker of Cards 0s 4d . . . Jan the 10 work came to 4s 0d . . . Jan the 11 won at Cards 0s 2d; Jan the 18 work came to 5s 8d . . . Jan the 16 ¼ of lb of hony 0s 3d . . . Jan the 23 Work came to 7s 4d won at Cards 0s 1d . . . Jan the 25 sold a reed to John Street for 0s 2d’.18 In the later journals he still recorded things in this way, in 1809 noting among the stocking shapes and ‘slender womens hose’: ‘ad given mee 2s 6d . . . the 10 Won at Cards 1s 6d . . . the 31 sold a lb of Cotton 6s 3d’ (he was trading in cotton yarn by now). At the end of 1813 he accounted for his total income of £44 0s 113/4d by separating off what he ‘cleared by doctering’ (£1 10s 7d), ‘by my garden’ (£1 14s 5¼d), and ‘by trading’ (£1 3s 2d), from what he ‘Received this year’ (£39 12s 9½d). In 1815 he included sixpences he received for herbs he grew and nettles he gathered (he was now in the herbalist business in a substantial way, as shall be discussed), pennies for sheets of paper he sold to neighbours, and two prizes of 9s won at the Bradmore and Ruddington Gooseberry Shows (he was market-gardening now as well) among his regular incomings from framework knitting. What he ‘received’ included all the odd sums he gained, winnings at cards, and prizes, ‘Gathering Butter wort [for] mrs Hor’, and payment for his framework knitting.19 The last made up 90 per cent of his total income. Over the sixty-seven months accounted for in his diaries, these proportions were consistent. Framework knitting always provided the major part of his income. In 1819 Parliament considered further petitions from Midlands framework knitters – from Leicestershire rather than Nottinghamshire stockingers – about the continued deterioration of prices and wages and the way in which, as the committee reported, ‘their Trade has been, and still is, greatly injured by the introduction into it of a fraudulent species of Worsted Hose, which is called Cut-up Work’. Their first witness was John Thorpe, a framework knitter of some unspecified place in Leicestershire. It is worth comparing his account of earnings for worsted stocking making with Joseph Woolley’s, for Woolley worked worsted and cotton (the 1812 Committee had heard mainly from

18

19

entered ‘the 23 three day work for mr barker 6s 0d . . . the 25 one days work for mr thorp 2s 0d’ in his accounts section. It is not clear whether or not he played a wind instrument in connection to his Friendly Society band. Selling a reed may have been just another item of his trucking and bartering. But he was interested in musical instruments, noting that ‘Som time in December [1804] John quinton had a new Clarinit Came from London from Goldings and Co but he rote to ritchard parker to send it.’ NA, DD 311/3. The honey enterprise (based at his father’s?) appears to have lasted only until the end of 1801. He recorded a honey stream income of 2s 5d out of an annual income of £18 6s 10d (less than 1 per cent). NA, DD 311/5, 2 Aug 1813.

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Nottingham workers in lace and silk) and there is some suggestion in his diaries that he was connected to Leicestershire’s stocking-making economy: Clifton is in the south of Nottinghamshire with good road access to the neighbouring county. He recorded trips to Loughborough, about nine miles from Clifton, where there was a large manufacturer’s warehouse.20 John Thorpe remembered back over thirty-five years in the stocking trade. He said that framework knitters had first experienced changes in their wages and working conditions ‘about seven years ago’. Up to 1812 ‘we were enabled to earn, I believe, upon the average, about thirteen or fourteen . . . or fifteen shillings a week. We are now not able to earn more than from seven to eight shillings in a week, and in many instances not more than six.’21 In January 1813, Woolley averaged 12s 10d a week by the sale of his stockings; in June 1813, 16s 10d½. This was not his total income in these months, for now he was working for himself, and receiving frame rent from two other stockingers, and his usual bits and pieces. But it was the large proportion of his total income. In 1815, the next year for which there is a diary and accounts, he made an average per week of 17s 7½d in January, and an average of 16s 7½d in June. Again, these were not total incomings. But even without his supplementary earnings he was doing much better than Leicestershire John Thorpe and his colleagues, partly because he was working independently, and partly because he continued to work at the respectable end of the trade (he mentions cut-ups not once, in nigh on 100,000 words). His supplementary earnings were important to him, but the stocking-making business was providing him with a reasonable living, even during the long period of distress that Thorpe bore witness to. The date boundaries of economic downturn fluctuated according to when it was remembered, and by whom. In 1840 ‘An Old Hosier of Leicester’ recalled that ‘The period . . . from 1800 to 1810 . . . was the most flourishing period of the trade within my recollection . . . The demand for hosiery during the whole of these years was very great, it was impossible fully to execute all the orders received . . . ’22 ‘Are you a married man?’ asked the 1819 committee of Thomas Measures, a framework knitter of Wickston Magna, Leicestershire. Thirty-four years in the trade, his evidence was about greatly reduced wages. Since about 1815 he had only been getting ‘about seven shillings

20 21

22

Second Report, pp. 289–90. Great Britain. House of Commons. Report from the Select Committee on the Framework Knitters Petition; Together with the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before Them. 1819. (193) V.401, pp. 403, 407. ‘Memoirs of an Old Hosier of Leicester’, Leicester Mercury, 3 Apr 1841.

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a week’ from a fifteen- to sixteen-hour day, he said; ‘previous to that time, not being under the necessity of working more than thirteen hours a day, I could get from fourteen to fifteen shillings per week’.23 ‘Are you in the fine work?’ was the next question. ‘They are what used to be called fine,’ he said. ‘I am not much acquainted with the cut-up stockings, wholly cut; I work the partially cut.’ He said that he could make about twenty-one pairs a week by working fifteen hours a day. In 1815 Woolley made on average six pairs of stocking shapes a week. The major part of his output was the size called ‘maids hose shapes’.24 By the end of 1815 he was receiving 2d a finished pair less than he had at the beginning of the year, which he noted in his accounts for December as ‘bated 2d pr pair’. None of this is to say that Woolley did not experience the downturn in the stocking trade, only that he experienced it in a different way from his Leicestershire colleague (and we know nothing of what happened to his income after 1815). Being married, Thomas Measures was indeed the measure of all budgeting inquiries made by social investigators from the late eighteenth century onwards. Married men are the implied subject of most inquiries on which historical wage series are based. The idea of the family wage underpins most inquiries, contemporaneous or historical, into the economics of working-class life. The economic man questioned in 1812 and 1819 was a married man; evidence produced by counsel’s questioning was about his ability to maintain a wife and children. ‘When wages were better could you maintain yourself and family without having recourse to the parish for relief?’ Measures was asked – ‘With the greatest degree of pleasure’, he replied. He said that now ‘under the depression of trade, there are as many as two hundred and forty-eight families upon the parish [of Wickston Magna], besides a great number that are now in employ that cannot earn sufficient to maintain their families’. Statistics had been collected from St Margaret’s Parish, Leicester, showing, in order, fully-employed low earners in receipt of parish relief, ‘men only half employed’ receiving the same, and men ‘totally out of Employment’. Five hundred and three stocking-makers were listed with their wives and number of children. Only two single men were named, both on the last list.25 Sex and the early nineteenth-century single man may be a little historical mystery, but his economic life a much greater one, for he is subsumed – then and now – by the male breadwinner and the family 23 24 25

Report from the Select Committee, pp. 447–8. For types of stockings and shapes, see Chapter 9. Report from the Select Committee, pp. 451–2.

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his wages supported.26 Woolley’s diaries and accounts contain much evidence of the south Nottinghamshire pleasure and leisure industries; many men took ‘their amusements’ (hosier Hooley’s phrase) by paying for them. We may be interested in the marital status of his drinking, gambling, street-fighting acquaintances, but he was not. Any information about a fighter’s family, a drinker’s children, comes incidentally, on a different page of the diary, or in another volume. He wrote about many men purchasing entertainment and pleasure. Hard drinking precedes the spectator sports of gambling and fighting. Sometimes drink is the route to sexual contact, which may not have been literally purchased (at least not in the village of Clifton), but which was foundational to the great entertainment of gossiping about sex. His friends and acquaintances, as described by Woolley, often read like young men and boys out on the Randan, for that is the kind of story he wrote.27 The men he heard about, returning home blind drunk after a village feast or a strenuous night in the Coach and Horses, were mostly married men, with a wife to hold the pot as they vomited the night away.28 Charles Hodget features in many of Woolley’s drinking and fighting stories, with all the appearance of a right me lad. He and other Clifton men are in Nottingham in October 1803, find a village woman in the gutter, so drunk that she has soiled herself. They manage to get her home.29 In November 1803 Hodget entertains friends at his house: ‘they had fourteen quarts of ale . . . got drunk’, and played cards all night.30 It was Charles Hodget who acted as umpire in the women’s street-battle royal in February 1804.31 He was the companion severely injured in the fight after a friendly society meeting in October 1804, which, as we have seen, Woolley wrote about in very great detail.32 But this was a married man out on the Randan: the domestic setting to his drinking, his care to get someone home, his being chosen umpire of a women’s fight – all of this prefigures the bustling, domestic man in charge of a victory sheep-roast in Clifton in 1813.33 26

27

28 31 33

At the 1812 committees, wage inquiries were framed by the notion of total family income: Report from the Committee, p. 225. For the focus on the family in early twentieth-century poverty surveys, David Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth-Century Britain, Longman, London, 1991, pp. 1–39. As in ‘Young Fellows, who have been out all Night on the Ran-Dan’. But that was London, in the 1750s, and observed by an outsider. Anon., Low-Life: Or, One Half of the World Knows Not How the Other Half Live . . . , 3rd edn, John Lever, London, 1764. In modern lowland Scots and Northumbrian usage ‘on the randan’ means having a riotous night out drinking. 29 30 See above, p. 91. See above, p. 93. NA, DD 311/2, 23 Nov 1803. 32 See above, p. 89. See above, pp. 74–5. ‘Dec the 7 [1813] there was a sheep rosted whole at Clifton on account of the Good news that arived from the Contenant.’ NA, DD 311/5. There was much good news about the routing of Napoleon’s armies from the end of November, and many public celebrations

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He was married throughout the period of Woolley’s stories about him – married for eight years the night he haunted around Mrs Hardy’s house in his shirt and shoes, hoping for ‘his fling’, in October 1803. On this occasion Woolley did – incidentally – report that he was married, explaining that: ‘the reason he was so bold is his whife staid all night at Nottingham Goose Fair’.34 Charles Hodget had married Martha Fleatcher in 1795; their baby William was born in 1796. Over the years Woolley occasionally noted the Hodget children. By 1813, William Hodget (now about 17 years old) was a true me lad himself: he and a friend ‘followed some Girls to Barton feast’, overstayed their time, were so scared at the idea of being late back to work that they went off to Nottingham and enlisted. Charles and Martha got the money together to buy their boy out.35 John Holt is another companion and consumer of pleasure who has all the appearance of a single man: he wrestles another Clifton man for a tankard of ale in February 1801. ‘Jolly fighting we had at night between John brooks and Holt’ . . . Woolley so enjoyed this story that he told it three times.36 On Christmas Day 1801 Holt comes to the Coach and Horses very drunk – ‘a fool as he always is’ – and challenges the stranger Belton, ‘the Duke of Blusters’. The great battle described above ensued.37 When Holt left half-way through the proceedings to deal with his bloodied face, he went home to a wife. Mary and John Holt lost a child in August 1801.38 In October they are together at the notorious tea-drinking at Langford’s (The Coach and Horses). Mary Holt is the woman who, at the height of the revelry, pisses in a hat and plonks it down on some man’s head.39 It might be possible to place more of the men taking their amusements (drinkers and brawlers; consumers of pleasure) than Hodget and Holt by using records from Clifton with Glapton and other parishes within a fifteen-mile radius of Nottingham. It might be possible to determine whether pub and fight culture was one of young and older unmarried men like Woolley. Such a survey might equally reveal what lies between the lines of Woolley’s stories and anecdotes: married and unmarried men and women participated in the drinking culture he describes. Women (married and unmarried) are present at many all-night binge sessions and have as high a time as the men. Their presence promotes sexual activity – certainly stories

34 36 38 39

of what was sometimes called ‘the Emancipation of Europe’. Leeds Mercury, 4 December 1813. 35 See above, p. 110. NA, DD 311/5, 9 May 1813. 37 NA, DD 311/1, 17 Feb 1801; undated, pp. 8, 94. See above, p. 95. NA, DD 311/1, ‘August the 14 marey the daughter of John and Marey holt was buried.’ See above, p. 111.

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about sex, to be told by Woolley – but he never mentioned the presence of women during pub brawling. With one in four men never marrying there are likely to have been others like him. Three of the crew that broke up the alehouse in Grimston in 1804 were clearly unmarried; but ‘william arack of Widmerepool’ who went along with Woolley (or a William Herrick, or any other likely spelling of his name) cannot be traced. An imperfect sociology of the Nottinghamshire Randan would be produced in this way. Neither would a survey like this reveal whether the drunken brawling married men with small children who were part of this group, were seen as irresponsible or feckless. Our only guide here is Woolley, and he never criticised a drunk and incapable ‘duke of blusters’ on the grounds that he was a married man. This is by way of marked contrast with his story of Sam Boyer’s mother, tied to a drunk who spent all the household income in the alehouse. But he had never met the woman or her sot of a husband; her unhappy circumstances were what he had heard tell, and the story one of the several empathetic accounts of married women’s lives that punctuate the diaries. Drunks were fools – and often disgusting – according to Woolley, but their marital status did not figure in his judgement of them – nor of himself, when he had his own high old time. He was not a married man, but Joseph Woolley had family responsibilities. After the death of his half-brother in 1803 he was the only son, and clearly expected to care for his parents and the wider family. But he had had responsibilities before 1803. In the first set of accounts he recorded ‘Thursday the 15 of Jan 1801 my aunts acount sinc She as been ill’. He spent 5s 9¼d on food treats for her (including pikelets and leg of lamb, green tea, wine and aniseed) and on medicine.40 At the other end of the accounts, in March 1815, he paid ‘marey Holt for Looking after my mother 54 weeks £6 15s 0d’.41 Much of his expenditure was part of an extended family economy. He first recorded paying board (of 4s 6d) in January 1804, which I have assumed was to his parents, even though he did not shift his frame ‘up home from the Shop at the Lane End’ (where the sight of the heavily pregnant Rose Woolley was more than he could bear) until August.42 In 1813 he was sworn in as Gervase Clifton’s tenant (‘the 6 paid at the Cort for being sworn in tennant 2s 0d’). This is an indication that after the family homestead crisis of 1804 (‘October the 9 We received a discharge from the reverand 40 41 42

NA, DD 311/1, 15–23 Jan 1801. NA, DD 311/6, 25 Mar 1815. In October he paid £3 17s 6d for a further thirty-one weeks’ care. DD 311/6, 27 Oct 1815. NA, DD 311/3, 21 Jan, 6 Aug 1804.

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William Clifton to quit all the Lands tenements Creditments and that wee occupy under him’) Samuel Woolley obtained a tenancy from Sir Gervase, and that in 1813 (for reasons unknown) his son took it over.43 I have assumed that during all the years he kept accounts he lived with his parents, though his financial relationship with them altered over the years. This means that the extraordinarily full account of one working man’s getting and spending is not that of a housekeeper – and it is not possible to reconstruct his diet. He did buy food, but it was mainly of the treat and snack variety, when he was on the move, or at the barber’s – ‘pd for shaving and a orange’ is typical.44 He bought nuts and apples like this; and ‘Jan the 11 [1801] pd for oranges and queen Cakes 1s 6d Jan . . . pd for rum and tea 2s 4d . . . pd for 1½ lb of Lump Sugar 6½d’ looks like shopping for a party of some kind.45 Herrings, pikelets, buns, lettuces, and cucumbers appear to be spontaneous purchases, mostly of food in season that you would buy if you saw it.46 His board (which he continued to record in 1813 and 1815) included regular meals and, we must assume, washing of bed and personal linen. He made not one entry for laundry, though much expenditure on clothes mending and shoe repairing (Elizabeth Woolley may have drawn the line at mending and darning). After 1813 his consumer behaviour became more like that of a householder. He bought coal in January 1813, nails in June, July, and September. He paid for a total of 3 tons, 7 hundredweight of coal in January, March, and November 1815. Soap, and the fabric for making a set of sheets and two pillowcases were purchased in January 1815, a sweeping brush in February, more soap in March, ‘a new Basket’ in April, panes of glass in September (though these may have been for a garden cold frame), and a wallpaper brush and yet more nails in November. He presumably still had the use of the ‘2 Chairs and a table’ he had bought ‘at the revd mr Launders sale 5s 0d’, in 1803. ‘Sweet oil’ (January 1813), ‘mutton suiet’ (April 1813), ‘½ lb of tracle’ (July 1813), ‘mustard and vinegor’ (April 1815), a ‘peck of peas’ (July 1815), and a great many herrings in December, are the purchases of someone who has something to do with a kitchen. But just how much suet can a small family get through? Suet was his largest foodstuff purchase in 1813 and 1815. He bought 4 lb of suet and 5 lb of dripping between August 1813 and the close of the accounts (excluding the mutton suet, which was evidently a special purchase). Had he kept records for 1814, that would have 43 44 46

NA, DD 311/3, 6 Apr, 9 Oct 1804. DD 311/5, 6 Oct 1813. 45 NA, DD, 311/2, 5 Feb 1803. NA, DD 311/1, 11 Jan 1801. They were probably kippers or bloaters: ‘the 23 [Dec 1815] pd for 21 herengs fresh herengs 0s 9d’ marks all other herrings as dried or cured. NA DD 311/5.

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been 16 lb over three years. Perhaps his was a household cuisine based on pastry, dumplings, and roly-poly puddings. This was not the kind of cookery that philanthropic advisors were pressing on the poor during the recurring food crises of 1790–1820 (they were keen on soup, porridge, rice, pulses, and potatoes; not pastry, which in any case demands some kind of baking facility, which we must assume the Woolleys possessed); but pastry does eke out meat.47 His only mention of flour was when he reported on its price in the crisis year of 1800–1801 (and when a neighbour had some stolen in the same months). Bread was consumed (by him and others) in public houses (and jails) and on public occasions. His purchases of a loaf first in January 1801 and then in June 1813 were unique accounting occurrences.48 The bread he ate at home must have been provided by his mother. The hogs suet (lard?) he purchased was used in the preparation of his herbal remedies, and accounted for separately.49 The only meat Joseph Woolley ever mentioned eating was at feasts and fairs and public sheep roasts. He never purchased red meat, but we can assume he ate it at home and in the many inns and taverns where he spent the majority of his income. And he did buy bacon: 14 lb in March and 33/4 lb in November 1815. These are household-size purchases.50 Cheese and butter may have been made by Mrs Woolley from the family cows, and by 1813 Woolley had sorted out the garden to the degree of running a small market gardening enterprise, able to supply the daily needs of a small family with ease. In January 1804 he recorded a payment of 4s 6d for his board. This may have meant for the food he received at work in the shop where his frame stood. By December he was paying 6s 2d a week for his ‘board seaming frame rent’, presumably to his parents, who may have organised the seamer for him. By 1809 he was making his own seaming arrangements and keeping separate seaming accounts. From 1809 onwards his entries were for ‘my Bord frame rent’: 8s 0d a week rising to 9s through 1809. He paid the same in 1813. In January 1815 board and frame rent rose to 10s 5½d per week, though in this year he returned to some kind of seaming arrangement plus board that made this a fluctuating sum. 47 48 49

50

Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 259–264. NA, DD 311/1, 21 Jan 1801; 311/5, 8 Jun 1813. ‘mar the 25 [1813] pd for Hogs Sewet 2s 2d’, ‘June the 26 [1813] Hog sueit 0s 7d’ were the only entries in his home doctoring accounts of this kind. He also bought lemons and sugar for making up various kinds of salve and ointment. He appears to have changed to ready made salve by 1815. Gabrielle Hatfield, Memory, Wisdom and Healing: The History of Domestic Plant Medicine, Sutton, Stroud, 1999, pp. 79, 91, 100, 163 for lard used in herbal preparations. For bacon (and cheese) as flavourings in the cookery of the poor, Steedman, Labours Lost, p. 272.

Getting and spending

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These were consistent weekly entries over the six years he kept accounts: in February 1804 his board (and whatever else he handed over at the same time, for frame rent, seaming, candles, or needles) accounted for about 48 per cent of his total expenditure. In March 1809 board, etc. was about 46 per cent of his total outgoings, rising to 57 per cent in April 1813. In May 1815, 65 per cent of his total outgoings were on board, frame rent and seaming. He was not worse off in 1815 compared with ten years earlier as we have seen, but the pattern of his expenditure had changed, and he spent less money at the alehouse than he had as a younger man. Is it possible to say this? As earlier observed, it cannot be determined exactly what he spent on alcohol in the Coach and Horses, the Red Hart, and hostelries all over Rushton Hundred. I have assumed that he sometimes, if not always, bought food when he drank. Once, for a few months in 1801, he attempted to keep a bar account, totalling what he had spent at Langford’s in Clifton and Widdowson’s in Ruddington.51 If he had had a percentage calculator he could have worked out that between January and April, during which time his total income as calculated by him was £6 10s 10½d, he spent 36 per cent (£2 10s 6½d) of it at two local inns. (He spent additional small sums at alehouses at Barton and other places during these four months.) This was the first and last time he kept an alehouse tally. If we follow his expenditure for these months over the next five years of his accounting, we see that in January 1804, 47 per cent of his expenditure was at local inns and alehouses. In February 1809 only 3 per cent of his outgoings were at Langford’s in Clifton. He may have bought drink at Segrave, Nottingham, and Beeston, which he visited this month, but all he recorded was ‘spent at’ those places. In March 1813 his expenditure at Langford’s (only Langford’s this month) was again 3 per cent of all he spent. In April 1815 10 per cent of all his expenditure went to Langford’s in Clifton and Simpson’s in Chilwill. We could say that he was drinking less by 1809, but only if we knew for certain that 47 per cent of his income was going on booze in 1804 – which it probably wasn’t. And he still bought ale on Club night at the Red Hart during these apparently sober later years. It would suit the categories of modern personal accounting to put his purchase of alcohol together with the tobacco he bought, as dangerous pleasures. But we can’t, as it is impossible to determine what and how much he drank at the bars he habituated. He first noted buying tobacco in January 1803, evidently at the barbers on a Saturday: ‘the 15 pd for

51

NA, DD 311/1, Apr 1801.

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An Everyday Life of the English Working Class

shaving and tobacco 4½d’; he then went on to spend 7d at Dann’s in Nottingham, so maybe he got shaved in town – or walked in from Clifton, spruced up, for a Saturday night out.52 Between 1803 and 1815 he bought tobacco, in 2 oz or 4 oz quantities once a month, though not every month of each year. Modern estimates suggest that there are ten pipes worth to an ounce; but we do not know what size his pipe bowl was or how tightly he packed it. There is no entry in his accounts for the purchase of pipes. In a much later nineteenth-century collection of working-class budgets, investigators felt the need to point up the dreariness of life for a family surviving on ‘round about a pound a week’. Many suggested that the dire necessity of feeding and clothing and keeping a roof over the head on a male bread-winner’s wages meant that no adult in a family ever experienced the pleasure of social or cultural life, tied as they were to the endless grind of survival.53 Written-up, philanthropic investigators’ budgetary accounts of life on the edge provided a psychology of poverty, sometimes to be read backwards into the early nineteenth century, as a set of ‘attitudes’ attributed to the poor. And the adult human beings who provided these typologies were, almost without exception, men and women with children to provide for. A single man’s budgets, on the other hand, allow us to question the categories of poverty, necessity, and pleasure that have been put in place by the historical investigation of working-class life. We cannot divide necessity (like eating) neatly off from the cultural and social pleasures that Woolley spent his money on, for his accounting method does not allow that. We do not know much about what he ate, or when, or how it was paid for. And as for drinking – or getting shaved – who is to balance pleasure against necessity in their purchase? Nevertheless, Woolley did reproduce himself as a worker (in the classic Marxist sense) on a daily basis, and this reproduction involved caring for himself. The ‘reproduction of everyday life’ and the ‘care of the self’ can guide us through his six accounts of spending in the month of October each year. In October, at the end of harvest and time of wakes and feasts

52 53

NA, DD 311/2, 15 Jan 1803. Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life, Macmillan, London, 1901; Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London. First Series: Poverty. I: East, Central and South London, rev. edn, Macmillan, London, 1902, pp. 116–19, 131–55; Florence Bell, At the Works. A Study of a Manufacturing Town, Arnold, London, 1907, pp. 126–170; Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week, Bell, London, 1913, p. 92; Women’s Co-operative Guild, Maternity. Letters from Working Women, G. Bell, London, 1915, p. 46; B. Seebohm Rowntree, How the Labourer Lives: A Study of the Rural Labour Problem, Nelson, London, 1917, pp. 325–7.

Getting and spending

189

across the district, Woolley had the money and opportunity for pleasure – though in fact, he took pleasure every month of the year. A spot check (see Table 2) on his accounting for the month of October demonstrates that Woolley made up his accounts from memory. The date sequence shows how he remembered spending, not its chronological order, as he recalled paying his board in 1804 four days after the event. Sometimes he incorporated three days’ spending in one entry; in the first diary 15s 9d was tacked onto the end of his list with ‘for matters’. When he wasn’t working, he was spending (sometimes writing). Most weeks he spent by far the greater proportion of money between Saturday and Monday. Except for holidays and feasts extending into the working week (the cricket match in 1801, and later in the month the notorious ‘tea-drinking’ at Langford’s), the accounts show that Woolley’s working days were from Tuesday to Friday. The Tuesdays he spent in October 1801 having fun, getting shaved, buying pens, and spending time at Langford’s, were truly unusual across all the accounts. You would now say that he ‘didn’t go out’ on a Tuesday – nor on a Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday, though Gotham Feast Week (where he spent a great deal of money) saw him out and about mid-week in 1803 and 1804. The first October Thursday on which he spent any money was in 1815: 4s 6d at the cricket, which lasted two days.54 He spent nothing on any October Friday, the most intense day of the stockingmaker’s week. We can assume he ate at home, and did not drink on a normal Friday. Saturday, Sunday, and Monday were his spending days. On the second Saturday of October 1804 he got himself shaved (unclear where), read and/or purchased a newspaper, and got hold of the needles he needed for his frame – so perhaps he was in Nottingham. Whichever barber’s shop he was in, he didn’t repeat the experiment of January 1803 when he paid for ‘shaving and buff’, which only cost him 2d. Being massaged to a high shine with pomade sounds lovely to me, but presumably he didn’t enjoy it.55 (Having a shave on Tuesday as he did in October 1810 was unusual in the total context of his accounts. But he had missed Saturday this week.) He then went on to spend 1s 5½d in Nottingham, and at some point came home to Clifton to drink and possibly eat at the Coach and Horses. This was not the first Saturday of the month, so there was no friendly society meeting. At some point he bought the candles he needed and also Tom Jones (in the three-volume 1792 edition), which was probably in Nottingham. Sunday was quieter, but he visited the Red Hart (Widdowson’s) where his friendly 54 55

For this cricket match, and just how wrong the newspapers got it, see Chapter 2. NA, DD 311/2, 29 Jan 1803.

Table 2. Joseph Woolley’s expenditure in October 1801, 1803, 1804, 1809, 1813, 1815

Oct Day

1801

sd

Oct Day

1803

sd

Oct Day

1804

sd

1 Th

pd thomas hall for a pair of shoes Soaling and heeling

3-0

1 Sa

Club and spent

1-5

2 Tu

Spent at Goose Fair

9-1½

3 Sa

Club and spent

1-5

1 Sa

Shaving and news

0-3

3 We

pd for 1lb of candels

0-10½

nd

Spent at the fair

2-6

3 Mo

Spent at Goose fair

6-0

6 Sa

Shaving and news

0-2

5 Mo

Spent at Langfords

0-8

7 Fr

Spent at Langford

1-4½

6 Sa

Club and spent

1-4

6 Tu

Spent at the Cricket match

2-9

8 Sa

spent at nottingham

0-8½

7 Su

Spent at widdersons ruddington

1-9

6 Tu

then spent at Langfords

1-7

9 Su

spent at Loughborough

7-0

3 We

pd my bord frame rent seaming all for 3 We[eks]

12-0

10 Sa

pd at nottingham

1-4

15 Sa

spent at nottingham

0-10

13 Sa

shaving and news ½ hundred of needels

0-9

13 Tu

Spent at Langfords among the tea drinkers

4-0

16 Su

shaving and news

0-3

13 Sa

spent at nottingham

1-5½

17 Sa

pd for 1 number and Shaving

0-8

14 Fr

pd for a pair of stockings

1-6

13 Sa

spent at Langfords

1-0

18 Su

Spent at the peacock

0-5

16 Su

spent at Willford feast

1-8

13 Sa

pd for 2 dozen of Candels

£1-0-0

20 Tu

pd for pens and shaving

0-7

19 We

spent at hensons ruddington

0-11

12 Fr

pd for my breeches mending

1-3½

24 Sa

Spent at Langfords

0-11½

22 Sa

spent at nottingham

1-6

14 Su

spent at ruddington widders

1-2½

25 Su

spent at Gotham wakes

1-9

22 Sa

too intrest

15-9

13 Sa

pd for 3 vol of the history of tom jones

4-9

26 Mo

spent at Gotham wakes

1-9

24 Mo

pd for 6 Score of plants

1-0

17 We

pd for a Letter breeches mending and Cariage

0-7½

Table 2. (cont.)

27 Tu

spent at Langfords

1-6

31 Sa

for ½ pint of oyl

0-4

[Woolley’s total]

£1-6-0

for [other] matters [Woolley’s total]

31 Sa

26 We spent in Gotham feast week

20 Sa

my board frame rent seaming

7-0

21 Su

Spent at burtons of Gotham

1-7½

20 Su

spent at Langfords

1-6

£0-15-9

27 Sa

my board seaming frame rent

7-0

£2-1-9

27 Sa

pd for 2 weeks shaving and news

0-4

27 Sa

spent at Langfords

2-6

28 29 31 Su Mo We

spent at Gotham

9-10

29 Mo

spent at widdersons rud

0-6

31 We

my board frame rent seaming

6-0

[Woolley’s total]

£4-15-1½

[Woolley’s total]

£1-1-0

£3-1-2

Table 2. (cont.) Oct Day

1809

sd

Oct Day

1813

sd

Oct Day

1815

sd

1 Su

spent at noingham

1-6

4 Mo

spent at Goose fair

2-11½

nd

Spent in Goose fair week

5-7

nd

paid for a Comb

0-5

1 Su

spent at ruddington

0-3

6 We

paid at the Cort for being sworn in tennant

2-0

5 Th

Spent at the Cricket play to days

4-6

7 Sa

my board frame rent

9-0

6 We

spent that day

3-0

7 Sa

my board frame rent seaming

9-5

9 Mo

shaving and newspaper

0-2

8 Fr

pd Mr Wilmot my Compessison

2-0

7 Sa

shaveing and news paper

0-2

7 Sa

Club and spent

2-6

9 Sa

my board frame rent

9-0

13 Fr

pd for 1 lb of Candels

0-11

7 Sa

Spent at Goosefair

3-1½

9 Sa

spent at Noingham

1-3

13 Fr

pd marey Hardey for mending Coat and breech

1-6

7 Sa

pd for ale for mr towlson

3-8

9 Sa

Club and spent

0-9

14 Sa

my Board frame rent Seaming

10-5½

7 Sa

shaving and newspaper

0-2

9 Sa

shaveing and newspapers

0-3

14 Sa

shaveing and newspaper

0-2

8 Su

pd for a roller and tape

0-10

9 Sa

paid for oil

0-1½

14 Sa

Club and spent

0-5

8 Su

spent at ruddington hensons

0-11½

10 Su

Spent at Langfords

1-3

14 Sa

pd for 2 ounces of tobacco

0-9

14 Sa

my board and frame rent

9-0

15 Fr

pd for Candels oil and soap

1-10¼

21 Sa

my Board frame rent and Seaming

10-5½

14 Sa

shaving and newspaper

0-2

16 Sa

my Board frame rent

9-0

21 Sa

shaveing and news paper

0-2

14 Sa

pd for my watch mending

1-8

16 Sa

shaveing and newspaper

0-3

22 Su

spent at Widdowsons Ruddington

0-9

14 Sa

spent at noingham

1-3½

16 Sa

spent at noingham

0-4½

26 Th

Gave a way to tramp Stockingor

0-6

14 Sa

pd for ¼lb tobacco

1-1

16 Sa

pd for 2 oz of tobacco

0-7

28 Sa

my Board frame rent seaming

10-8

Table 2. (cont.) 14 Sa

pd for ½ hundred of needels

0-7

23 Sa

my board frame rent

9-0

28 Sa

pd for 2 oz tobacco

0=9½

14 Sa

Club

1-0

23 Sa

shaveing and newes papers

0-3

28 Sa

shaveing and news paper

0-2

14 Sa

Gave John Barker

1-0

24 Su

Spent at Widdersons Ruddington

1-5½

[Woolley’s total]

£2-17-8 ½

15 Su

spent at Sutton feast

4-9

30 Sa

my Board frame rent

9-0

16 Mo

spent at Simpsons Chillwill

1-2

30 Sa

paid for string

0-4

21 Sa

my board frame rent

9-0

30 Sa

Shaveing and news papers

0-3

21 Sa

Shaving and newspaper

0-2

30 Sa

spent at nottingham

0-7

28 Sa

spent at notingham

1-8

30 Sa

spent at Langfords

0-11½

28 Sa

my board frame rent

9-0

31 Su

spent at Simpsons Chilwill

1-8

28 Sa

shaving newspaper

0-2

31 Su

paid for Seaming

5-2½

28 Sa

pd for walnuts and Candels

1-6

28 Sa

pd for 4 lb of Cotton

17-0

[Woolley’s total]

£3-3-4¼

30 Mo

spent at Gotham feast

1-11

28 Sa

paid for seaming

5-3

£4-10-3

This may be ‘compensation’ (or the archaic `compromission’). The payment is connected to Woolley’s becoming a Clifton estate tenant. Mr Wilmot (who makes his first appearance in this month’s accounts) was a churchwarden and ‘a verey bad farmer’ according to Woolley. (DD 311/6, 15 May 1815). He took a rental of the Reverend Clifton sometime between 1809 and 1813 (DD 311/6, Mar 1813). I have assumed that any compensation was paid because Woolley, or the Woolleys, had now stopped renting grazing land from the rector (one of the rector’s tenants.)

i

194

An Everyday Life of the English Working Class

society met, and spent 1s 2½d, which was enough for food and drink. He appears to have done most of his Sunday drinking out of Clifton (Simpson’s at Chilwell was a favourite); perhaps there was some unspoken prohibition on Sunday boozing by the parish clerk’s son. October was a month for clothes mending and maintenance rather than shopping for new, and for attention to his footwear and watch. New clothes were usually a springtime investment. He paid for new breeches in August 1801, a hat band in January 1803, in February a hat, and on ‘april the 2 a new sute of Cloaths £3 12s 6d’. He purchased a ‘fine Shirt 10s 2d’ on the 21st. He bought gloves when he paid for the suit. He was well kitted-out by the end of 1803 and his clothes expenditure from now on was on maintenance of his wardrobe. He had the grey coat (which featured in the one, startling observation of himself – see above, p. 94) mended in February 1813. He bought a new shirt in April 1813, and had the fine one mended. In April 1815 he ‘pd Eliz Foster for makeing 2 shirts and mending another 3s 0d’.56 That there is no mention of a comb before the purchase of one in 1815 does not mean that he didn’t have one, and it doesn’t appear to be the case that he was thinking of home hairdressing. He paid the barber for hair cutting two or three times a year, the last recorded trim being in November 1815. And his clothes and footwear wardrobe may have been larger than his accounts reveal: there is, for example, no earlier mention of the splatterdashes (long gaiters worn to keep stockings and breeches clean in wet or muddy conditions) that needed mending in December 1815. After paying for the necessities of life (board, ‘rent’ of his frame, the materials needed for its maintenance and repair, and after 1813, payment as tenant of Sir Gervase Clifton) all of Woolley’s expenditure was on himself, and that on pleasure, or ‘taking his amusement’, as hosier Hooley called it in 1812. Gambling is claimed as a pleasure by those who do it: in the October accounts Woolley wins and loses games and wagers; he bought many lottery tickets over the years, which is the ‘number’ part of ‘pd for 1 number and Shaving 0s 8d’ for October 1801 (see Table 2). Clothes are both necessity and pleasure: Joseph Woolley enjoyed his grey coat, and bought a very large number of handkerchiefs (neck cloths), the quickest and cheapest route to style flare (if you knew how to wear one: emphatically not tied so you looked like a pouter pigeon as did his friends at the theatre in August 1805). He bought twelve over the years represented by the diaries, at an average 56

For the typicality of Woolley’s wardrobe and pattern of expenditure on clothes and their maintenance, John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2007, pp. 31–55, 153–65.

Getting and spending

195

price of 2s 6d each. One pair (he usually bought in bulk) cost him 9s 0d, so they were very fine.57 He purchased, as well, a rich cultural life: books, newspapers, theatre tickets. He visited shows and exhibitions.58 He sang in connection with St Mary’s Clifton and his friendly society. He watched, played, and read about cricket. And his diaries bear witness to his abiding interest in other people and their doings, social, sexual, and legal, which in modern Western terms is one indication of happiness – or what might have been called ‘cheerfulness’ in early nineteenth-century terms.59 His accounts and his diaries bear witness to a man cheerfully in control of his own life; he was as cheerful as was reasonable for one of the poorer sort, living through times of war, economic depression, the long-term decline of his trade, and increasing state incursion into the economic and affective life of the poor. His accounts cannot reveal whether or not he enjoyed his work. We would apply twentieth-century industrial psychology to an early nineteenth-century worker were we to ask that question.60 He cared about doing a good job and his reputation as a stocking-maker, as witnessed by his remarks that Sam Boyer simply didn’t care about what came off his frame. And his work was good: no hosier practised the trick and stratagems to pay him less than the agreed price that many of his colleagues across the region bore witness to.61 The note in his accounts of the one abatement he experienced (‘4 pair of maids hose Shapes 8s 8d bated 2d pr pair’) is very marked. These are the December accounts for 1815 – perhaps a portent of things to come.62 But there was another part of his income stream that he clearly did enjoy producing. Woolley first indicated an interest in herbalism in November 1809 when he ‘pd for 4 numbers of the herbal 2s 0d’.63 By 1813 he was

57 58 59

60

61 62 63

For the grey coat, see above, p. 94. For neckcloths, Styles, Dress of the People, pp. 88–95. For example, ‘feb the 11 [1801] I went to thurland . . . to Sea the Exibitation of the battle of the nile’. NA, DD 311/1. Keeping a pet is on the modern index of happiness. Woolley’s dog however, is mentioned only once: when it went astray in November 1815 (‘the 28 Spent Seeking my dog 1s 3d gave George Handley for takeing it up 0s 6d’); NA, DD 311/6. Its function in his life is – imponderable. ‘The reluctance of craftsmen to discuss their trades’ in early modern self-writing is discussed by James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus. Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 119–24. ‘Of this reticence there can be no doubt’, he remarks. For instances reported to the Framework Knitters Committee, see for example, Report from the Committee, p. 225; for a hosier’s view, Second Report, p. 277. NA, DD 311/6, 2 Dec 1815. NA, DD 311/4, 10 Nov 1809. This may have been Culpepper’s New British Herbal, advertised in the Nottingham Journal, 19 Jul 1800 as published in fifty-two numbers. Culpeper’s British Herbal; and Complete English Family Physician: Enlarged, Corrected, and

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keeping separate accounts for his herbal business.64 He made a loss that year, gaining only 4s 0d out of an expenditure of 9s 4d, though back in January he had recorded a profit of £1 10s 7d for 1812. In December 1815 he noted making £4 13 2½d from a year’s home doctoring. He fixed neighbours’ warts and bad backs, the itch, and the ague, and attended to scalds (‘april the 1 [1813] recd of marey fletcher for Cuering hir daughter that was scalded 4s 0d’). His speciality was sprains and other injuries to hands and feet – but above all, to hands, the worker’s primary tool: ‘Feb the 26 [1815] for Cureing of Bates fingers 0s 6d’ . . . ‘Mar the 10 [1815] for Cureing Ed Brooks thumb 1s 0d’ . . . ‘Apr the 29 [1815] fur Cureing Tho Billbys hand 2s 6d’ . . . ‘June the 10 for Cureing Deverals maids finger 0s 6d’ . . . ‘July the 25 [1815] for Cuering william prices fingers 1s 0d’.65 He was on the lookout for sprain remedies, noting in a quite separate part of the 1815 notebook ‘2 oz of oil Turpentine – 2 oz of oil of spik [spike lavender] – 1 oz of oil of Hartshorn – Mixt to gether for a Strain’.66 He sold a lot of salve and ointment. Most of his clientele was local, but an itinerant harvester came to see him in 1815 (‘Aug the 22 for Cuering a Lumpers finger 1s 6s’). Gentlemen might send their servant maids to him, but out of the twenty-eight patients he named, only one was designated ‘Mr’ (‘Sept the 6 [1815] for Cuering mr streets foot 1s 2d’). He extended credit, noting in April 1813 that he had finally received from ‘ritchard Tongue for Cuering his toe due feb the 2[nd] 1812 0s 6d’.67 His preparations were sweet, and perhaps palatable for the sugar they contained: his herbalist accounts detail 4½ lb sugar bought in 1813 and 1815. He called all of this activity ‘doctoring’ (‘the Account of what I make of Doctering’).68 This was not a term used

64

65 66 67 68

Improved . . . To Which Is Added Culpeper’s Celebrated Astrological Judgments, of all the Diseases of the Human Body . . . By Geo. Alex. Gordon . . . An Entire New and Complete Edition, Embellished with Engravings, etc., H. Hogg, London, c. 1805 was also published in parts. Mary Fissell, ‘The Marketplace of Print’, in Mark Jenner and Garthine Walker (eds.), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c. 1450–1850, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. 108–32. For alternative medicine in the long view, Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine? A History, Oxford University Press, 2007. Also Mary E. Fissell, Patients, Power, and the Poor in Eighteenth-Century Bristol, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 27–8, 40–4. He may initially have kept the herbalist accounts in a separate notebook: in 1813 he noted ‘July the 4 braught up from my Exendatuer (Extenuator?) for drugs 9s 4d’. NA, DD 311/5, 4 Jul 1804. In November 1815 he ‘recd of Mr Sanby for dressing Elizabeth Cokes harme £1–18s–2d’. NA, DD 311/6, 3 Nov 1815. NA, DD 311/6, 1815 [pencil note in reverse, p. 127]. NA, DD 311/5, 4 Apr 1813. NA, DD 311/6, Jan 1815. Susan Kermas, ‘From Herbal to Advert’, in Nicholas Brownlees (ed.), News Discourse in Early Modern Britain. Selected Papers of CHINED 2004 (Linguistic Insights, 30), Peter Lang, Bern and Oxford, 2006, pp. 175–97. For a

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in contemporary herbals, being reserved for the treatment of animals and the adulteration of wines and liqueurs – though Pamela (Daughter of the People!) is doctored by the evil housekeeper during her imprisonment in Lincolnshire.69 Despite these somewhat negative connotations, it seems likely that ‘doctoring’ is what Woolley’s friends and neighbours believed he was doing, indeed ‘doctoring’ may have had positive connotations with the tending and mending of labour capacity in workpeople (and working animals). Lisa Smith remarks that men’s historical role in household medical practice has been overlooked.70 Responsibility for the health and well-being of a family was certainly a component of the (bourgeois) domestic man promulgated by eighteenth-century conduct literature.71 But Woolley’s family appears to have relied on professional (or outside) services as much as home doctoring in their treatment of each other. When his sister Ann was ill in 1803 she was treated by both her brother and her employer with home remedies and by a local apothecary.72 Woolley paid for the full-time nursing of his mother in 1815, as described above. If healing and doctoring and caring was understood to be a duty of working-class men towards their family in early nineteenth-century England, then Woolley performed it outside the home. The doctoring business clearly was a commercial enterprise, but the indications are that Woolley was intellectually interested in it.73 His other three enterprises were the sale of candles, cotton yarn, and garden produce. He called what he did with cotton ‘trading’, though only once, in 1813, when his annual accounts noted ‘Clearedd by doctering £1 10s 7d . . . Cleared by my garden £1 14s 5¼d . . . Cleared by trading £1 3s 2d’.74 He traded in other things – odd sheets of paper, his skills

69 70 71 72

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similar sprain remedy, made from bought ingredients, Fissell, Patients, Power and the Poor, pp. 40–1. It was recorded in a late eighteenth-century farmer’s notebook. Richardson, Pamela (1792 edn), vol. 2, p. 76: ‘“I hope you are not worse for my Care and my Doctoring of you!”’. Lisa Smith, ‘The Relative Duties of a Man: Domestic Medicine in England and France, c. 1685–1740’, Journal of Family History, 31:3 (2006), pp. 237–56. For one late eighteenth-century user of some of these guides to domestic masculinity, Steedman, Master and Servant, pp. 131–51. Alannah Tomkins, ‘Who Were His Peers? The Social and Professional Milieu of the Provincial Surgeon-Apothecary in the Late Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Social History, 44:3 (2011), pp. 915–35. For some discussion of medical knowledge in Nottinghamshire at the turn of the nineteenth century, Catherine Smith, ‘Urban Improvement in the Nottinghamshire Market Town, 1770–1840’, Midland History, 25 (2000), pp. 98–114. For ‘proletarian science’ and its literature, Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes [2001], Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2010, pp. 70–2. NA, DD 311/5, 1813, 105.

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as a letter writer, and candles – but it was in regard to the cotton that he used the word. He appears to have bought the yarn, in different weights, from (a different) Joseph Woolley of Barton, a fellow member of the Red Hart Friendly Society at Ruddington. Barton Woolley had a framework knitting shop and worked in cotton.75 At first Woolley recorded what he made from the sale of cotton in his running income accounts, transferring the details to separate pages at the end of 1809. The last record of his selling cotton was in December 1813. He often sold in tiny quantities (but cotton yarn weighs very light). In 1813 he bought 13 lb and sold 11 lb, an indication that by now he was knitting worsted stockings incorporating some cotton. He was still selling small amounts of cotton in 1815, but no longer keeping separate cotton accounts – or maybe he had bought another ‘Extenduator’. These are workmanlike accounts, dealing with just one commodity, and thus lacking the compelling detail of ‘Balsom . . . Conserve of Elecumpoir [electuary?] . . . Horehound . . . Spirit of whine . . . salve and Extract of Lead . . . Camphorated Spirits . . . Spik . . . ’, in the medical accounts (but that is a reader response rather than anything to do with Woolley’s feelings on the difference between the two enterprises). The candle accounts are more like the cotton than the garden reckonings. He had always done a small trade in candles among colleagues and neighbours. Candles were a necessary tool of the framework knitting trade (to provide the means to work on winter nights, as noted by many petitioners before the first 1812 Framework Knitting Committee). In October 1801 he recorded a small profit from selling them. One account from 1802 was not settled until 1807.76 In 1804 he noted what he made from ‘Candels that I sell out of the 2 dozen that I baught for my self’.77 This trading had ceased by 1809. On paper at least, he was much more interested in his garden than he was in candles or cotton. By 1813, when 75

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NA, DD 311/1: ‘feb the 24 [1801] Joseph Woolleys Shop at barton was broken open and hose and Cotton stole there out to the amount of 14 shillings Joe had been to the Club and Came home about 12 oClock and found the Shop Window open and a pair of mens shoes stand in it and he haveing no thaught that there was aney body in it he took the Shoes and threw them in to the Shop and then went into the house and went to bed and in the morning the shoes was gone and it is thaught that the roge was in the Shop at the same time’; ‘28 Dec 1809 Bot of Jos Woolley Brt Cotton 5½ lb £1 7s 11d . . . Nov the 20 4 lb of Cotton £1 2s 0d’, NA, DD 311/4. NA, DD 311/3: ‘June the 15 1802 mr reckless to me for candles 11s 8d may the 22 1807 received of mr reckless the sum of eleven shillings and Eight pence’. This may have been Gervas Reckless, churchwarden between 1805 and 1807. NA, DR 1/5/40/163–74, The Account of Baptisms Marriages & Burials taken from the Registers of Clifton with Glapton in the County of Nottingham (Bishops Transcripts, Clifton with Glapton). NA, DD 311/1, Dec 1801; DD 311/ 3, 27 May 1807 (Woolley returned to the 1804 notebook to record this).

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he first made consolidated garden accounts (‘oct the 11 1813 what I make of my garden’), it was a thriving enterprise. He specialised in soft fruit, purchasing a wide variety of gooseberry bushes (‘Juberlee . . . Beauty . . . Golden Queen . . . Shannon . . . Independent . . . Ever Green . . . Jolly Tar . . . Triumphant’), and sold not only the fruit, but bushes for planting out. He understood his subscription money to local gooseberry shows as a necessary outgoing, and was evidently pleased to win prizes at Bradmore and Ruddington in 1815.78 His reputation for gooseberry growing put his stock at risk: the first entry in the 1815 journal records that ‘Feb the 28 at dinner time I saw the three Goos berey trees in my Garden and on Friday the 3 of march I saw they was stole I never was in the Garden from the 28 of Feb till the 3rd of march and they were stole between those Dates and on Satuarday the 4 of march or Earley on Sunday the 5 I had 1 Smitering beuty and some seedlings and a spoarts man stole.’79 He grew currants, plums, and apples as well, but made the most from gooseberries, selling 6 pecks 15 lbs in July 1815.80 He put down onions and root vegetables (unspecified) and asparagus; he sowed onion, french bean, lettuce, cress and radish seed. He sold a great many cabbages in June 1813. Some of the herbs he grew (sage, pennyroyal, horehound) must have been of use in his doctoring business, but he sold them as well. It looks as if he had a flower garden too, for he purchased flower pots and ‘13 stands for flower pots’ in August 1813, but did not say what he grew in them. The only garden flower he mentioned was Ranunculus (‘oct the 30 [1813] pd for Runicaleses 1s 6d’), and autumn is the right time to put in the bulbs. They can be grown in containers.81 And what of the garden shears he paid to have mended in June 1815? Did he have a hedge? Or a small lawn? (The spade that was repaired in April raises fewer questions.)82 The garden appears a more pleasurable site of profit than the knitting frame and its appurtenances; but perhaps only when the reader of his accounts knows that gardens are – a pleasure. But Joseph Woolley may have hated gardening, digging two spits deep in a cold rain, his splatterdashes covered in mud.

78

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81

He had first paid a subscription in 1809: NA, DD 311/4, 12 Aug 1809; DD 311/6, 31 Jul, Aug 1815. He had had his eye on the Ruddington prize for a long time, noting in 1809 ‘Monday august the 7 the Goosberry show was at mr widdersons at ruddington and the first prise was wone by Joseph widderson at the tool [Toll?] Bar William wright of ruddington won one prise’. DD 311/4. NA, DD 311/6, Feb 1815. This is noted on the first end paper of the book. A peck is a measure of dry volume, equivalent to two gallons. I have not currently the means to weigh two gallons of gooseberries, not least because, as I write, it is the middle of winter. 82 NA, DD 311/5, 7 and 21 Aug, 30 Oct 1815. NA, DD 311/6, 1 Apr, 17 Jun 1815.

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His extra-framework-knitting activities allowed him to supplement the income brought in by four or so days stocking-making. His position as never-married man and (after 1813) Clifton estate tenant provided him with the sites for economic activity (house and garden ground). By the end of 1813 he had borrowed and saved enough capital to acquire three frames of his own. Had he had a family to support, he would not have been in a position to do these things, even with a wife’s earnings, and his framework knitting income would have been as hard pressed as Thomas Measures said his was, from 1809 onwards. Adam Smith said that it was a natural disposition of humankind, ‘to truck, barter, and exchange’, at the same time as he provided a cultural and conjectural history to explain it. He described the division of labour in remote and modern times (division here meaning the specialism of making bows and arrows in a primitive community, whilst someone else came to specialise ‘in making the frames and covers of their little huts’). It was the certainty of being able to exchange the surplus of arrows, say, for animal skins, or a nicely made frame-hut, that made each person apply themself to a particular occupation. In remote and modern times parents were hard pressed to see a difference in the talents and abilities of their children, said Smith. Work – labour – made the differences of personality between them, when at about six or eight years old, they came ‘to be employed in very different occupations’. Then their different capacities and abilities were noticed; emphasised by others, they developed in the child or adolescent, ‘till at last the vanity of the philosopher is willing to acknowledge scarce any resemblance [between them]’. In even remoter eras, without barter and exchange, each person would have satisfied his own needs (made his own arrows and hut) and differences in talents and abilities would not have emerged. ‘Different geniuses and talents’ could not become socially useful unless they were brought into a common stock, by ‘barter and exchange’.83 But there is no evidence from Joseph Woolley’s writing that his trading activity was a natural proclivity, innate capacity, or aspect of his personality. It was, rather, a response to the specific set of social and economic circumstances in which he found himself. Nevertheless, the pleasure he appears to have found in exercising his labour in gardening and herbalism is some inscription of his personality and his understanding of himself. His accounts allow us to deepen and detail Adam Smith’s groundwork to industrial psychology. 83

Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations . . . In Three Volumes, Whitestone, Chamberlaine, W. Watson, Potts, and 17 others, Dublin, 1776, vol. I, pp. 20–5 (chapter 2, ‘Of the Principle which gives Occasion to the Division of Labour’).

9

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So you understand the law? – Yes. Second Report from the Committee on the Framework Knitters Petitions (1812), p. 273.

‘Few male workers spent less than twelve hours of most weekdays at work,’ says John Rule of the period 1700–1850 in England. Working hours, days, and weeks were determined by ‘the task in hand; by the number of pieces to be made to maintain a living; by custom or agreement; or even by Act of Parliament’. Extraordinary events (riots and strikes, feasts, and festivals) can sometimes provide apertures onto working lives otherwise hidden from view, he says; but work was ‘central to working-class experience . . . and the historian must try to go deeper in search of the everyday’. Working-class autobiographers make this difficult to do, for often they chose to write about the extraordinary rather than the ordinary.1 Joseph Woolley’s diaries are unusual then, in providing a detailed chronology of six years of an ordinary life, but his subjective experience of most of the working hours of most of his days lies in shadow. However, in a reversal of the procedure suggested by Rule, work – the knitting process and the machine he used – can be made to provide some aperture onto his everyday life (and, perhaps, his experience of it). Woolley bears no direct testimony to doing knitting and working a frame, so recourse is to the recorded experience of other framework knitters and those who observed them, in the years from 1800 to 1815. They, in fact, gave consistent testimony about Rule’s third determinant of working lives: ‘Act[s] of Parliament’, or statute law. This kind of testimony from Woolley’s contemporaries may even allow us to fulfil William Sewell’s strict criterion for dealing in terms of 1

John Rule, ‘Against Innovation? Custom and Resistance in the Workplace, 1700–1850’, in Tim Harris (ed.), Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1995, pp. 168–88. On how the diary (in comparison with autobiography) functions to theorise ‘everyday life’ itself, see Julie Rak, ‘Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary’, in Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, pp. 16–26, and below, Chapter 11.

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‘experience’ in the first place: some evidence that ‘the person who has enjoyed or suffered [an] event has reflected upon it’.2 The law provided for active cogitation on work in the stocking trade, in the same way it provided for Woolley’s reflection on his daily life. Listening to masters, men, lawyers, and MPs discussing framework knitting in 1812 and 1819 (reading the minutes of evidence from the three committees set up to consider the framework knitters’ petitions) also reveals something of Woolley’s bodily experiences over long stretches of time, and ways in which those experiences may have organised his thinking about labour, and, perhaps, life itself. But any information we gain this way will come at second hand: Woolley did not write about these things. Unlike the eighteenth-century maidservants who wrote and published poetry about domestic labour processes and their work with household objects, Woolley recorded nothing of his thinking about framework knitting; he did not need to, for unlike them, he did not write for an audience.3 The cultural status of framework knitting is an important context to Woolley’s life and labours. By the 1820s there existed a ‘romance’ of the knitting frame – a story of national pride in technological development combined with minute description of a labour process – to be taught to children in schoolrooms. This was ‘romance’ in the figurative sense, as in the later nineteenth-century ‘romance of the slums’, or ‘the romance of science’: someone’s, something’s, ordinariness made alluring and strange by the lyrical oddity of telling it. ‘Little tarry-athome travellers’ were transported to Nottingham in no. 51 of Scenes of British Wealth in Produce, Manufactures, and Commerce (1823), whilst simultaneously being asked to look ahead to scene no. 73, at the picture of an old Shetland woman knitting by hand. You could look at a hand knitter for a long time and not work out how it was done; you could contemplate a knitting frame for an eternity, and never understand: ‘All one can see is, that the man holds a thread of worsted at one end, and then, one after another, a whole row of hooks jump up to catch hold of it and drag it out of sight. When this operation has been several times repeated, you find a piece of stocking wove; but who would ever have thought of it?’4 As with most histories of the framework knitting industry 2 3

4

See Chapter 2. Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 342–56. For work, writing, and the workers, James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 119–23. Isaac Taylor, Scenes of British Wealth in Produce, Manufactures, and Commerce. For the Amusement of Little Tarry-at-Home Travellers, Harris, London, 1823, pp. 185–7; 265–7.

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for juvenile and adult audiences, much word-space was given to the literally romantic story of the frame’s sixteenth-century invention by a Nottinghamshire curate crossed in love (though communal technological development was highlighted by John Blackner in 1815).5 And as for the workers, ‘a stocking-weaver requires more genius than strength’ young readers were told in 1821. The enterprise was more profitable to the master than to the journeyman to be sure, for the latter was hard pressed to earn more than a guinea and a half a week without ‘considerable application’, but on the plus side, it was ‘clean neat work, and unexposed to the inclemencies of the weather’.6 Whoever compiled the tenth edition of English Trades had not revised the passage on wages in stocking manufacture in light of the 1819 House of Commons Select Committee’s report, which was of weekly incomes in the Leicestershire worsted branch of the trade as low as 6s a week. Many stockingmakers looked back to the better days of 1809, or 1814–15, to measure the deterioration of their income ten years on, but none, giving evidence before this committee, mentioned earnings of 31s a week.7 The school books persisted in calling knitting, ‘weaving’, elided framework-knitting with hand-knitting, and used what appears to be the worsted-trade organisation of West Yorkshire to stand in for that of the Midlands – and everywhere else that framework knitting was undertaken. Weaving is done on a loom by passing a series of horizontal threads between a vertical warp; knitting involves one continuous thread used to produce a looped fabric.8 And for juvenile readers worsted knitting was made to stand in for plain and fancy silk stocking-making in cotton and cotton lace, of which the 1812 committee on framework knitting heard much more than it did of worsted. Gravenor Henson

5

6

7

8

Stanley D. Chapman (ed.), Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters [1831], David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1970, pp. 38–71; Anon., The Book of English Trades and Library of the Useful Arts, 10th edn, F. C. & J. Rivington, London, 1821, pp. 311–15; John Blackner, The History of Nottingham, Embracing its Antiquities, Trade and Manufactures, from the Earliest Authentic Records, to the Present Period, Sutton, Nottingham, 1815: ‘the frame is the offspring of profound genius and nice discrimination . . . brought to its present state of perfection by the united talents of many’. Book of English Trades, p. 314. The author probably never entered a frame shop: Dorothy M. Shrimpton, The Parkers of Rantersgate, Framework Knitters, Ruddington, Ruddington Framework Knitters Museum Trust, Ruddington, 1989, pp. 12–14. Great Britain. House of Commons. Report from the Select Committee on Framework Knitters Petition; Together with the Minutes of Evidence Taken Before Them. 1819 (193)V.401, pp. 407, 409, 424, 429, 435, 437. Workers in the Nottingham plain-silk branch remembered earnings of 18s a week in 1805–7. Great Britain. House of Commons. Report from the Committee on the Framework-Knitters Petitions. 1812. (247)II.203, p. 226. For these ‘bill committees’, see above, Chapter 8, note 14. Shrimpton, Parkers, p. 10.

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(framework knitter and historian of the trade) spoke to ‘the staple part of our business, that which I conceive there are most hands employed in, that is, in making plain work of worsted or woollen yarn’.9 But the majority of witnesses were from Nottingham, testifying to practices in silk and lace. In 1831 Henson was to give the most minute description of the stocking frame and the process of knitting in his History of the Framework Knitters (1831).10 Written in the instructional mode (‘Throw the threads over the needles by the hand’) these passages were reproduced by William Felkin in his History of the Machine Wrought Hosiery (1867). From his own experience, Felkin described what a worker had to do. Hands busy with thread and sinkers, ‘feet moving at the rate of one hundred yards in a minute’, you must keep constant watch over the needles and the work to see ‘that it be free from blemish and irregularity’. Short-sightedness was common among knitters of fine work. By the 1860s you could see many young knitters wearing spectacles. But in general, fully fashioned work was much better for the knitter than making lengths of knit for cutting up, said Felkin: it relieved him of the bodily monotony of working a straight piece on a wide frame. As he shaped the stocking he moved the position of his body, briefly rested his hands and feet: ‘wide hand-frames on which usually the unfashioned work is made, are . . . very trying’. But even so, on either type of frame ‘the constancy of muscular motion is favourable to the health of the stocking-maker’, especially if the place he worked was warm and well ventilated.11 The stocking-frame looked complicated in operation; there was much labour involved in keeping it in good order; but ‘a youth of ten or twelve . . . soon learns to work in it’, as had he: ‘the author at thirteen produced three pairs of fashioned women’s twenty-six gauge full sized hose between six in the morning and nine in the evening of a summer’s day in 1808’.12 9 10 11

12

Report from the Committee, p. 245. Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters [1831], pp. 61–7. Emergent industrial medicine and occupational health discussed digestive and lung problems among hand-loom weavers but did not mention framework knitters. John Forbes, Alexander Tweedie and John Conolly, The Cyclopaedia of Practical Medicine, 3 vols., Sherwood, London, 1833, vol. II, p. 614. Charles Thackrah pointed out that in weaving the worker’s limbs were exercised, but the trunk remained still. The same could be said of frameworking. He thought this not a problem except for home workers whose rooms were often small and ill ventilated. The Effects of Arts, Trades and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity: with Suggestions for the Removal of the Agents which Produce Disease and Shorten the Duration of Life, 2nd edn, Longman, London, 1832, p. 20. William Felkin, History of the Machine Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, Longmans, Green, London, 1867, pp. 48–9.

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Readers might learn something of this when they read the reports on Nottinghamshire framework knitters’ petitions in 1812. They might learn how a frame worked and of their vagaries – how men must get used to a new frame – and how stockings, in silk, worsted, cotton, and cotton lace were processed from start to finish. They might learn the many names for varieties of stockings and stocking shapes.13 As far as manufacture was concerned the point hammered home by hosiers and knitters in 1812 and in 1819, was about selvedges. The kind of shaped stocking that – for example – Joseph Woolley knitted, was fashioned to the contours of a human leg, as in his ‘small wemens hose single shapes’. The narrowing towards the ankle and toe was made by shifting the loop of thread and clearing two or three of the needles.14 This produced one piece of knitted fabric looking rather like a fat funnel. Its edges were taut because the stitch had been firmed at the beginning and end of every row – turned back so that the piece would not fray or unravel. This gave the seamer something firm to work with. This was a proper stocking, ‘made in the original manner’.15 A flat, rectangular piece of knitted fabric out of which a stocking was cut with scissors or shears had no selvedge. Without selvedges, stocking seams, whether in lace, silk, cotton or worsted, were liable to burst open or fray as soon as they were worn, and certainly when they were washed. To prevent this, seamers of cut-ups had to make wide, thick seams, which altered the appearance of the stockings and made them uncomfortable to wear. Any shape to a cut-up stocking came from the seamed tube being fitted damp to a leg-shaped board, and then stiffened and dried. Looseness down the seam and its tubular shape were revealed at the first wash, said many masters and men. Goods like these were ‘stockings on a new plan’, the result of a ‘new mode of manufacturing’.16 Consumers could not tell the difference between these ‘cut-up’ articles and a genuine fully-fashioned stocking when they were displayed on a shop counter or in a pedlar’s pack.17 ‘Elasticity is a most desirable thing in a stocking,’ said one Nottingham hosier. ‘Our stockings spring from the selvage and the seam, when made in a proper way, but when cut up . . . they cannot spring, there is not that elasticity, and it difficult that 13 14 15 16 17

Report from the Committee, pp. 219, 222, 229, 237, 240. Report from the Committee, p. 224. Report from the Select Committee, pp. 407, 436. Report from the Select Committee, pp. 407, 425, 427, 429, 431. Only men would buy stockings without putting their hands in and holding them up to the light, suggested hosier Hooley in 1812, ‘which I observe ladies generally do when they purchase stockings’. Great Britain, House of Commons. Second Report from the Committee on the Framework Knitters Petitions, 1812 (349)II.267, p. 287.

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the parties will get them on and off ’.18 Cut-ups began to penetrate the market in 1812 said some; or in 1815, said witnesses from Leicestershire.19 Some with very long historical memories pointed out that there had been cut-ups in the worsted branch of the business as far back as the 1790s, for certain kinds of fine-twilled hose demanded the cutting out of the foot. But compared with the cheap shoddy stuff of 1819, ‘those stockings at that time of day were most respectable, and came into the trade most beautifully’.20 Many of the witnesses (masters and men) before the 1812 and 1819 committees appear nostalgic – for a golden age, when returns to workers were high and all stockings beautifully made. But this was not another romance of the stocking trade. The political tactic of the petitioning stockingers was to tie questions of consumer confidence, and the reputation of the trade at home and abroad, to aesthetic appreciation of a beautifully-wrought object – a pair of fully fashioned stockings. This aesthetic was clearly deeply felt by many framework knitters; but ‘a poor man’s time is his bread’, as one Nottinghamshire hosier said in 1812, and by 1819 the problem was getting work of any kind, let alone the beautiful.21 From early 1811 through to the spring of 1812, Nottinghamshire Luddites destroyed many wide frames used to produce lengths of knit for cut-ups.22 But wide frames were little mentioned before the Committee, which sat first in May, and then July 1812. It was the material that was produced on frames that was at issue. Workmen actually liked wide frames, said Gravenor Henson, speaking of the lace branch. Wide frames may have produced worse work, but that was because more stuff could be made using one. Many knitters preferred them, and ‘masters will sooner employ a wide and a fine frame than they will a narrow and coarse frame’, for more money was to be made from them.23 In 1812 and 1819 most evidence about stocking-making came from masters and workers in the cities of Nottingham and Leicester. 18 19 20

21 22 23

Second Report, p. 287. Report from the Select Committee, pp. 409, 410, 421. Report from the Select Committee, p. 416. In 1812 a Nottingham hosier explained twills to government: ‘Wide Frames, were originally constructed for the purpose of making pantaloons, which required wider Frames than were then in use, & for the making of fancy Stockings called “Twills”, which were made the length way of the Frame. This description of Stocking, is now out of use, and Pantaloons not being wanted for the Continent, these frames were not employed in the work they were originally intended for, but being applicable to make two Stockings at once, many of them were put to work in that way’. HO 42/131. Second Report, p. 283. Kevin Binfield (ed.), Writings of the Luddites, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD and London, 2004, p. 15. Report from the Committee, p. 247.

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Nineteenth-century accounts of the trade ignored framework knitting in the country districts, as Stanley Chapman has observed. During the long eighteenth-century, in the villages of the East Midlands, an extensive system of ‘yeoman’ framework knitting developed, undertaken by men like Joseph Woolley and his father, who worked both frame and land.24 The Committees heard very little of knitters from places like Clifton, but there was enough evidence given to suggest how Woolley’s everyday working year was organised. There were two main phases to Woolley’s stocking-making life. Up until 1804 he worked the frame in the shops of at least two small masters. He mentioned ‘my master Launder’ in 1801, and in 1803 going ‘to work at reeds shop in his Eight and thirty frame’.25 In 1804 he moved his frame home and started to record not only frame rent in his accounts, but also payment for board (presumably to his parents). By 1813 he was receiving 6d a week from a journeyman working a second frame he had acquired; by the end of the diaries he was receiving 1s a week for three. It is not clear whether the frame he moved home in 1804 was one he had purchased, though he had taken out loans that would cover the cost of one. He also paid for the carriage of a frame in March 1813, which was a 40-gauge he had had repaired.26 In Woolley’s diaries there was no recognition of the anonymous genius of the engineers who had brought the frame to a pitch of technological perfection over the centuries, but rather exasperation at the ‘Lieing and Shaffeling and promising and then deseiving’ of the frame setters.27 This 40-gauge frame will be discussed in the next chapter. It may provide one narrow window onto Joseph Woolley’s 1812 – what he did and why he did not write during the height of the Luddite disturbances in south Nottinghamshire. The frame ‘was that that was broak Last Janewarey and recruited again for mee’.28 ‘Last Janewarey’ was January 1812 when there was a Luddite raid on Clifton. After 1804, when Woolley worked his own frame (old, new, or recruited) he paid rent on it. In 1812 ‘frame rent’ was much discussed. The two reports on the framework knitters’ petitions emphasised that the ‘rent’ of a frame was not a rent in the modern sense of hiring out

24 25 26

27 28

Stanley D. Chapman, ‘Introduction to 1970 Edition’, Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, p. xviii. NA, DD 311/1, 17 Feb 1801, 311/2, 3 Jan 1803. This was a fine-gauge frame. On ‘gauge’: it was reckoned by the number of needles set in an inch on the horizontal. The more needles, the finer the knit produced. But a frame with more needles was not necessarily a ‘wide frame’. Gauge described the placing of the needles, not the width of the frame. Felkin, History, pp. 49–50 for setting-up and recruiting (a thorough service) of frames. NA, DD 311/5, 20 Feb, 29 Mar 1813.

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something or some place in return for money, but rather was a grant of usage by an employer. It was a levy on work handed out and received back by hosiers, a deduction from the price paid for the finished stockings, or a kind of tax for the privilege of being given work (raw materials to process) in the first place.29 Frameworkers ‘were often obliged to pay rent for their own frame’.30 For all stockingers questioned at the 1812 committee, frame rent was inextricably part of the wages question: if prices for their work were increased, so too was frame rent. They also gave evidence about a new kind of speculation in frames, about the number of ex-servants and ‘persons, such as bakers, butchers, farmers sons and others’ with a little capital who invested in frames and looked for a good return for their outlay. ‘We consider 10 per cent a sufficient interest for frames’, said Thomas Large of the Nottingham plain silk branch.31 A speculator who had acquired frames was eager to see them working. This, in the opinion of many witnesses, was the cause both of high frame rents and the seeking out of ‘colts’ – men who had not served an apprenticeship in the trade – to work them. From 1801 to 1804, Joseph Woolley did not record paying frame rent. His typical record for income, before he moved his frame home, was ‘the work come to’, that is the amount he received from whoever employed him for making an unspecified number of stocking shapes. He did not pay for seaming until 1804, at which time he also started recording regular outlay for candles, oil, and needles, as well as frame rent.32 By 1809 he was independent in a way he had not been at the beginning of the century. Independence might be thought a good thing, and, as Thomas Large pointed out, men with their own frames may have been ‘independent of the manufacturer’ but they were also ‘more liable to be turned out of employment’ and ‘to go elsewhere, and take a low price: they will work at a less price sooner than their frame 29

30 31

32

The system of’making ‘capital cost a direct charge on the workers’ was explained as the owner needing ‘some safeguard to ensure an adequate return on his capital’; but that does not account for frame rent as a deduction experienced by workers who owned their own machines. F.A. Wells, The British Hosiery and Knitwear Industry: Its History and Organisation [1935], David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1972, p. 64 Second Report, pp. 220, 230. Report from the Committee, pp. 218, 232, 247. ‘The remedy which I should propose, would be to lower the rent of the frames so that the owner should receive 5 percent. for his money, and as much as would pay the repairs of the frame . . . 8 percent would do that’, said Gravenor Henson. For Thomas Large, ‘dear but funny Friend’ of the ‘Sherwood Lads’ (the Luddities), Binfield, Writings, pp. 122–3. The typical weekly expenses of a knitter in the Nottingham cotton branch in 1811 were detailed as: seaming, needles, oil, candles, coal, frame standing, frame rent and the cost of delivering the work to the hosier. Nottingham Review, 29 Nov 1811; Report from the Committee, pp. 261–263.

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stand still’.33 The point was pursued: ‘Do you suppose that it is more advantageous for a workman to use his own Frame or to hire one?’ – ‘To hire one’, replied John Blackner, cotton stockinger of Nottingham.34 Much of Joseph Woolley’s independence, if that’s what it was, came from his sideline business of cotton trading and home doctoring, and from the incidental freedoms of a tenancy in his own right of a Clifton estate property with garden ground to cultivate. Few in this closed village could have called exchanging the bonds of fealty to the Reverend William Clifton for those owed to Sir Gervase either freedom or independence. Nevertheless, after 1804 Woolley was in a different productive relationship to masters and hosiers from the one he experienced in his early thirties, though he still worked within the same putting-out system. The ‘master’ Woolley wrote about in 1801 was not a hosier, or merchant manufacturer. He was probably what witnesses before the 1812 committees called a bag-hosier.35 As Edward Allen explained, a baghosier was a master stockinger. He obtained the materials for stocking making from the ‘head hosier’; he and his men processed the silk, or cotton, or worsted; then the master delivered the finished goods to the hosier and received payment for the labour of making them. When he distributed the wages to the workers was not made clear by any of the witnesses.36 The hosier then sold the stockings to the merchant, who in turn sold them on to shopkeepers, and to overseas merchants if he dealt in the export business. ‘Merchant . . . hosier . . . master stockingmaker . . . apprentices and journeymen who are the Framework Knitters’, said Gravenor Henson: that was what the committee needed to grasp about the production chain in stocking-making.37 Master Launder behaved like a bag-hosier (or master stocking maker), and, on the evidence of Woolley’s early accounts, paid him a weekly sum according to the amount knitted and the price he obtained from the head hosier. Woolley did not pay for seaming, or for frame rent, or lighting or heating,

33

34 36

37

Report from the Committee, pp. 220, 237. Wells, British Hosiery, p. 65 on ‘independence’. Also Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 31–3. 35 Report from the Committee, p. 231. Wells, British Hosiery, pp. 61–3. Report from the Committee, pp. 231–2. The country bag-hosier typically had frames on his own premises. Buying raw materials where he could, he put out work in the locality and sold the finished stockings directly to small shopkeepers and hawkers. Later accounts of the distribution system in stocking-making distinguished the bag-hosier from the undertaker, or middleman, who may have worked for one large hosier, distributing yarn and orders directly to journeymen stockingers, and sometimes to small masters. Wells, British Hosiery, pp. 62–3. These distinctions were not explained at the 1812 committees. Report from the Committee, pp. 246–7

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or the materials to service his frame during these early years. We can assume that the sum of money that Woolley recorded as ‘work come to’ was after these deductions had been made. I wish I knew for certain what material Woolley worked on in these early years, for it would tell us something about his daily experience as a worker. Master stockingmakers in the silk hose branch of the industry received the raw material in the mass from the hosier. They and their workers were involved in the spinning of silk yarn. This was not the case for workers in worsted or cotton. When Woolley was clearly working in cotton (after 1809) it was yarn he purchased by weight, and cotton yarn that he traded in. Spinning was not mentioned in his diaries or accounts (though in 1813 he did purchase two bobbins, but these only imply that at some stage he or someone close to him undertook winding – but again, from purchased yarn). In his ‘Statistical Account of the FrameworkKnitting Trade’ John Blackner (who gave evidence to the House of Commons committee as a stocking maker, not the historian/sociologist of the trade he also was) reported that by 1812 across Nottinghamshire more were employed in making cotton hose than worsted.38 Perhaps Woolley had worked cotton from his earliest days, for a cotton yarn consistent and fine enough for stocking making had been developed in the county in the eighteenth century (‘the name of Nottingham will ever be coupled with the invention of manufacturing this article’).39 The machine Woolley labelled by gauge in 1813 was probably for working fine cotton, but he could have used it for worsted.40 Earlier in his career he may have worked worsted yarn, and his early masters may have been connected with the Loughborough worsted trade. Woolley records visiting the town in his journeyman days, in 1803, on a Sunday or a Monday; so for the purposes of pleasure, probably, rather than stocking delivery, which was what a master or bag-hosier would undertake, anyway, not a journeyman. By 1809 Woolley was something like a bag hosier himself (or that’s the closest name we have for country workers like Woolley, who were never mentioned by city masters or men). He purchased cotton yarn and traded some of it. He appears to have had a reciprocal arrangement with the Barton Joseph Woolley, who kept a small knitting shop, and from whom ‘Clifton’ Joseph bought yarn in bulk in 1809.41 But he did not give the cotton to journeymen to work on: he knitted his own stocking shapes, and traded the rest. He had an interest in first two, then three frames, which may have been located in his house. He had other men working for him, 38 39

Blackner, History, pp. 238–45; Wells, British Hosiery, pp. 50, 57. 40 41 Blackner, History, pp. 245–6. Second Report, p. 282. See Chapter 8, p. 198.

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though whether to call them journeymen, or apprentices, or simply knitters, is a moot point. ‘Oct the 16 [1815] william price Left me’, he wrote. William Price was a married man and did not live at Woolley’s.42 But in July of that year he described a more formal labour and employment arrangement with: ‘the 15 John Smith Left mee and went to service and he was in my Debt for 29 weeks . . . frame standing and Lodging at 6d per week 14s 6d . . . for 6 Goosberey trees 8s 0d . . . for Doctering his wrist 0s 6d’. Smith did not settle his debt until January 1816.43 Even formal arrangements in the stocking business could be fleeting; frameworking filled in a period of job-seeking. Did John Smith have a home elsewhere and a bit of garden ground on which he could emulate Joseph Woolley and cultivate the gooseberry bushes he had from him? What did he do with the bushes when he got a job as live-in servant?44 In 1812 and 1815 stockingers attempted to explain the fleeting arrangements, the shifts and stratagems of what was a complex industry – men buying frames in good times and paying rent on them even when not in use so that they might keep their options open with a hosier, even as they rented a frame at another shop; the constant carting of frames from one dwelling house to another, to anywhere its standing could be paid for; in Nottingham and Leicester the rapid movement from hosier to hosier in search of an order (stockingers and hosiers did not call it that); the arrangement with a stocking maker like Joseph Woolley who would take you in to bide your time for 6d a week and a frame standing charge; small-time trading in cotton yarn in the country villages . . . Gravenor Henson’s neat typology (‘it may be satisfactory to the Committee to state, that there are four descriptions of persons concerned in the stocking-making business . . .’) did not tell the half of it; but perhaps, as has already been observed, he was talking about practices in town, not in the country places. ‘The system of distributing work was complicated,’ remarked F. A. Wells, and that says nothing of the complications of production itself. Definitions of types of knitting and hose varied widely from witness to witness before the 1812 committees. Masters claimed that they had very little idea of how the business was carried on: ‘The number of needles I do not know. I do not know the number of needles my workmen put in’ . . . ‘I am frequently obliged to leave it to the workman how to make the thing I want, and cannot describe it perfectly.’45

42 43 44 45

NA, DD 311/5, 16 Oct 1813; 25 Oct for Price’s marital status. NA, DD 311/6, 15 Jul 1815, 6 Jan 1816. In the diary part of the 1815 volume: ‘July the 14 John Smith Left me and on the 15 he went to Live Searvant with one of Docter Mattocks Sons’. Report from the Committee, pp. 271, 287.

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And what of Joseph Woolley’s regular Saturday visits to Nottingham? He went into town nearly every Saturday that is recorded in his diaries. He spent a good deal of money there, for Saturday was the same day he also recorded, first, ‘work came to . . . ’ and after 1809 (for example, in December 1815) ‘the 16[th]/ 7 pair of 6 Sizes shapes 14s 3½d’. He may have taken the finished goods to a Nottingham hosier and then gone on to spend (that particular Saturday) 1s 7d in town. But it is equally possible that he took them to a bag-hosier (several different bag-hosiers, over the years) along the way, picking up a new job and yarn for the ensuing week at the same time. Later in the century Monday was spoken of as distribution day (‘The worsted for the week is given out by the hosier, who lets frames and employs, every Monday morning’), and Saturday as the universal return day: ‘At some warehouses they have to wait most of the day,’ said one Leicestershire worker.46 But in 1812 hosiers spoke of knitters coming to their warehouses at all times of the day and night as one of the vast inconveniencies that would ensue from posting the lists of prices for which framework knitters were petitioning.47 The pattern of work revealed by Joseph Woolley’s accounts and diarywriting does not make a complicated putting-out system much plainer. It was plain to him and there was no need to record the names of hosiers and middlemen, or even of the type of yarn he was working on. But the city-based industry as described by witnesses before the 1812 select committees helps point up the position of a stockingmaker in the rural area south of the River Trent. The pattern of Woolley’s days and weeks was entirely structured by the framework knitting industry. Keeping accounts of it was the primary reason for his putting pen to paper in the first place. His stocking-making life can be reconstructed to some extent from accounts that his contemporaries gave of theirs, but Woolley himself did not comment on it, or made a general assessment of the industry as did many of his fellow workers. In most aspects of his life Woolley was highly aware of structural factors. Many stories he told about himself and friends and neighbours were framed by the law. Poor law, common law, the summary justice of the magistrate’s parlour – were the factors that made his accounts of sexual and social relations stories in the first place. The law framed his consciousness; many of his 46

47

Great Britain. House of Commons. Factories Inquiry Commission. First Report of the Central Board of His Majesty’s Commissioners Appointed to Collect Information in the Manufacturing Districts, as to the Employment of Children in Factories, and as to the Propriety and Means of Curtailing the Hours of Their Labour: with Minutes of Evidence, and Reports by the District Commissioners. 1833 (450)XX.1, p. 535. Second Report, p. 291.

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judgements and opinions about what happened to him and others were formulated in regard to law. But not so with the complicated system that provided him with the means to live. Legal consciousness was high among the Nottingham framework knitters who petitioned parliament in 1812. This is hardly surprising, as their key proposal was to have ancient statute law revived on their behalf, or for new legislation to regulate wages and prices in the trade. Witnesses gave detailed evidence about the regulatory role of magistrates. The campaign for regulation was conducted in legal language, both nationally and locally. Woolley had access to this perspective, certainly from the local press and probably from discussion with his friendly society and ale-house companions. And yet in his writing, ‘the law and framework knitting’ was an empty category. And so too was it in the notebooks of the local magistrate. Framework knitters crowd the pages of Sir Gervase Clifton’s notebooks, very occasionally examined as to the state of their settlement (in only three of the thirty-three settlement examinations Clifton recorded did men give framework knitting as an occupation), far more often accused of assault, sexual assault, and threatening behaviour.48 Together, assault, threatening behaviour, disorderly conduct, and sexual assault by framework knitters accounted for eleven of the forty-three incidents like this that Clifton dealt with over the years. One assault case from 1779 suggests what may have lain behind the eruption of violence into a framework knitter’s home, by men ‘Cursing and swearing . . . Breaking the peace . . . Threaten[ing] . . . murder . . . [swearing] they would do for him root and Branch’ . . ..49 In May 1779 John Winfield of Ruddington, framework knitter, complained of assault against two other knitters of the same parish, William Wilson and William Asher. Uniquely in the context of his notebooks, Clifton recorded an explanation for the assault, as provided by John Winfield. Three weeks before seeing the magistrate, Winfield had got an order from a Nottingham hosier; it was to make two and a half dozen (30) 10d hose, to be delivered in a fortnight’s time. Winfield had said he would do the job ‘with Gods leave and luck’. He worked fifteen hours each day, but could only complete the order by taking a half day extra over the agreement. When finished he took them into Nottingham and the hosier ‘found no fault with the work but paid him one pound five shilling deducting one shilling and sixpence for a fortnights framerent’. Winfield had laid out ‘two shillings and one penny for the seaming . . . [and] found himself Needles & Candles about one shilling’. As he 48 49

He once oversaw the assigning of an apprentice knitter to a new master (1772). NA, M8050, 21 Aug 1772.

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calculated it, ‘out of one pound five shillings he received clear for his 13 days work Twenty shillings & five pence to maintain himself his Wife and two small Children’. (Sir Gervase calculated this as well, devoting an interleaved sheet of blotting paper to the sums provided by Winfield.50) Winfield was eloquent on the beauty of the stockings he had produced: ‘they were narrow clock Toes and it was particular good and ready work and thinks he never earned so much money in the same time since he has been in the business which is about Eighteen years’. But Wilson and Asher were ‘displeased at his doing the said two dozen and half of Hose in so short a Time and [for] so little money’. They ‘colered him threw him down upon the Ground and otherwise assaulted him contrary to Law’.51 If everyone’s dates were accurate, the assault took place on a Tuesday: the evening of the first day of the stockingmaker’s week. Wilson and Asher did not think the price a good one; Winfield was undercutting them. This was a workplace dispute. It was one small eruption into the formal legal system of a system of regulation managed by stockingmakers in their own shops.52 Winfield took his complaint before a magistrate, who heard it as a case of assault; but the constraints under which Sir Gervase operated as an interlocutor did not prevent the stocking maker telling the story in his own way. This was the first and last time a framework knitters’ dispute was recorded by Clifton. After 1779 stockingers appeared in his notebooks as drunken, brawling, street-fighting men, some of whose sexual and marital relationships were managed by extreme violence; but their working relationships and the organisation of the stocking trade do not figure in his notebooks. Forty years on, hosiers, masters, and workers agreed that common law and labour law as administered by magistrates was a system unfit for the purposes of the framework knitting industry. The workers’ testimony was by their silence. Only one knitter out of the seven who gave evidence in 1812 had anything to say about Nottinghamshire magistrates. Edward Allen from Sutton in Ashfield (north east of the county, near Mansfield) described how about 1810 he and perhaps a hundred other knitters in

50

51 52

Clifton often made these kinds of calculations when asked to settle wage disputes between employers and domestic servants. And perhaps here, in his early days as a sitting magistrate, he was attempting to understand the economics of the stocking trade. For clock stockings and their handsome appearance, Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, pp. 103–4. In 1812 Thomas Latham remembered back to a time (early in the century) when workmen could make a good deal of money out of clock stockings. Report from the Committee, p. 226. NA, M8050, 26 May 1779. ‘Custom is not always “nice”, still less quaint’. Rule, ‘Against Innovation?’, p. 179.

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the town were being regularly paid in soap, sugar, and herrings by a certain bag-hosier who was also a grocer. ‘It has been so common in our town to pay goods instead of money, that a number of my neighbours have been obliged to pay articles for articles, to pay sugar for drugs . . . for drapery goods . . . one person paid half a pound of . . . sugar . . . to have a tooth drawn,’ he said. A helpful local grocer (not the bag hosier) investigated the matter for the neighbourhood. He found that the workpeople were not getting goods of equal cash value. He enlisted the help of the parish constable; together they collected samples from several shops and ‘carried them to Mansfield before the magistrates, and it was judged there that . . . [the bag hosier’s sugar] was twopence a pound worse than the other shopkeepers charged’. This was ‘a proof that we were imposed on’, said Allen.53 Mansfield magistrates could act here, as Sir Gervase could act in a case of common law assault. But really, as the Select Committee was at pains to point out in its report, the question of workmen being paid in goods instead of cash was not a matter of opinion, for it had been ‘prohibited so long ago as the reign of King Edward the Fourth’ and there was much eighteenth-century legislation confirming the illegality of truck. Moreover ‘in the 12th of George the First, chap. 34, it is expressly said, that this Act shall extend to Framework-Knitting, and the making of Stockings’.54 Those who wrote the report were happy to agree that none of the respectable Nottingham hosiers had adopted the practice of truck, though there was evidence that it did prevail in some villages.55 Edward Allen also described action taken by the workpeople a little while before they carried their sugar samples off to Mansfield: ‘People were so dissatisfied’ he said, that ‘there were little depredations made several nights; in the night-time a window or two of this person [the bag-hosier/grocer] broke, and such things’. There were long antecedents to the machine breaking that characterised the Luddite disturbances, in this kind of direct action.56 Hosiers had a different perspective on the abilities of magistrates in the management of industrial relations. One proposed solution to the problems the committee heard about in May 1812 was that all disputes 53 54 55

56

Report from the Committee, p. 233. Sutton in Ashfield is in the north east of the county on the Derbyshire border, about 4 miles from Mansfield. Report from the Committee, pp. 5–6. Christopher Frank, ‘Truck or Trade? Anti-Truck Associations and the Campaign against the Payment of Wages in Goods in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 27/28 (2009), pp. 1–40; G. W. Hilton, The Truck System, including a History of the British Truck Acts, 1465–1960, W. Heffer, Cambridge, 1960. Rule, ‘Against Innovation?’, pp. 168–88; Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 1–4; Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, pp. 398–416.

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between hosiers and lace manufacturers and their workmen, concerning the actual manufacturing process, should be taken before the justices. The bill that emerged from the committee over the spring months of 1812 was designed to reaffirm the role of magistrates in the operation of master and servant legislation.57 If magistrates heard a complaint from either side, it should be lawful for them to summon the parties and determine if and what deductions should be made from the monies due to the framework knitter. There should be no appeal against the magistrates’ determination: ‘it shall be final and conclusive’.58 Like the House of Lords in July, when the bill was lost by two votes, John Parker, Nottingham hosier, was having none of this.59 Workmen already had common law remedies for short payment, he said: ‘in the case of a dispute, a man may apply to a magistrate, who might call in such parties as he thought proper; and determine, upon the evidence, whether the work was fairly paid for or not’. But the problem was making magistrates understand the nature of the agreement between the master and his workers. They usually had to call in someone with knowledge of framework knitting. If a magistrate had the necessary knowledge then he was likely to be a hosier himself and would decline to interfere in the dispute. But were these unwritten contracts so difficult to understand that no magistrate could make one out? This last point was pursued with some determination, possibly by the Committee’s chairman, Daniel 57

58

59

Douglas Hay, ‘England, 1562–1875: The Law and Its Uses’, in Paul Craven and Douglas Hay (eds.), Masters, Servants and Magistrates in Britain and the Empire, 1562–1955, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 2004, pp. 59–116; p. 112: ‘At the end of the [eighteenth] century . . . the traditional authority and role of the justice of the peace was emphasized’. Great Britain. House of Commons. A Bill as Amended by the Committee, for Preventing Frauds and Abuses in the Framework Knitting Manufacture; and in the Payment of Persons Employed Therein. 1812 (331)I.1149, pp. 3–4. At the drafting stage, opponents of a bill might counter-petition, as did Nottingham hosiers and manufacturers. The Select Committee was reconvened in July to hear evidence bearing on petitions from Nottingham and Leicester hosiers. Great Britain. House of Commons. Journals of the House of Commons. From January the 7th, 1812, in the Fifty-Second Year of the Reign of King George the Third, to July the 30th, 1812, in the Fifty-Second Year of the Reign of King George the Third, Vol. 67, pp. 476, 513. Great Britain. House of Lords. Hansard. First Series, Volume 23, Lords Sitting of Friday, 24 July 1812, Columns 1247–50; ‘House of Lords, Friday the 24th July – Framework Knitters Bill’, Nottingham Journal, 25 Jul, 28 Nov 1812. The Lords’ objection was to interference ‘in the bargains made between the master manufacturer and his workmen’. In the House of Commons there was full discussion of trade regulation, stretching back the early eighteenth century. History taught that when trade was good ‘it was very easy for the men to get their wages raised by the magistrates; but, when any stagnation, or want of demand ensued, the masters always found it a very difficult matter to get any reduction made’. Great Britain. House of Commons. Hansard. First Series, Volume 23, Commons Sitting of Tuesday, 21 July 1812, Columns 1112–77.

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Parker Coke, who was himself a JP.60 Nottingham hosier John Parker’s interlocutors used the language of contract: they knew that employment disputes over contracted work made up a large proportion of magistrates’ everyday business, all across the country. ‘Contract’ was not in hosier Parker’s vocabulary, though under questioning he soon came to use the term. Workmen had claimed that the payment agreed between them and the hosier was often reneged on when they came back to the warehouse with the finished goods. When Parker employed a man to make a given quantity of stockings, was there ‘any actual or understood agreement’ between them that the man would be paid at a given rate, he was asked. There was, said Parker. And would there be any difficulty in putting the agreement down on paper before the man took away the material? How could there be such a thing as an understanding between him and his workers that it was impossible to write down? Not impossible, said Parker; but it would occasion a great deal of work and loss of time – ‘if a workman required it of me, I should decline to employ him’. That was tantamount to saying that he refused to make any written contract with any of his men, was it not? Hosier Parker said a man could always go to a magistrate, and then outlined the difficulty of doing so ‘in a trade in which no written contract has been adopted’. That meant that ‘the workman is to be at the mercy of the master?’ It seemed so. How did Parker make deductions for work he was not satisfied with? ‘I really do not know how to describe it further than that I make the deduction, and pay the man so much less.’ He described his employment book, in which he noted how much raw material the man had taken away, and the number of stockings returned, and their price. There really was no written account of the price agreed. So ‘there does not appear any contract under which the man can demand anything?’ ‘That is a question of law’, replied Parker. He, on the other hand, was talking about custom. The transcription is confused here (the shorthand writer unclear as to what he was saying?), but Parker appeared to claim that it was customary for a worker to rely on previous arrangements and prices in undertaking a new job (‘in the custom there is a contract the man having made before, at the same price’).61 A main clause of the bill presented to Parliament underscored the power of magistrates to determine in framework knitting disputes. Now, in committee, Parker was asked to ‘admit that . . . [the custom] would be considered before a Magistrate as a contract?’ 60

61

Second Report, pp. 273–4. Mark Pottle, ‘Coke, Daniel Parker (1745–1825)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edn, Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 26 Jan 2012. Also Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 213–17. Second Report, p. 274.

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Another Nottingham manufacturer, James Hooley, was asked about the contentious clause. There was nothing new in it, was there? Had not masters and men long had recourse to the magistrates in all sorts of disputes arising in the stocking trade? Hooley agreed: ‘it is suggested by some persons that it is not law, but it is the custom among us’.62 But it was not hosier Thomas Nelson’s custom. ‘If a man does not make his work as I like I discharge him; I never appeal to a Magistrate against a man, nor a man never has against me.’63 John Parker returned to the committee room to say the same. He believed that no appeals ever were made to magistrates in regard to prices, wages, or abatement. Perhaps he meant appeals by the workers, and was not contradicting himself when he said that the very few applications he himself had made had been on the grounds of ‘injured work and work spoiled’. But in those cases the damage was ‘so slight and the magistrate is so little able to determine . . .[it] that I believe no instances are ever taken before them’. He remembered the last time it had happened to him, when a man had made the foot of a stocking of far too thick a silk and had worked it far too slack: ‘the injury to me was great’. He had perceived the difficulty the magistrate was having in knowing what he was looking at; so ‘I took back the goods, and told him I could not put him to that difficulty, that I would bear the loss myself, and discharge my workman.’ That was many years ago, and he had ever since ‘observed the same practice . . . I have never since . . . taken a workman before a magistrate.’64 It is difficult to map these exchanges about contract, custom, and trade tradition onto the historiography of ‘customs in common’ in the modern period, not least because many existing accounts assign customary practice solely to the workers as their bulwark against an ever-encroaching market capitalism.65 But hosiers and other masters in the Nottinghamshire stocking trade evoked ‘custom’, sometimes meaning, as did John Parker, ‘what I do’, or ‘what I never do’. The committee (or perhaps framework knitters’ counsel) attempted to introduce the term ‘general usage of the trade’, but with little success. ‘Customs’ stretched back twenty years, or were of recent innovation; or hosiers’ allowances to knitters for natural wastage were a custom that had fallen into disuse.66 Hosier Coltman thought that stockingers had brought the trouble with cut-ups on themselves; that cutting out stocking shapes was ‘a custom which the stocking-makers have introduced into the trade . . . in order to 62 65 66

63 64 Second Report, p. 286. Second Report, p. 290. Second Report, p. 299. Rule, ‘Against Innovation?’; Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 32–33; Binfield, Writings, pp. 20–2. Report from the Committee, pp. 219, 223, 224, 231, 236, 237.

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enable the stocking-maker to get a greater sum per week’.67 Stockingers who gave evidence were more precise in their dating of the changes that had become the ordinary way of doing things. All argued for the turning of custom into law. Thomas Large argued for prices schedules ‘established by law, as they are now by custom’. It was an old practice (in the silk branch of the trade) but schedules had never been committed to paper. The innovation would be to have a printed list of prices posted fortnightly at the hosier’s warehouse. For none of the witnesses from the Midland counties was custom a set of immutable practices stretching back to time immemorial, but rather – certainly from the stockingers’ point of view – a language for describing changes that had taken place in the industry within the memory of its workers.68 And stocking makers were, as Kevin Binfield has recently shown, much more conversant with questions of law and legality than were the Nottingham hosiers who appeared before the 1812 select committees. There was exasperation at hosier witnesses’ failure to engage with the ideas of legally enforceable agreements and written contracts.69 Stockingers, visiting London as part of the 1812 deputation, or in the wider context of the trade and the Luddite disturbances, appealed to the legislature to regulate and police the trade, in point of payment agreements, the type of goods allowed to be produced, and the number of entrants by means of the apprenticeship system. They debated statute law with counsel and Committee members (in what was probably a series of rehearsed exchanges), wondering whether the compulsory apprenticeship clauses of the Statute of Artificers (5 Eliz.c.4) might not be applied to deal with the problem of ‘colts’.70 (‘It only applies to the trades named in it’, Thomas Large 67 68

69

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Second Report, pp. 300, 303. The model of legal and contractual relations that the petitioning Nottingham knitters had in mind may well have been the Arbitration Act obtained by Lancashire cotton weavers in 1800. It is discussed by Joanna Innes, ‘Des Tisserands au Parlement: la légitimité de la politique du peuple (Angeleterre, 1799–1800)’, Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, 42 (2011), pp. 85–100. I am very grateful to Joanna Innes for pointing out this possible connection. For a source of civil servants’ and other state functionaries’ incredulity at employers resisting the idea of a contract between themselves and their workers (refusing to recognise the employment relationship as subject to legal oversight), see Innes, ‘Des Tisserands’. I am very grateful to Joanna Innes for pointing out that this kind of employer resistance was experienced by other textile workers besides stockingmakers. Report from the Committee, pp. 219, 221. These clauses were repealed in 1814. K. D. M. Snell, ‘The Apprenticeship System in British History: The Fragmentation of a Cultural Institution’, History of Education, 25:4 (1996), pp. 303–4; Donald Woodward, ‘The Background to the Statute of Artificers. The Genesis of Labour Policy, 1558–63’, Economic History Review, New Series, 33:1 (1980), pp. 32–44; Thomas Kingston Derry, ‘The Repeal of the Apprenticeship Clauses of the Statute of Apprentices’, Economic History Review, 3 (1931–2), pp. 67–87.

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was told.) In the Nottinghamshire press and before the House of Commons committees, witnesses from the United Committee of Framework Knitters like Thomas Large provided a history of their trade finely tuned to their purposes: the revival of regulatory law promulgated by Parliament.71 From Kevin Binfield’s richly detailed collection of Luddite writings (their context and dissemination) we understand how, from about 1810–20, Midlands Luddism ‘assumed a constitutive ground and [made] use of originary documents . . . [to] create a myth of origins and impart legitimacy to the framework knitting trade’.72 We might add: ‘and for strategic and political purposes’. The ‘originary document’ was a Charter of Incorporation granted in 1663 by 15 Charles II. The enactment had granted powers to the Framework Knitters’ Company of London and Westminster to regulate the trade and limit the number of new entrants. It was amended many times; any control the Company once had over a widely scattered provincial industry had declined dramatically by the mid-eighteenth century. The 1812 Committee reported the Charter a dead letter, but actually put it into wide circulation by appending a copy to its first report.73 Gravenor Henson’s conviction that the Charter, underscored by a modern parliament, was the best possible system for securing ‘moderate wages and regular employment’, was not one he expressed before the Committee. In May 1812 his opinion was as John Blackner’s (his fellow historian of the Nottinghamshire trade) that the Charter was not the answer to all ills, only perhaps to the problem of the trade’s being flooded with unskilled workers; when it was active the Charter had cramped the genius of many people over the years, he said.74 And yet Henson and Blackner – all the Nottingham witnesses – had come to London from a context in which stockingers had persistently 71

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The textile trades wrote their own histories during the nineteenth century, as claims for legitimation and national importance. The stockingmakers’ history was produced by its workers, unlike the later histories of the Yorkshire worsted manufacture (which had a longer lineage than framework manufacture), which were mostly produced by its masters and outside commentators. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 32–3. Binfield, Writings, p. 20. Report from the Committee, p. 205; pp. 251–60 for the Charter; pp. 224–5 for Thomas Latham (Secretary, United Committee of Framework Knitters) on eighteenth-century legislation regulating framework knitting. Also Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters, pp. 222–5. Whether workers were better off within a legal framework or without, was matter for debate among them and their supporters. See Joanna Innes, ‘Regulating Wages in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century England: Arguments in Context’, in Perry Gauci (ed.), Regulating the British Economy, 1660–1850, Ashgate, Farnham, 2011, pp. 195–216.

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claimed their right – in words, riot, and writing – to redress their grievances under the Charter. A declaration posted in Radford in January 1812 claimed the authority of Charles II for the framework knitters’ powers to ‘to break and destroy all Frames and Engines that fabricate Articles in a fraudulent and deceitful manner’.75 Binfield remarks that the Luddite author of this declaration conceived the powers granted by the Charter to be so great that they could nullify even an Act of Parliament making frame breaking a capital felony.76 And yet the Framework Company Charter existed by act of parliament. There was much rhetorical force used in reminding varieties of audience that whilst the trade’s ability to regulate itself had been recognised and chartered by a King, that dispensation was nevertheless granted by parliamentary law. ‘Considered in the larger discursive context existing in Nottingham at the time . . . the Luddites’ appeal to royal discourse is reasonable,’ remarks Kevin Binfield; ‘the Nottinghamshire authorities buttressed their own legal notices with associated royal discourse.’77 In practical efforts to have legislation framed on their behalf, stockingers appealed to the notion of regulation in general (the trade had been regulated by Parliament; it might be so regularised again). They did not promote a seventeenth-century Charter to the House of Commons, but looked for a new bill that would address concerns about trucking, frame rent, abatement, cut-ups, and ‘colting’. For these problems they sought new legislation. On the question of the continual need to adapt to changing fashion – ‘the whim of the day’ – framework knitters, hosiers, committee, and counsel retreated to the silence where no legislative remedy may go.78 The petitioning Nottingham framework knitters have been found wanting, then and now, in their failure to understand the wider economic and political context to the downturn in their trade. Many knitters insisted that inferior goods were damaging the trade – not the loss of the North American and continental markets, not war, not blockade . . . but cut-ups.79 At the 1812 committees, they were frequently questioned about the wider context to their grievances.80 But Nottingham stockingers appeared to be highly aware of the balance of causation: ‘Then you apprehend the decay of the trade . . . is principally owing to the manufacture of . . . fraudulent articles? – Yes; but partly owing to the War, to the

75 76 77 79

Binfield, Writings, pp. 25, 89–90. Binfield, Writings, p. 25. Framebreaking Act, 52 Geo. 3, c. 16; Malicious Damages Act, 52 Geo. 3. c. 130. 78 Binfield, Writings, p. 88. Second Report, p. 285. 80 Wells, British Hosiery, pp. 86–7. Report from the Committee, pp. 213, 225.

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Orders in Council, and to the Non-Intercourse Act; we lay it a little to the account of all three.’81 Changing fashion was not cited as a cause of the downturn by any party, though Nottingham witnesses may have been aware that the gentlemen asking the questions were part of their problem. What were Counsel and Committee members wearing on their legs? When First Lord of the Treasury Spencer Perceval was assassinated in the lobby of the House of Commons in May 1812, contemporary engravings depict horror-struck MPs and helpers, some wearing knee-breeches and stockings, some trousers and boots. Some wear close-fitting pantaloons, held under the instep by a strap.82 Trousers predominate, though sometimes Perceval dies wearing breeches and stockings. Older and more sartorially conservative men attending the committee may have been wearing fully fashioned hose, those sporting trousers dressed in short stockings, or socks held up by garters, or even sandals (ankle socks), which were mentioned by the Nottingham knitters – all of the gentlemen unaware of the nature of cut-ups, what with their legwear being purchased by a manservant and washed by a laundry maid. Unravelling seams may not have been within their experience. What Nottinghamshire petitioners wanted from Parliament – and what they briefly got – was a bill to formalise prices and check arbitrary abatement of wages by the public posting of price lists by hosiers, and the prohibition, not of wide frames, but of a range of goods made on wide frames. The Bill for preventing Frauds and Abuses in the FrameworkKnitting Manufacture gained support in the House of Commons. It failed in the Lords, where its policing proposals – appeal to magistrates in their sessions and their parlours – were focused on. It was argued that they constituted unwarranted interference in the relationship between hosiers and their workers.83

81

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US Congress replaced its 1807 Embargo Act with a Non-Intercourse Act in 1809. This lifted embargoes on American shipping except for those bound for British or French ports. ‘Orders in Council’ were blockade decrees issued by the British government between 1783 and 1812. Here, framework knitters were referring to decrees of 1807 and 1809. David C. Hanrahan, The Assassination of the Prime Minister: John Bellingham and the Murder of Spencer Perceval, Sutton, Stroud, 2008, Plates between pp. 120–1. Jill Condra (ed.), The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Clothing Through World History, 3: 1801 to the Present, Greenwood, Westport CT, 2008, p. 29. Great Britain. House of Commons. A Bill as Amended by the Committee, for Preventing Frauds and Abuses in the Framework Knitting Manufacture; and in the Payment of Persons Employed Therein. 1812 (331)I.1149, pp. 3–4; Lords Sitting of Friday, 24 July 1812; ‘House of Lords, Friday the 24th July – Framework Knitters Bill’, Nottingham Journal, 25 Jul, 28 Nov 1812. The Lords’ objection was to interference ‘in the bargains made between the master manufacturer and his workmen’. In the House of Commons there

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In understanding the dynamics of collective action in the past, historians have attempted to describe the ways in which groups have constructed and articulated an understanding of shared interest. According to Marc Steinberg ‘fighting words’ emerge in this process of understanding and identification. ‘Fighting Words’ describe a situation that needs to be put right and provide a justification for action. Successful collective action, says Steinberg, is partly based on the process of framing. ‘Frames’ are cognitive schema that give people the means to analyse both events and other social groups that have influence over their lives. Doing this makes involvement in collective action meaningful. Patterns of labour contention, including Luddism, must be explored through a frame, constructed out of Luddite participants’ own frames of reference (and in this case, their literal frames).84 In this view, the words of the United Committee of Framework Knitters, in London attending the House of Commons and at home in the Nottingham press, were fighting words. Kevin Binfield has shown how profoundly the law shaped the fighting words of Nottinghamshire Luddites. Joseph Woolley’s written words allow further questions to be asked about the fertile historical analyses promoted by Steinberg and Binfield. Woolley’s shaping of his own text by legal language, ideas, and events, adds an everyday resonance to the discourses of equity and common law that Binfield has found in Luddite proclamations, letters, and advertisements. Luddite writers used juridical forms and language much as they were to be found in magistrates’ warrants; anonymous notices and letters mimicked the language of depositions and writs.85 In Binfield’s analysis these words are no mere evidence of a happening, but of meaning in the minds of writers and rioters. Joseph Woolley’s diaries suggest, as much as the United Committee’s words do, the matrix of ordinary everyday thinking, feeling, and conviction out of which the highly articulate and self-aware Luddite campaign arose. In this perspective, Woolley understood full well the events, people, and structures that made his life what it was (church, land ownership, agrarian capitalism, poor and common law, relations of production in his trade . . .). But

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was full discussion of trade regulation, stretching back the early eighteenth century. History taught that when trade was good ‘it was very easy for the men to get their wages raised by the magistrates; but, when any stagnation, or want of demand ensued, the masters always found it a very difficult matter to get any reduction made’. Commons Sitting of Tuesday, 21 July 1812. Marc Steinberg, Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England, Cornell University Press, Ithaca NY, 1999, pp. xi–xii, 6–7. Binfield, Writings, pp. 65, 71, 133.

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how often he and his friends turned this knowledge into words to fight with, or expressed unity of experience and identity, is not known. Writers write alone, and some, like Joseph Woolley, have no audience at all, present or in prospect. His words were not crystallised into a frame of analysis by the collective act of conversation with others. Or not that we can ever know – of either the talk or the action. So this particular frame – the sociologist’s and historian’s frame of ‘fighting words’ – does not allow us to hear, as Joseph Woolley heard, Ludd’s knocking at the gate, in January 1812.

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A great part of the workmen live in small Cottages with one Frame which they hire of the Hosier they work for. Robert Baker, 9 Feb 1812 (HO 42/120/7).

Never shall we forget the shout with which the verdict of Not Guilty was received, and the unavailing attempts of the Judge to silence it. ‘Death of an Alleged Luddite’, Nottingham Review, 25 Jan 1839.1

The object now is not to provide a history of Luddism, c. 1811–17, or to account for its spread in Nottinghamshire and adjacent counties. The proposal is that some account of the machine-breaking crisis as experienced in Nottinghamshire during 1811–12 can provide a window onto Joseph Woolley’s (textually) silent years. The meaning of Luddism has preoccupied historians since the nineteenth century. A large and important historiography has developed out of the problem of definition, recently and brilliantly summarised in Kevin Binfield’s Writings of the Luddites.2 Luddism’s origins in Nottinghamshire, in the hosiery and lace trades, and its movement outwards, first to neighbouring counties and then to Yorkshire and Lancashire and trades and industries other than framework knitting, have been described in detail. Luddism between 1811 and 1817 has been variously understood as a social movement, labour militancy, embryonic trade unionism, and domestic rebellion in time of war. In the 1963 account scrutinised in so much recent historical writing, E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, Luddism represented an articulate, communal working-class assault on the values of industrial capitalism. It was thus a factor in the making of class and class consciousness. Thompson recognised that Luddism originated in the grievances of workers at a time of economic depression and a war-time restructuring of the textile trades. But he argued also that 1 2

Leicester Chronicle; or, Commercial and Agricultural Advertiser, 2 Feb 1839, repr. from Nottingham Review, 25 Jan 1839. Kevin Binfield (ed.), Writings of the Luddites, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD and London, 2004, pp. 10–15.

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Luddism moved from direct action for the maintenance of wages and against the obnoxious machinery that drove those wages down, to become ‘a quasi-insurrectionary movement which continually trembled on the edge of revolutionary objectives’. It was not a wholly conscious revolutionary movement, he said, but rather ‘had a tendency towards becoming such a movement’.3 All modern historians urge on us an understanding of Luddism in its regional variations, and in specific local contexts. Thompson took most of his evidence for the revolutionary potential of Luddism from West Yorkshire and workers in the woollen and worsted trades. In Nottinghamshire however, ‘radicalism remained low-key in 1811–12’.4 In its county of origin Luddism was less violent and revolutionary than in West Yorkshire. Kevin Binfield and others speculate that the framework knitters’ Charter, an originary legal document that ‘instituted, organized and provided for the regulation of their trade and the addressing of grievances’, may account for the moderation that characterised Nottinghamshire ludding.5 Tactics employed by the Luddites – anonymous and threatening letters, armed and disguised raids by night, targeting of particular employers, and the destruction of certain types of machinery – have been closely related to local cultures and the customary practices of the textile workers involved. Frame breaking was a longstanding form of industrial action in the Midlands stocking industry: many workers believed that it was sanctioned by the Charter of their trade. In these bi-centenary years (2011–17) historians’ attention to Luddism as a historical phenomenon is facilitated by the increasing internet availability of Luddite texts and other contemporary documentation of the crisis.6 Most of this material is taken from the Home Office papers (correspondence files and registers of disturbances in the provinces) which comprise ‘the single most valuable archive for studying Luddism’.7 This is so because of the considerable number of Luddite letters, notices, proclamations, poems, and songs that were forwarded to London by magistrates and other local officials 3 4 5 6

7

E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class [1963], Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1968, p. 604. Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809, Cambridge University Press, 1991, p. 264. Binfield, Writings, p. 23. The National Archives has made HO 40–HO 43 available in digital format – these comprise correspondence with the Home Office and its Disturbances Entry Books. ‘The Luddite Bicentenary 1811–1813’ website has as its first aim to ‘To document, using various sources & methods, the daily events of the uprisings on the 200th anniversary of the day they occurred’. Here are transcriptions of many Luddite documents, including some from the Home Office files. http://ludditebicentenary.blogspot.com/ Binfield, Writings, p. 9.

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attempting to explain to a Home Secretary the gravity of a crisis in the Midlands and, later, the North. In this way a Luddite archive was created and preserved by the forces of order that some have argued Luddism sought to attack.8 Recent attention to Luddite writing as writing has the aim of allowing long-dead people to speak for themselves, allowing us to use and interpret this archive outside the purposes for which it was collected.9 Older preoccupations with central–local relations, British state formation, and a crisis of policing c. 1811–17 (all historical developments connected to Luddism and richly detailed in the Home Office papers) can appear conservative and reactionary to those rescuing Luddite words from the condescension of posterity by revelation of their rhetorical and poetic underpinnings. Perhaps the easy availability of the Home Office papers will allow us to use both perspectives. For Luddite words, written and spoken, did have their effects on government and the polity at large. Whoever penned ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’ (‘Now by force unsubdued, and by threats undismay’d/Death itself can’t his ardour repress/The presence of armies can’t make him afraid . . .’) may not have anticipated its being transcribed by the Nottingham town clerk, sent in copy to the mayor of Leicester, and then to the Home Office.10 But it was so sent, and it, along with many other utterances, had its effects, not least in the twenty-year gestation at the Home Office of a policing structure for the whole nation. And perhaps Luddite writers did intend something like this to happen. The extraordinary knowingness about how the world worked displayed by Joseph Woolley cannot have been his alone. Perhaps now, building on the ground of textual and rhetorical analysis, we can turn our attention once again to questions of Luddism and the British state, central and local, and interpret Luddite words as they were directed at actual audiences and constituencies.11 So the point here is to provide some contextualisation of Joseph Woolley’s silence about a crisis of the British state, originating in the villages and hamlets of the everyday Nottinghamshire in which he lived and wrote. His silence was – as has been so often emphasised in 8

9 10

11

Because of the availability of this archive, it is no longer the case that ‘the significance of Luddite ballads . . . [is] ignored by social historians’. Karina Navickas, ‘The Search for “General Ludd”: The Mythology of Luddism’, Social History, 30:3 (2005), pp. 281–95; p. 287. Binfield, Writings, pp. xviii, 7. Binfield, Writings, pp. 97–8; Thomis, Malcolm I., Luddism in Nottinghamshire, Thoroton Society Record Series no. 26, Philimore, London and Chichester, 1972, pp. 1–2. ‘Whoever’ must include the many hands – transcribers, copyists, editors – that made it. Jeff Horn, ‘Machine-breaking in England and France during the Age of Revolution’, Labour/Le Travail, 55 (2005), pp. 143–66.

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these pages – a functional and technical silence. There is no diary for 1811–12 (or for 1810, or 1814). His was a silence of a different order from the silence Binfield says historians have wilfully constructed for the Luddites. They have done this, says Binfield by using ‘the historical strategies of ignoring, reducing, or rendering curious or impotent . . . Luddite texts that are known to exist’.12 But ‘Luddites were not silent’, as he so eloquently demonstrates. Luddite documents show that other Nottinghamshire framework knitters besides Joseph Woolley wrote, and were used to writing.13 Like him, they used the language of the law to frame their written words. When those accused of frame breaking were brought into court, Nottingham reporters developed new styles of graphic representation for plebeian speech, making Luddite and other working-class words available to audiences far beyond the county borders. Their doing so does not, of course, account for the reception of their reporting, for the terror (or quaintness) that might be read out of the newsmen’s words. But reporters were keen to convey the atmosphere in magistrates’ courts and at quarter sessions and assizes, frequently describing laughter in the house at some particularly pithy or apposite phrasing used by witnesses. One man, asked how exactly he had been forced, as he claimed, to take part in frame breaking said that someone had told him that ‘unless he went his jack-wires would be drawn (a general laugh)’.14 The newsmen’s reports suggest not only that there was a Nottinghamshire language community shaped by many voices, but also that it was actively reflected on by its participants, and not just Luddite participants. Nottingham Review reporters in particular appear to have made considerable innovations in the representation of workingclass speech during these years.15 By considering the working-class language and writing community in Nottinghamshire in the year 1811–12, we may find Ned Ludd in Woolley’s unwritten words.

12 13

14 15

Binfield, Writings, p. 9. I agree with Binfield that Luddite texts employ the handwriting and style of ‘persons with a minimal education but nevertheless sufficient to write a threatening letter’; but Joseph Woolley’s style of writing – its range of reference and narrative and rhetorical strategies – indicates a range of reading and depth of knowledge that the modern idea of ‘a minimal education’ does not capture. Binfield, Writings, p. xxv. Nottingham Review, 3 May 1811. This is a topic that deserves much fuller research. It is not strictly correct to call Nottingham newsmen ‘reporters’ in its modern meaning. But Charles Sutton’s men appear to have expanded eighteenth-century reporting techniques (in their use of transcription, italicisation and speech marks) in radically new ways during these years. See Carolyn Steedman, ‘Sights Unseen, Cries Unheard. Writing the EighteenthCentury Metropolis’, Representations, 118 (2012), pp. 28–71 for some comments on eighteenth-century reporting of ‘low-life’.

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For General Ludd did come knocking at Clifton village doors. Or rather, in the manner described by many witnesses and in communications to the Home Office, a group of disguised men arrived, entered dwelling places and frame shops by night and by stealth, and damaged or destroyed knitting frames, either those that belonged to hosiers who had been paying underprice, or wide frames that were used for the production of cut-ups. ‘They have seldom made free with other property, altho’ opportunities have at all times presented themselves,’ reported one of the London stipendiary magistrates drafted to Nottingham early in 1812. ‘In one instance, lately at Clifton, some clothes that one of the framebreakers brought away, were carefully sent back the following day.’16 Robert Baker knew about this incident before the Nottinghamshire reading public did: a day after his was sent off to London, a ‘Letter from Ludd’ appeared in the Nottingham Review. It described how, when Ludd and his men were on their way to Clifton ‘their weir sum joined us that I Never as with me before and it wear these Villands that plundered’. Ludd had the strangers searched, found the stolen articles, left them ‘at the Lown End’, and hoped that ‘the oners has got [them] agen’. He described how the interlopers and thieves had been punished. ‘One of them have been hanged for 3 Menet and then Let down agen,’ wrote General Ludd, for ‘I ham a friend of the pore and Distrest and an enemy to the opressers throne.’17 In 1812 theft of items worth more than thirty-nine shillings was still a capital offence. ‘The Men that had the things’ could have been hanged. But the General and his men broke illegitimate machinery, in accordance with the framework knitters’ Charter; they were not common thieves. They were legitimate. The previous week both Nottingham newspapers had reported the Clifton raid as taking place on the night of Saturday, 25 January (or in the early hours of Sunday morning). Frame breaking started at Ruddington; a message was sent to Nottingham and a party of the Berks Militia (stationed in the town since November 1811) set out.18 But ‘the business had been completed long before their arrival’. Then Ludd and his men were pursued to Clifton, but they had finished there as well. It was surmised that they had made their escape over the Trent, for the chain usually tethering the passenger boat had been broken.19 Estimates 16

17 18 19

HO 42/120/3, Robert Baker to under secretary John Beckett, 6 February 1812, reproduced in Malcolm I. Thomis, Luddism in Nottinghamshire, Thoroton Society Record Series no. 26, Philimore, London and Chichester, 1972, pp. 27–8. Nottingham Review, 7 Feb 1812, transcribed in Binfield, Writings, pp. 101–2. Ruddington is further from Nottingham than is Clifton, and closer to the Loughborough road. But we do not know from which direction the militia came. Nottingham Review, 1 Feb 1812. Also a less detailed report in the Journal, 31 Jan 1812.

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as to the number of frames broken varied: the Review reported twentynine broken at ‘Ruddington, Clifton, &c’; and much later, in the 1860s, it was said that most frames had been broken in Clifton, not Ruddington.20 Whatever the details, on this and many other occasions, Ludd and his party were locals, who knew the terrain they operated in very well indeed. ‘The Lown End’ where the stolen goods were left was probably not a place, but the lower end of town, near the river bank. A year before this, in the early months of 1811, well-publicised negotiations between stockingers and Nottingham hosiers over reduced prices were accompanied by break-ins at knitting shops and the removal of jack wires from frames. A public meeting in central Nottingham in March 1811, protesting against the use of wide frames, cut-ups and colting, ended in an attack on a shop employing wide frames in Arnold, about three miles north of the town. This was the first complete destruction of a whole working frame. Luddism starts here, in most historical accounts (though ‘Ludd’ was not named until November 1811).21 Charles Sutton’s Review reminded readers that the March 1811 incident in Arnold was nothing new: ‘On the 17th June, 1779, about the same number of frames were broken at Arnold on a similar occasion, which caused the passing of a Bill . . . which makes it transportation wilfully to injure a stocking frame.’22 Manufacturers and stockingers had by now been conducting negotiations in the local press for several months, and in the short term the first action of the Luddites cannot be called unsuccessful: two weeks after the Arnold attack ‘a numerous meeting of manufacturers’ resolved to recommend to the trade in general that hosiers should ‘give for full fashioned Work the old prices’. 20

21

22

William Felkin, History of the Machine Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures, Longmans, Green, London, 1867, p. 234, said fourteen at Ruddington, twenty at Clifton. But he said the raid as took place in the ‘first fortnight’ of January, not at the month’s end. Nottingham Review, 25 Jan; 1, 8, 22 Feb; 15, 22 Mar; 5 Apr 1811. Also HO 42/119/700–12, ‘A Brief Statement of the Transactions Which Have Taken Place from the Commencement of the Disturbances in the County of Nottingham and the Town of Nottingham’. This was compiled by the two London police magistrates stationed in Nottingham, Nathaniel Conant and Robert Baker, with the assistance of the Nottingham Town Clerk, George Coldham. Nottingham Review, 22 Mar 1811. Sutton’s parliamentary history was incorrect, and his brief notice omitted detail of the preceding attempts – and failure – to have rates and prices in the Midlands stocking trade set by ‘positive law’ (legislation). Stanley D. Chapman (ed.), Henson’s History of the Framework Knitters [1831], David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1970, pp. 384–416. But the newspaper item reminded readers of the long history of what would shortly be called Luddism. For the 1780s debates over the protection of stocking frames, Parliamentary History of England from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. XXVII: 1788–1789, Hansard for Longman and 17 others, London, 1816, pp. 391–4.

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The display notice in the local press announcing this was accompanied by a statement of concern about the ‘illegal Measures which have been resorted to by some of the Framework-Knitters’.23 Both Nottingham newspapers reported continued attacks in the villages surrounding Nottingham during the spring of 1811. Then reports of frame breaking dropped off. According to Kevin Binfield ‘Ludd’ was born during these relatively quiet summer months. The experiences (recent and of long standing) of innumerable and anonymous men and women were given shape he says, in one ‘forceful act of naming’.24 The name ‘Ludd’ expressed resentments specific to a trade and the organisation of daily life around that trade. Experience was mythic or actual; it might involve a history of frame working stretching back to 1663, or to payment in sugar for stockings in Sutton in Ashfield in 1810.25 Then a poor harvest (in a series of very bad ones) hiked food prices, and a breakdown of public communications between hosiers and workers led to new disturbances in November 1811. On 10 November framework knitters gathered outside Bulwell (north of Nottingham) and led by ‘Ned Ludd’, proceeded to the village and broke up six wide frames housed by a master stockinger. Then, with blackened faces, they retreated into the dark. Their attack was announced by what is probably the first dated letter from Ludd. The letter cited as grievances payment in goods, wide frames, and the decline of fully fashioned stocking production at the master’s shop.26 This, in some accounts, was the true beginning of Luddism. ‘Ludd’ was now named in the local and national press; the Home Office knew the name by the middle of November from the number of Luddite documents forwarded and the use of the word by numerous correspondents.27 Binfield’s ‘naming’ provides an entirely plausible model for something that happened – something like what may have happened – in the framework-knitting villages around Nottingham and in the town itself, some time in the summer and early autumn of 1811. Joseph Woolley’s accounts of his days and weeks, talk at friendly society meetings, drunkenly in ale houses, easy and regular access to newsprint, the everyday means of relating large-scale social and political circumstances to an ordinary life – these may have been the circumstances in which Ludd was named, time and time again, in countless irretrievable acts of the imagination. And then – as words must, for that is their nature – ‘Ludd’ gets out into the world, and is used by others to describe quite different 23 25 27

24 Nottingham Review, 22 Mar 1811. Binfield, Writings, pp. 6, 29, 47. 26 See above, Chapter 9. HO 42/118. Reproduced in Binfield, Writings, pp. 73–4. Binfield, Writings, pp. 70–4.

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emotions, beliefs, and knowledges. News about the tumultuous month of November 1811 was transmitted rapidly to the reading nation by reprints from the Nottingham press.28 By the lord lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, or by troubled county magistrates, the terms ‘Ludd’ and ‘Luddism’ were used variously: to name riot, or insurrection, or criminality; or a group of men much to be pitied for their suffering under trade depression. Luddism was named ‘a system’ or ‘a practice’ in Parliament, the press, and letters to the Home Office. By this was meant, first, a scheme of events and happenings in which each was connected to another by a common law of motion, and second, systematic and organised property destruction.29 Men set to work in a planned, organised, and systematic way, and destroyed something.30 In the early months of the Luddite movement, as far as many observers and commentators were concerned, Ludd did: ‘Ludd’ was a series of violent actions. Once Ludd was named, there was a debate about his status as an ‘ideal personage’, or as an actually existing historical person.31 In usage – because a newspaper reported a man calling out ‘General Ludd!’ as he snapped some jack strings and disappeared into the dark; or because of the number of communications from Ned Ludd transcribed in the local press and reprinted elsewhere – ‘Ludd’ became, not more of a person or personage, but rather a trope, to encapsulate, in a variety of ways, the distant apprehension of a vast social and political problem.32 ‘Ludd’, as the product of a powerful system of naming by Nottinghamshire stockingers over the summer and autumn months of 1811, had other

28

29

30 31 32

‘Serious Riots at Nottingham’, Morning Chronicle, 18 Nov 1811, and in Morning Post, 18 Nov 1811, and in Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 23 Nov 1811; ‘Riots in Nottingham’, Caledonian Mercury, 21, 23 Nov 1811; ‘Riots at Nottingham’, Leeds Mercury, 23 Nov 1811; ‘Riots at Nottingham’, Aberdeen Mercury, 27 Nov 1811; Derby Mercury, 28 Nov 1811; ‘Nottingham Riots’, Morning Post, 29 Nov 1811; Leeds Mercury, 30 Nov 1811. ‘The rioters . . . in armed parties, under regular command . . . the chief of whom, be he whomsoever he [be] . . . General Ludd’, Morning Post, 14 Dec 1811. Morning Post, 25 Nov, 1811; The Times, 19 Dec 1811; Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, 18 Jan 1812; HO 42/119/28, Nov 1811; HO 42/119/694, 14 Jan 1812. See also correspondence between the Duke of Newcastle, Nottinghamshire Lord Lieutenant, the chairman of quarter sessions, and Lord Middleton in Thomis, Luddism in Nottinghamshire, pp. 2–18. ‘System’ was beginning to take on connotations of any impersonal, restrictive organisation, including government, condemned by this language use (as in ‘the system of slavery’); but local and central government officials did not use the word in this second meaning. Walter Scott (ed.), The Edinburgh Annual Register for 1816. Vol. Ninth – Parts I and II, Archibald Constable, Edinburgh, and Longman and Hurst, London, 1816, p. l. Derby Mercury, 26 Dec 1811; Ipswich Journal, 11 Jan, 1812. But see Kevin Binfield, ‘Ned Ludd and Laboring Class Autobiography’, in Eugene Stelzig (ed.), Romantic Autobiography in England, Ashgate, Farnham and Burlington VT, 2009, pp. 161–78.

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meanings for other audiences. Yet there were consistent attempts – at least in Nottingham – to relate ‘Ludd’ to the meaning it held for stockingmaking communities. One month into his time in the town, London police magistrate Baker reported to the Home Office that ‘the first emotion was resentment against the Hoziers . . . Resentment against the Hoziers who paid the underprice has been the leading feature up to the present day.’33 Whether he meant to or not, he ascribed a set of beliefs, feelings, and motives to the frame breakers. (The point holds whether they did or did not actually have the emotions he described.) By early 1812 and in the national press ‘Ludd’ was more often a name for violent depredation, as in ‘Ludd has declared his intention of destroying all frames without exception.’34 A letter sent by Ned Ludd to a Bulwell hosier, in early November 1811, is as important historiographically as it is for charting the coming into being of General Ludd. It was once argued that the type of dignified and knowledgeable working man who appeared before the House of Commons select committees in the summer of 1812 should be conceptualised differently from those stockingers who took direct action in the name of the General. Men like the trade’s later historian Gravenor Henson (one of the witnesses before the Committee) spoke to legal matters – to the trade’s constitution and its rights under its Charter of incorporation. He and other members of the United Committee of Framework Knitters were from Nottingham town; the men who raided by night with blackened faces were country stockingers. Low-paid workers in the villages were more likely to express their grievances in violence – so the argument once went.35 What happened in Nottinghamshire in 1811–12 was used to put in place the historical story of the ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ English working class, and the divisions between them.36 After Binfield’s uncovering of the legal discourse at work in both ‘constitutional’ and ‘unconstitutional’ Luddite writing, this distinction no longer stands. Binfield uses Ludd’s letter to Bulwell to make the point that Gravenor Henson (and the stockingers he represented) and the anonymous man with blackened face shared the same 33 34 35

36

HO/42/120/3, Robert Baker, Nottingham, to John Beckett, 6 Feb 1812. The Times, 30 Jan 1812. Roy A. Church and Stanley D. Chapman, ‘Gravenor Henson and the Making of the English Working Class’, in Eric L. Jones and G. E. Mingay, Land, Labour and Population in the Industrial Revolution: Essays Presented to J. D. Chambers, Edward Arnold, London, 1967, pp. 131–61. Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture, Routledge, London, 2004, pp. 1–27; Michael Savage and Andrew Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940, Routledge, 1994. These do not discuss Luddism; their suggestion is that the respectable/unrespectable divide was always a historian’s tool of analysis.

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gaols and aims: list prices for finished goods, no truck, no abatement, no wide frames producing cut-ups. And he also argues that the letter to Bulwell signed off with the address line ‘Nottinghm – November 1811’ indicates that ‘much of Luddite discontent did issue from Nottingham, even when the threats were made against masters outside the town’.37 In 1811, certainly, most of the sites of frame breaking were close to Nottingham: crowds of people as well as letters could reach them in under an hour.38 In May 1811 (before Ludd was named), William Heath was indicted at quarter sessions for breaking a frame at a shop in Kirkby, Sutton-inAshfield (in the north of the county near Mansfield, some fourteen miles from Nottingham, so not within easy walking distance) on 18 March. After the trial, the jury ‘in a few minutes returned a verdict of Not Guilty. A burst of applause immediately ensued.’39 By transcribing the words of the witnesses, highlighting their youth, and by the use of a striking series of italicised observations, the reporter indicated a sociology of the Luddism about to emerge and the network of personal relationships and resentments that underlay communal action. A witness for the prosecution was another stockinger, Francis Armstead, who said he had been forced to enter the frame shop and take part in smashing the frame. But about him, another witness told a further story: ‘John Hudson (an apprentice)’ said that he had seen the accused with the mob approaching Kirkby. Heath told Hudson to get off home, ‘but he did not – he went with the mob to Kirkby, and saw people enter Hayes’s house – (here he burst into tears, and said he dare not speak the truth, for Armstead had threatened to half knock him on the head if he (witness) said any thing about him; but on being told he must speak the truth, he said “well then, I will”)’. Then the young man declared that it was in fact Armstead who first entered the house carrying a hedge-stake with which he set about destroying three frames. Throwing that aside, said the boy, Armstead had picked up the bench of a damaged frame and finished off the job with it. ‘“Come Jack”,’ he had said to young Hudson; ‘“You can pull some wires out, if you can do nothing else”.’ But the boy did not touch the frame; someone at work had told him he could be transported for doing so. Heath was not there at all, said Jack. He may have set out for Kirkby, but he was not among the twelve or so in the house. After

37 38

39

Binfield, Writings, p. 73 P. Foster, ‘The Spread of Luddism in Nottinghamshire and its Surrounding Villages’, Nottinghamshire Historian, 42 (1989), pp. 18–22; Thomis, Luddism in Nottinghamshire, map facing p. 38. Nottingham Review, 3 May 1811.

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leaving the village, said Jack, Armstead blackened his face and otherwise disguised himself. Trial scenes like this and acquittals of frame breakers by other juries have been used by historians to suggest community support for Luddite activity. When the ages of perpetrators and witnesses were given in the press, there is an indication that the groups entering frame shops in the name of Ludd included a high proportion of young men, in their late teens and early twenties.40 The town/country divide in Nottinghamshire Luddism may have been imploded, but it mattered very much to the Home Office and to local officials charged with maintaining the good order of the county. Home Office officials scarcely needed to be told that two systems of management made the policing of Luddism difficult, for a division between town and county magistracy pertained throughout the country. Antagonism between the two systems was of very long standing.41 When Bow Street stipendiaries Baker and Conant arrived in Nottingham they had to hold duplicate meetings with town and county justices.42 The Home Office was repeatedly reminded of the problems created by a division of authority between town and country. The county magistrates lived and operated in isolation; should they ‘exert themselves it becomes obvious that it must be at the evident hazard of their property – cutting down Plantations, Burning Hay and Corn Stacks, [damaging?] Cattle and Horses, so would be the prelude to more serious depredation’.43 Nathaniel Conant was alerted to the problem of policing the ‘country villages’ on his first, preliminary, visit to Nottingham in December 1811.44 The lord lieutenant himself, the Duke of Newcastle, thought the police of the county very defective. Measures for containment of the crisis, which included the dispatch of military aid, the imposition of curfew, and the rapid passage of a Nottingham Watch and Ward Bill from Home Office, to Parliament, to enactment, helped Nottingham magistrates and constables much more than country ones.45 Police magistrate Robert Baker had detailed suggestions for extending the town clauses of the Watch and Ward Bill to the county, and reiterated the difficulty faced by magistrates in the villages adjacent 40 41 42 43 44 45

Randall, Before the Luddites, p. 182; Malcolm I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England, David and Charles, Newton Abbot, 1970, p. 112. Anon., History, Topography, and Directory of the Town of Nottingham and the Adjacent Villages . . . , W. Dearden, Nottingham, 1834, p. 17. HO 42/119/25, 8 Dec 1811; /684, 20 Jan 1812. The commander of the 15th Dragoons stationed in town also had to work with two sets of magistrates. HO 42/119/2–5, 14 Jan 1812. Copy of letter to The Times forwarded to the Home Office by a third party. HO 42/119/25, 8 Dec 1811. Thomis, Luddism in Nottinghamshire, pp. xvi–xvii, 14–15. H0 42/119/ 260, 264, 684.

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to Nottingham.46 Dark accusations of inertia among county magistrates were flung in the House of Commons (‘He had a knowledge of Nottingham in his capacity of a magistrate, and would say, that if the same activity had been shewn by the county magistrates, as had been evinced by those of . . . the town of Nottingham, there would have been no need for this [Watch and Ward] Bill.’)47 The Nottingham Watch and Ward Bill as enacted did extend into the countryside. The April 1812 quarter sessions meeting of county magistrates issued a notice naming Clifton and Ruddington as two of the places to which it applied.48 (In 1809 Joseph Woolley had recorded 4 shillings ‘for watching’ as part of his income for September, but there were no such entries in the diaries for 1813 and 1815.49) Whether the watch and ward system was ever operated in Clifton is unknown, and anyway Woolley did not pay the poor rate, which the Act required.50 In mid January 1812 Nottingham town clerk George Coldham informed the Home Office that Ludd was moving south, through Rushcliffe Hundred towards Leicestershire: ‘our Nottinghamshire frame breakers have been to Leicester and Leicestershire for the purposes of exciting the same spirit which prevails here’.51 The Clifton raid on the night of 25 January 1812 may have been part of this movement towards the county borders (though Ludd and his men exited Clifton by crossing the River Trent to the north bank, away from Leicestershire). Throughout January, some Leicestershire magistrates had reported directly to the Home Office on Luddite activity, though in a climate of panic and suspicion it was easy enough to confuse an escaped French prisoner of 46 47

48

49 50

51

HO 42/120/56, 84, 96. The Nottingham Peace (Watch and Ward) and the Framebreaking Bills (the second made wilful destruction of a knitting frame a capital offence) were introduced to the House of Commons both on the same day by Secretary Ryder. Parliamentary Debates, from the Year 1803 to the Present Times, vol. XXI: comprising the Period from the Seventh Day of January to the Sixteenth Day of March, Longman and 13 others, London, 1812, pp. 807–24. Nottingham Journal, 18 Apr 1812. 52 Geo. 3 c. 17 provided for all males between the ages of 17 and 50 years to be called on for police and public order duties. They were charged with the duty of protecting knitting frames and given powers to arrest any person committing a felony and to take them (via a constable) before a magistrate. Any person not able to serve had to state reasons and find a substitute. These provisions were in force between 1812 and 1816. NA, DD 331/4, 30 Sep 1809. Thomas Edlyne Tomlins, The Law Dictionary: Explaining the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the British Law . . . Third Edition, in Two Volumes, Payne and Foss and 26 others, London, 1812, vol. II, ‘Watching and Warding’. HO 42/119/695, 15 Jan 1812. On 13 Dec 1811 the Review reported that ‘the flame has now extended itself into the heart of the two neighbouring counties of Leicester and Derby’.

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war with girlfriend in tow, or a German confectioner from Hull with a handkerchief over his face, with a follower of Ned Ludd.52 But there appears to have been no magisterial activity on Sir Gervase Clifton’s manor. Was he even resident? In August 1813 Joseph Woolley reported that the magistrate returned to his estate ‘after being a way verey near Eleven months’, which would place Sir Gervase in Clifton in September 1812.53 He recorded no sittings as a JP in 1812. The only 1812 entry in his notebooks was a personal one, about someone having ‘To be at Eton college on or before the 5th day of September 1812’. It was signed ‘Gervas Clifton’, so it was probably an instruction to someone else.54 And there are no entries at all for 1811. He did not attend quarter sessions during 1812 and was not present at the various meetings held by the county magistracy promoting to the Home Office, and the public, the reconstitution of powers of watch and ward.55 Had he been resident during 1811–12, he might well have invested his policing and judicial powers in the Clifton, Wilford, and Barton Association for the Prosecution of Felons (APF) which had been inaugurated in 1800 in the aftermath of autumn food riots in and near the village.56 In the first two months of 1812, many new prosecution associations were formed across the southern part of the county, but magistrate Clifton had been subscribing to his own local association (and also to one under the patronage of Viscount Newark) since the beginning of the new century.57 On the Friday before the Luddite raid on Clifton, Sutton’s Nottingham Review noted that Sir Gervase Clifton – ‘according to his wonted beneficence’ – had distributed ‘his usual liberal donation among the poor of Clifton, Wilford and Barton’ – just below the item reporting on Monday’s quarter sessions and the ten men charged with collecting money in support of the framebreakers (‘no bills were found against them, and 52 54 55 57

53 HO 42/119/551. NA, DD 311/5, 20 Aug 1813. NA, DD M8050. If these were portable notebooks, the entry could well have been made outside Clifton. The preceding entries concern incidents from 1809. 56 HO 42/119/684. Nottingham Journal, 21 Jan 1801. Nottingham Journal, 14 Mar 1801. Subscribers’ names were prominently displayed in the APF notices inserted in the local press. David Philips, ‘Good Men to Associate and Bad Men to Conspire: Associations for Prosecution of Felons’, and P. F. R. King, ‘Prosecution Associations and their Impact in Eighteenth-Century Essex’, in Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (eds.), Policing and Prosecution in Britain: 1750–1859, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989, pp. 113–70, 171–210; Jim Sutton, ‘Protecting Privilege and Property. Associations for the Prosecution of Felons’, Local Historian, 34:2 (2004), pp. 89–103. These were voluntary associations of the propertied living in a locality. Each member made a regular contribution to a fund which was used to pay the costs of prosecuting a crime committed against members. Joseph Woolley was aware of the operation of the Clifton Association, and noted the reward monies it offered in 1801 and 1809. NA, 311/1, 1 Jun, 13 Sep, 10 Dec 1801; 311/4, 14 Jul 1809.

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they were discharged’). But Sir Gervase does not have to have been in Clifton for charity to have been given in his name.58 Joseph Woolley, on the other had, was at home in the early part of 1812. There is no diary, but the 1813 volume records friendly society business for 1812 (his and another’s subscriptions), and, as already observed, a note dated 4 April 1813, that he had finally received the sixpence due him for curing someone’s injured toe at the beginning of the previous year. The money had been due to him ‘feb the 2 1812’, so a week after the Clifton raid. Another oblique reference to early 1812 has already been observed, in the frame ‘that was broak Last Janewarey and recruited again for mee’, noted by Woolley in February 1813.59 As has also been observed, ‘last January’ was January 1812; the frame had been broken in the month Ludd came to Clifton. The account item dated 29 March 1813 – ‘pd the carage of a frame 2s 6d’ – indicates what we know already: that the date structure of his accounts and his narrative of daily life follow different chronologies. He paid his bill in March 1813, but he took possession of the restored frame on or about 20 February 1813, almost exactly a year after the Clifton raid. We should examine the passage in detail, for in it lies the only trace of Woolley’s connection to Luddism. The entry in which Woolley may have named Ludd is this: feb the 20 [1813] I braught a 40 gage frame of mr Hills and Lewes it was that that was broak Last Janewarey and recruited again for mee it was recruted by Nutt and hall Nutt was the frame smith and Hall the setter up they were about four or five months a bout it But I never had to doe with such a set of men in my life befor for Lieing and Shaffeling and promising and then deseiving.

His writing in this entry is clear and firm: he wrote ‘braught’, not ‘baught’ or ‘bought’. This is consistent with his having paid the carriage bill for having the frame brought home at the end of March 1813. If it had been his own frame, in his possession in January 1812, he could have written my or the ‘forty gage frame’. For some imagined audience – perhaps just himself – he notes ‘it was that that was broak Last Janewarey’. This could read as The one that was broken last January, meaning that it was one of his own, or a different one, but with which his imagined audience are familiar. ‘Recruited again for mee’ may suggest that it was restored for him as its new owner, or simply that recruiting is what the frame smith and setter-up did for him. It may have been a friend’s or neighbour’s, broken during the Clifton raid and then acquired by Woolley between February and September 1812 (September takes him 58 59

Nottingham Review, Jan 24 1812. The Journal reported this the week before, 18 Jan 1812. NA, DD 311/5, 20 Feb, 29 Mar 1813.

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back the five months he says the repairers fiddled about with it). It is all pretty ambiguous. But a 40-gauge frame was capable of knitting the flimsy, insubstantial material that went to make cut-ups (though was not necessarily a ‘wide’ frame). In mid January 1812 (probably the 16th) a ‘40 gauge, belonging to Mr Francis Braithwaite, hosier, Nottingham’ was destroyed along with four others kept at the house of George Ball, framework knitter at Lenton. The men wore masks and handkerchiefs over their faces.60 In the reward notice, George Ball’s workers declared that they never had been abated by their master or anyone else, and that all the machines had been producing fullyfashioned work (the men’s and maids’ single shapes that we are familiar with from Woolley’s later diaries). 40-gauge frames (like Woolley’s old? – new? – second hand? – frame) were damaged elsewhere in the county in January 1812. If twenty frames were wrecked in Clifton on the night of 25 January, then stocking-making capacity in the village must have been substantially reduced. The population of Clifton with Glapton was returned as 399 for the 1811 census, with eighty houses occupied by eighty-three families. There were fifty-five families employed chiefly in agriculture and twenty-six in handicrafts, manufacture, or trade.61 How many knitting frames there were in the village is not known, but twenty destroyed could have been a majority of them.62 So it is possible that Joseph Woolley was visited by Ned Ludd. And also possible, though less 60

61

62

HO 42/119/135, ‘Reward poster for the arrest and conviction of men who destroyed three knitting machines in January 1812’; also HO 42/119/700–12. Also Nottingham Journal, 25 Jan 1812; Nottingham Review, 26 Jan 1812. Great Britain. House of Commons. Abstracts of the Answers and Returns Made Pursuant to an Act, Passed in the Fifty-First Year of His Majesty King George III. Intituled ‘An Act for Taking an Account of the Population of Great Britain, and the Increase or Diminution Thereof’. Preliminary Observations. 1812 (316)XI.1, p. 287. Ten years later Clifton inhabitants were returned as 470, with 114 families occupying 84 houses. Families working in agriculture totalled 71, and 28 were employed in manufacture, etc. Great Britain. House of Commons. Abstract of the Answers and Returns made Pursuant to an Act . . . 1822 (502)XV.1, p. 249. In 1818 the Church of England counted parish inhabitants as 298. Great Britain. Parliament. Account of Benefices and Population; Churches, Chapels, and Their Capacity; Number and Condition of Glebe Houses; and Income of All Benefices not Exceeding 150 per ann. Together with Abstracts of the Same. Returned by the Archbishops and Bishops to His Majesty in Council. 1818 (005)XVIII.137, p. 211. In 1812 John Blackner counted the total number of knitting frames in Nottinghamshire but restricted his door-to-door inquiries to places adjacent to Nottingham, so we do not know how many of the county’s 9,285 frames were in Clifton, only that it was a small but important site of the trade. The History of Nottingham, embracing its Antiquities, Trade, and Manufactures, from the Earliest Authentic Records, to the Present Period, Sutton, Nottingham, 1815, pp. 238–9; Alan Rogers, ‘Rural Industries and Social Structure. The Framework Knitting Industry of South Nottinghamshire, 1670–1840’, Local Historian, 12 (1981), pp. 7–35.

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likely, that he damaged the frame himself, or ‘allowed’ it to be broken, as did other knitters and small masters using rented frames, in incidents reported from across the region.63 Whatever Joseph Woolley did between 1809 and 1813, and whatever kind of stockings he made during those years, his consistent production of fully fashioned work in 1813 and 1815 might be understood as a consequence of Ned Ludd’s visit to Clifton and the persuasive power of Nottinghamshire Luddism in its insistence on fully fashioned work at the negotiated price. His trading in cotton yarn, his home doctoring and market garden enterprises might be interpreted as one country stockinger’s economic adjustment to reduced production capacity in the village after the night of 25 January 1812. Or simply to hard times. If any of this was so, or is a possible reconstruction of Woolley’s experience between 1810 and 1813, do we then understand him as a victim of the Luddites? I think not. To claim victimhood for Woolley would be to claim it for all Nottinghamshire people whose frames were broken in their full understanding of why what was happening before their eyes was something that must happen. It would be to separate Luddite action (damaging or breaking frames) from Luddite politics. But those people who stepped outside the door to allow frame breaking to take place, or who swore on oath that they had never seen the depredators before in their life – could not describe them – had no idea where they came from or who they were – did not isolate Luddite aims and intentions from the snapping of a jack wire, or the smashing of a machine, even though the broken frame pointed ahead to many months of hard living and poverty. For what could a Nottinghamshire working family do without a frame? That was the first point Robert Baker (London police magistrate) made to Home Department Secretary Beckett in his February 1812 assessment of the local situation: in fear for their frames Nottinghamshire hosiers were calling them in from the country places. The carts carrying them were escorted by soldiers and constables, so far unmolested. But he was concerned to see so many on the roads into Nottingham ‘because it must leave the Country people without the means of work’.64 Emotions (Baker’s term for understanding Luddite activity) at a frame recalled, or a frame smashed, must have been mixed, to say the least. And a frame itself was only – a frame: the means to get a living by monotonous, repetitive movement of hands and feet and eyes over many hours, in dirty and noisy conditions. It was a machine that managed human labour output. Knitters did not love their 63 64

Thomis, Luddism in Nottinghamshire, pp. 21–3. HO 42/120/3, 6 Feb 1812.

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frames, though in their explanation of how they worked, they might express admiration for the ingenuity of the men who had perfected them over the centuries, or wax lyrical about the beauties of a fully fashioned stocking. Joseph Woolley’s only expressed emotion about his frame was exasperation, as in January 1803 when he went to ‘work at reeds shop in his Eight and thirty frame and I cleaned it before I could work in it I began to work on Wednesday the 5 of Janewary and it was about one oclock and I did one hose and Crossed one needle then I gave over’.65 Once, before starting to write this book, I made a note to myself that whatever I did, I must not do a ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ with Joseph Woolley. I had in mind W. H. Auden’s poem of that title, which inscribes a particular relationship between grand, large-scale historical events and the everyday. Auden wrote many poems about ‘history’, history not as ‘the past’, or as ‘something that happened’, but history as a constitutive activity in the modern Western world; history as a form of thinking and a way of writing. I believe that ‘Musée’ is one of them. In a gallery someone (perhaps a poet) muses on how the old masters always got their painting of extraordinary events just right. Ordinary life carries on, the extraordinary a scarcely-noticed backdrop. Food is consumed, roads are walked, windows are opened and shut by ordinary people, who if they knew what History was being made just out of their line of vision, might not want it to happen at all.66 I did not want – still, most profoundly, do not want – to set Joseph Woolley’s unconsidered life in the grand perspective of Luddism – to say that Luddism was historically significant but Woolley was not. To write about Woolley as a ‘victim’ or target of Luddism at a distance of two hundred years would be to do a ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’: to obey the protocols of historical writing, with all the consequences that are explored in Auden’s poem. Attention to Luddite writing has had the extraordinary and salutary effect of restoring subjectivity and agency to more early nineteenthcentury Nottinghamshire men and women than its actual authors. Rhetorical and linguistic analysis has given meaning and motive and – perhaps above all – intelligence to framework knitters and their communities. (These attributes were only ever absent because of the way in which these people were written, as respectable or unrespectable, ‘constitutional’ or ‘violent’, wanting it to happen, or not especially wanting it to happen.) But historians can find an even more useful form of analysis in a dialogic model of language. Joseph Woolley’s own writing suggests two further 65 66

NA, DD 311/2, 5 Jan 1803. W. H. Auden, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957, Faber and Faber, London, 1966, p. 123.

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conceptual moves that might be made. First, we can take note of the shared language of Nottinghamshire during the crisis years; or if not exactly shared, the way in which very few people, including strangers to the town like Robert Baker and Nathaniel Conant, appear not to have understood what Ludd meant. (One might always want to make an exception for the Duke of Newcastle.) The local press worked hard to express that meaning. A third local newspaper was founded on the grounds that the Review was a progenitor of Luddism. Only a different style of reporting could counter ‘the wicked and deluded disciples’ of the General, said the Nottinghamshire Gazette.67 That the meaning of Luddism could be discerned was of course due to the Nottinghamshire Luddites’ clear and insistent statement of their grievances and the problems of the trade.68 But what they stated could be heard, and also – though infrequently – listened to. Joseph Woolley’s own writing gives some small access to a wider community of knowing and understanding in which Ludd spoke. Ludd was not only related to other avenging avatars of the period like ‘Captain Right’ or ‘Captain Rock’; his more important manifestation was as General Ludd: Ludd was general.69 Woolley was in Luddism, as all Nottinghamshire frame workers were in Luddism in the years 1811–12: in Luddism as systematic thought and action (frequently violent) about depression of a trade and living standards in time of war; 67 68

69

Nottingham Gazette, 21 and 28 Oct 1814; Nottingham Review, 27 Jan 1815. ‘The figure of Ned Ludd served as a discourse for concentrating public attention on a set of principles, previously sanctioned by the government but [now] under threat . . . an eponym for a subculture, a selective trade culture, that grew out of a larger culture. The selected codes that founded and regulated the culture of framework knitters and facilitated its discursive extension into the larger culture were products of that larger culture.’ Binfield, Writings, p. 32. Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811–12, PM Press, Oakland CA, 2012. ‘Captain Right’ was Irish, but available to English imaginations. Dominick Trant, Considerations on the Present Disturbances in the Province of Munster, Their Causes, Extent, Probable Consequences and Remedies, privately printed, Dublin, 1787; Sir Richard Musgrave, To the Magistrates, the Military, and the Yeomanry of Ireland, privately printed, Dublin, 1798; George White, A Digest of All the Laws at Present in Existence Respecting Masters and Work People. With Observations Thereon, I. Onwhyn, London, 1824, p. 124. So too was ‘Captain Rock’ Irish. For both, see Emer Nolan, Catholic Emancipations: Irish Fiction from Thomas Moore to James Joyce, Syracuse University Press, 2004. Also Mortimer Sullivan, Captain Rock Detected. Or, the Origin and Character of the Recent Disturbances, and the Causes, Both Moral and Political, of the Present Alarming Condition of the South and West of Ireland, Fully and Fairly Considered and Exposed. By a Munster Farmer, T. Cadell, London, 1824. ‘One who Pities the Oppressed’, author of The Beggar’s Complaint, against Rack-rent Landlords, Corn Factors, Great Farmers, Monopolizers, Paper Money Makers, and War, and Many Other Oppressors and Oppressions, 2nd edn, for the author, Sheffield, 1813, pp. 100–1, had an interesting theory about how such figures come into being, in which newsprinters, newsmen and newspaper readers are deeply implicated. See ‘Reflections on Luddism’, pp. 99–123.

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Luddism as a series of profound objections to management of that trade by magistrates and masters. You did not have to go out at night with implements of destruction and blackened face to be in Luddism. The prepositional phrase ‘in Luddism’ is not used in the manner of ‘in love’; it has the force of ‘on this side’, or ‘from the framework-knitting village of Clifton’, or ‘the frame in the cart’ – Which frame? The one in the cart (broken in Clifton last January)’. This is to read Woolley’s writing in the light of something he never mentions, to be sure. But reading his written words in the perspective of Luddism is also to find some access to the substratum of thought, language, and experience out of which General Ludd / general luddism emerged, in the Nottinghamshire spring of 1811. His writing gives access not so much to ‘Ludd’ as a forceful act of naming, but rather to its meaning for those involved, as expressed within the confines of a threatening letter, or the even greater constraints of the court rooms in which men and women were questioned about the General. It allows us to hear the laughter in the house, and the whooping and wailing that no judge could silence. Woolley’s words belonged to the matrix of experience and language that was the General’s home. ‘Almost every creature of the lower order both in town & country are on their side,’ said police magistrates Conant and Baker in January 1812 of the Luddite landscape they found themselves in.70 Luddism was to end on the scaffold, as E. P. Thompson observed, but for Nottinghamshire Luddism in 1812, not yet awhile.71 James Towle, from Basford near Nottingham, was hanged at Leicester in November 1816, having been tried at the Leicester summer assizes and found to have aided and abetted a Luddite attack on Heathcoat and Boden’s Loughborough lace mill in June of that year. Sixteen men were led by Towle in ‘the greatest Luddite attack’ during which a number of workmen and security guards were forced to the ground at pistol point, and one guard shot and wounded. Fifty-five frames were destroyed and lengths of lace stolen. Towle was recognised during the raid; his arrest came a few days later. (He had been tried and acquitted for frame breaking earlier, in 1815.) He did not name any of his accomplices, but after his death, in January 1817, one of them was arrested for poaching. He secured immunity from prosecution by naming several of those involved in the Loughborough attack. Six men were convicted and executed at Leicester in April 1817.72 70 71 72

HO 42/119, 26 Jan 1812. Thompson, Making, p. 540. Thompson cites the London magistrates’ report here. Binfield, ‘Ned Ludd’, pp. 173–75. Binfield, Writings, pp. 153–55.

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The Nottingham Review covered both of these trials, and in 1817 Charles Sutton extracted the reporters’ material and added to it an account of the trial and execution of Daniel Diggle, convicted of a shooting at Radford in December 1816, and hanged at Nottingham, also in April 1817.73 Sutton described his pamphlet compendium as the first true account of the ‘system of framebreaking, which has so mysteriously existed in the counties of Nottingham, Derby and Leicestershire, for upwards of seven years’.74 Towle had been executed, suggested Sutton, not because he had fired at one of the Loughborough factory watchmen, but because the Loughborough raid ‘was by far the most important, whether considered with reference to the damage which was sustained, or the manner of its accomplishment’. It had been an event of ‘unparalleled demolition’. The publication is a strange and arresting hybrid, quite unlike Sutton and Son’s usual productions. The title page of Reports of the Trial of James Towle . . . of Daniel Diggle . . . resembles much cheaper (this was priced at 8d) older, and shorter execution sheets. It promised ‘A Variety of Interesting Particulars Relative to Samuel Caldwell alias Big Sam, John Disney alias Sheepshead Jack . . .’ and others ‘Concerned in that Memorable Outrage’, which was headlined as the ‘“Loughborough Job!!”’. But this execution sheet is sixty pages long, and very carefully indexed. In its entirety, it would throw more light upon ‘the system of “luddism”, than anything that has yet appeared’. The reporting is very detailed; witnesses and accused are quoted at length; there are blow-by-blow descriptions of Luddite planning, tactics, and of the Loughborough Job itself. It was said that more than one hundred Luddite sympathisers ‘kept a watch out for the authorities and prevented interference with

73

74

Reports of the Trial of James Towle, at Leicester, August 10, 1816, for Shooting at John Asher; of Daniel Diggle . . . at Nottingham, March 18th, 1817, for Shooting at George Kerry; also of John Clarke, James Watson, Thomas Savidge, Wm. Withers, Joshua Mitchell, Wm. Towle, John Crowder, & John Amos . . . at Leicester, March 31st, and April 1st, 1817, for Firing at John Asher, in the Attack on Messrs. Heathcoat and Boden’s Factory . . . Including a Variety of Interesting Particulars . . . Concerned in that Memorable Outrage. Copied, with Considerable Additions, from the Nottingham Review of the 4th of April, 1817, Sutton and Son, Nottingham, 1817. This has ‘Second Edition’ on the title page. The first edition was probably A Correct Report of the Trials of James Crofts and James Brayfield, for Arson; and John Chettle and Thomas Glover for Frame-Breaking: Who Were Tried at Nottingham, on Friday and Saturday, the 2d and 3d of August, 1816; also, the Trials of James Towle, John Slater, and Benjamin Badder, for Firing a Pistol at John Asher; Who Were Tried at Leicester, on the Tenth of August. Copied, with a Few Additions and Alterations, from the Nottingham Review of the 9th and 16th of August, Sutton and Son, Nottingham 1816. For the broadside view of things, see the one-page An Account of the Trial and Execution of James Towle, Cockshaw, Leicester, 1816[?]. Reports of the Trial of James Towle, Preface.

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the destruction within the factory’.75 The pamphlet delivers on its promise of inciting marvel and terror at Luddite organisation – and to the modern eye astonishment at the ready availability of firearms, on which one judge made mild admonition. Witnesses and accused acknowledged that young men were fools around guns.76 The pamphlet contains much incidental information about framework knitters and their everyday lives, though Midlands readers, in Luddism for nigh on seven years, had no need of it. It was not Sutton’s intention to provide a sociology of framework knitting communities, but quotidian routines and attitudes were revealed by the persistent questioning of counsel, as in many courts of law. The unusual feature here is the Review newsmen’s detailed transcription of court proceedings. Their reports carry many traces of their notebooks, including the non-tensed units of language and the liberal use of em-dashes which are a mark of transition from handwritten notes to set type. Loughborough people living close to the mill in June 1816 were asked what they overheard in the street, listening from a top window. What time did they go to bed? What time did they rise? What kind of light is shone by a candle placed before a reflector? (Not enough by which to see a Luddite’s face.) In these pages are some rare appearances of female framework knitters who are known to have existed in large numbers, but who scarcely make an appearance in the annals of Luddism. A Basford butcher, a neighbour of James Towle, saw him ‘and his wife at work in their frame at half past four o’clock’ on the morning of the raid. (Towle was a small man. His slightness was one of the ways in which his identity was confirmed in court. He and a partner could have sat side by side on a frame bench.) Basford is sixteen miles from Loughborough, so there were questions asked about whether he could have got there in time to take part in the attack. How people talked about Luddism was recorded. James Lawson, described as a police officer in Nottingham, said he had known Towle awhile, had seen him in a Nottingham public house on the Tuesday before the Loughborough attack, talked to him about Towle’s having been previously accused of frame breaking.77 Towle said that ‘would have been a job for him,

75 76

77

Binfield, Writings, p. 154 ‘Witness told him [Diggle] he had no occasion to fire, and he replied he was damn’d mad at himself for it. Witness then said, you’re always such a damn’d fool when you’ve got a bit of powder’. Another witnesse remembered that on the Sunday before Christmas one of Diggle’s accomplices came to borrow some powder of him – ‘he lent him some in a horn. This witness received an admonition from the Judge, and was desired to be more guarded in future.’ Reports of the Trial of James Towle, p. 20. Thompson, Making, p. 627. Also ‘dreadful outrage’, Morning Post, 18 Oct 1814; Bury and Norwich Post; or, Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex, Cambridge, and Ely Advertiser, 26 Oct.

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if they had found him guilty’. Lawson ‘advised him to leave off that kind of life’.78 They went outside because there was so much noise in the bar. Towle said he could not get work. Wherever he went looking for it they said to him ‘“Oh! It is you that was tried for frame-breaking!”’ He said he had been ‘“over-persuaded [by Luddite arguments], and felt so much hurt, he hardly knew what to do with himself,” [sic] many of their set were doing well, while he was used ill, and he had a good mind to split upon them”.’79 He was quiet for a moment, and then said ‘“There was something brewing, and there would be a job before it was long”.’ In Lawson’s perception (it is less clear what Towle’s was), ludding was a life some men led; it was connected to criminality, or was a bad habit they might give over. Both men used the term ‘do a job’, as in the modern burglar’s meaning of going out on a job, rather than as to destroy, defeat, damage, or utterly confound. Daniel Diggle, younger than Towle, just married at 21 and ‘a fine stout-looking young man’ was more reticent on Ludd, and appears to have been more uncertain than Towle about his own feelings and motives. He initially pleaded guilty to the indictment of having ‘wilfully, maliciously, and unlawfully shot at . . . George Kerry, with the intent to kill and murder him!’ and had to be cajoled by Judge Richard Richards into a Not Guilty in order to have at least a chance by jury. He had experienced the deep embarrassment of a meeting with the man he had fired at on the night of 22 December 1816.80 He had been visited in Nottingham jail by George Kerry. His victim appears to have spoken kindly to him (though there is no way of telling tone of voice). Mr Justice Richards wondered if Kerry had visited the jail at the encouragement of magistrates hoping for the confession Diggle had not yet made? Diggle had shaken Kerry’s hand and asked him how he did. ‘Not so bad as you meant me to be’, said Kerry. The young man blushed, and made no answer. Kerry asked him what induced him to do what he’d done. Silence from Diggle. Kerry repeated his question several times, ‘but still he was silent; at last he said, he’d be damn’d if he knew what made him come. – “I reckon you left me for dead, when you left our house”; he said

78 79

80

1814; Nottingham Gazette, 21 Oct 1814; Derby Mercury, 30 Mar 1815; Nottingham Review, 31 Mar 1815. Reports of the Trial of James Towle, p. 10. The sic is for the redundant double quote mark. In their exuberant use of punctuation marks to express the vibrancy and immediacy of speech, typesetters and proofreaders overdid them. In modern justice systems it is not usual for victims and perpetrators to actually meet, even though reconciliation and forgiveness are being attempted, and certainly not before a perpetrator has been convicted.

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he did’. Diggle could not remember what he’d said during the shooting or anything about the sequence of events. Kerry told Diggle who had betrayed him. Then in court, telling all of this, the older man broke down: ‘“The prisoner’s father lived next door to me for several years and is a very honest industrious man.” – (Here the witness’s feelings seemed almost to overcome him)’. He then continued to relate his interview with Diggle. Hearing that one of his accomplices was in Leicester jail, Diggle had said that the others had ‘put a pistol in his hand, and forced him to go’. Diggle then said that he ‘had done that by me [Kerry] for which he should be hanged, and hoped I’d be as favourable as I could’. When questioned in court Diggle’s accomplice said simply that ‘on the Sunday before Christmas day, himself, Diggle [and two others] . . . set off to break a frame at Kerry’s, it was about eight o’clock, they took three pistols and a hammer with them . . .’ After his hanging, a statement from Diggle was handed in to the Review office by a clergyman who had visited him in the condemned cell. It had been dictated to a friend. It urged all ‘to break off from those practices’ which had brought Diggle to his ruin. It was true that he had been involved in most of the frame breaking that had taken place in the neighbourhood over the past eight months, but had had nothing to do with Luddism until the middle of 1815. He finally answered Kerry’s question about motive: ‘We have often been told that Luddism would benefit trade.’ What he now saw, in the shadow of the Hanging Tree, was that Luddism led ‘insensibly, to the commission of the worst of crimes, even murder itself ’.81 This fluent and formulaic epistle, which bears little resemblance to the morose and defensive speech of his enforced encounter with Kerry, was probably not in Diggle’s own words. Sutton said they were written down by someone else. But these may have been his sentiments, and we should give him the right to criminalise his own activity – though this is to allow the shadow of the noose to fall even darker than it would the next day. Diggle’s reluctant testimony shows that young men – and we must assume women – grew up in Luddism, or at least came to maturity during its seven long Nottinghamshire years. It was something some young men did, of a dark night and after some preparation. It was an activity. Sometimes your target was someone who knew your family and had seen you grow up. Many were persuaded to activity by the argument that breaking targeted machines would bring about a change for the better: would be good for trade, and the everyday living of the working population

81

Reports of the Trial of James Towle, pp. 17–24

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and their families. But you did not need to smash a wide frame or indeed, in terror and confusion, to shoot another framework knitter, to be in Luddism. There was an emphasis on doors in court proceedings. Were they closed? On the latch? Bolted and double bolted? Was there a knocking at the door? Did the child go to open it? These were important questions in cases of criminal damage, forced entry, and theft.82 But which side of the door does the knocking come from? When Ned Ludd knocks at the door of a small cottage he finds what he knew he would find: a framework knitter like himself, a friend of his father, someone who watched him grow up from next door sixteen years before. Unlike the castle porter in Macbeth, the framework knitter listening to the knocking does not need to imagine starving workers clamouring to get in, for they are, like him, on this side of the gate. Really, there were no sides to these doors; inside was outside, in Luddism. It is much easier to put Nottinghamshire Luddite activity and Luddite words in the same frame as Joseph Woolley’s endless, knowing and highly wrought narratives about drunken nights out with the boys and ale-house trashing, than it is to evoke the comedic imagination for Yorkshire or Lancashire Luddism. Nottingham Luddites did not kill anyone, and broke upwards of a thousand frames in the county. Their direct action was initially successful, and ‘honest’ hosiers initially made many of the concessions demanded by the stockingers. Yet social history writes Luddism in the elegiac mode, as a defeat aestheticised because we have in contemplation heroic working men and women who acted with great courage, intelligence and determination in making their position clear, to the gentlemen hosiers of Nottingham, and to posterity. We write on their side, two hundred years on, and make them losers by our words: ‘The luddites occupy an unique place in history, having despite defeat, bequeathed their name to all future opponents of new technologies.’83 Luddites were heroised in the post-Thompsonian era; in the 1970s and 1980s they were written as dignified prototypes of the mid-twentieth century’s working-class heroes. The timing of defeat’s reification into nobility may account for the deafening silence that greeted Jacques Rancière’s account of nineteenth-century workers who did not care for their work, or about organisation around their work,

82 83

Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2009, pp. 29–34. Adrian Randall, ‘Luddite Riots in Nottingham’, in Immanuel Ness (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest, 1500 to the Present, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2009, vol. V, p. 2134

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but who preferred to spend their energies on poetry.84 They spent their nights writing poetry and philosophy, drinking and talking the talk, not producing orations for a trade union meeting. These men were ‘not necessarily traitors’ to a cause that had not yet been inaugurated.85 Rancière wrote against a modern idea of the committed working man: against social history’s grave fantasy constructed around eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men whom twentieth-century historians much admired. Woolley wrote, and drank, and talked the talk. He did not love his frame; it was a machine for living by. He read, and committed 100,000 words to paper (none of them poetry). But observing that does not allow us to place him on the other side of the gate, shutting out General Ludd, even though that may be what he actually did, on the night of 25 January 1812. As far as Nottinghamshire Luddism was concerned, after the disturbances of 1811–12, the formation of the United Committee, its successful petitioning of Parliament and the House of Commons committees’ sittings in the summer of 1812, protest died down. It surfaced again in late 1814 and in 1816 as we have seen; but the General had long moved on, to other counties, other distressed trades and wrecked communities. But in the diary for 1815 Woolley inscribed one tiny mark of the continued general distress when ‘on the 26 [Oct he] Gave a way to tramp Stockingor 0s 6d’.86

84

85 86

Jacques Rancière, Nuit des prolétaires [1981], trans. John Drury, intro. Donald Reid, The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1989. The silence was British, or rather, English. Nuit des prolétaires was much reviewed and widely discussed in the US. Rancière, Nights of Labor, p. viii. NA, DD 311/6, 26 Oct 1815.

11

Some conclusions: writing everyday

So I took notis of it I thought it so remarkable. Joseph Woolley, Diary, April 1804.

Joseph Woolley did not write the kind of ‘individualist self ’ which is said to have emerged during the long eighteenth century. In the cultural practice of ‘autobiography’, published and unpublished, an author displays a self identity. The writer is both object and subject of his or her prose (or poetry).1 The author of an ‘autobiography’ is the person accounted for in its pages, and if it gets published, the reader undertakes to believe that the book’s subject, its author, and the name on its cover, are all one and the same person. That is Philippe Lejeune’s famous ‘autobiographical pact’, a theory of autobiography, or self-writing, which depends much on the material factors of printing, publishing, and audiences as they emerged across the West in the modern period.2 Some nineteenth-century diary-writing has been claimed as autobiographical because the writer is deemed to have used daily entries to amplify or play out an already fully formed life story.3 But there are more differences than similarities between autobiography and diary. The major point of difference is the end. The man or woman who sits down to write ‘a life’, or their life, knows the end: the end is this man or woman telling the story of themself, now, in writing. The formal end of an autobiography is the end of the book; the reader knows this because they have

1 2

3

Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591–1791, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1997, pp. 1–10, and passim. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Sueil, Paris, 1975; On Autobiography, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989. Autobiography does not have to be written down for it to be ‘the core of identity in modern life’. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 53. Martin Hewitt, ‘Diary, Autobiography, and the Practice of Life History’, in David Amigoni (ed.), Life Writing and Victorian Culture, Ashgate, Aldershot and Burlington VT, 2006, pp. 21–40.

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the book in their hands. But diaries have a different shape: ‘they are repetitive, rough, elliptical . . . they are not for us’. They do not end.4 Woolley’s writing was not autobiographical, in either the generic or the cultural sense. He did not write to fashion, narrate, or reveal, a self or subjectivity. He did not use the modern ‘life history method’, and we cannot use it to interpret his writing. In modern sociological and oralhistory theory, a ‘life history’ is the story a person tells about the life he or she has lived, whether it be labelled self-narrative, story-of-the-self, autobiography, testimonio, ego-document, or ego-histoire.5 All of these demand that the scholar (sociologist, historian; whoever) employing the life-story method to interpret the document, focus on the first-person recounting of a life. But Woolley did not begin at his beginning and recount the circumstances and events that brought him to his present. His past did not shape the persona of his text because he did not describe his personal past – or any past; just a memory of a schoolhouse attended long ago; a notable flood in 1796. He used memory and the word ‘remember’ for things that had never happened before, as in ‘mr deverall plowed the home Close that is next to John Oldhams Close the first time I can Ever remember it being plowed’; ‘there was more sno fell that day than I ever remember So late in the winter’; ‘there as been a deal of thunder and rain and ail this week and more than I Ever remember at this time of the year in my life’; and ‘it was the first wedding that I Can remember that there was no Ringing at’. His past was a measure of present time, not a measure of himself (or his Self). He was a kind of living inverse of Old Moore’s Almanack: a time-line of what had never before occurred, usually meteorologically. (There was a lot of outlandish weather in the Almanacks.) Remembering was about the present, not about the past. He knew he had lived a life (‘in my life’); but he did not write a life story, or write ‘a life’ into being. He wrote a diary – both a material thing, and a form of writing structured by a modern Western

4

5

Julie Rak, ‘Dialogue with the Future: Philippe Lejeune’s Method and Theory of Diary’, in Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (eds.), Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, p. 20; Philippe Lejeune, ‘How Do Diaries End?’, Biography. An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 24:1 (2001), pp. 99–112; Carolyn Steedman, ‘History and Autobiography’, in Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography, and History, Rivers Oram, London,1992, pp. 41–50; ‘About Ends: On How the End is Different from an Ending’, History of the Human Sciences, 9:4 (1996), pp. 99–114. Ken Plummer, ‘Life History Method’, in Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Alan Bryman and Tim Futing Liao (eds.), The SAGE Encyclopedia of Social Science Research Methods, 3 vols., Sage, London, 2004, vol. II; Prue Chamberlayne, Joanna Bornat, and Tom Wengraf (eds.), The Turn to Biographical Methods in Social Sciences, Routledge, London, 2000; Daniel Bertaux (ed.), Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, Sage, London, 1981.

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understanding of time as linear and measurable. He dated the vast majority of his entries, being much more interested in recording the day on which he wrote than the date of the occurrence itself (which he sometimes could not exactly recall). ‘The modern diary does not really become what it is until . . . the date moves out of the field of the enunciated and into the field of the enunciation,’ explains Philippe Lejeune; ‘In a letter or a legal document, the date not only specifies but also certifies the time of enunciation: I am writing to you today, on such and such a date . . . Or we are entering into this contract today. That is important when reading the letter or executing the contract. It is a pact of truth: backdating . . . is cheating.’6 Joseph Woolley’s diary is a modern diary; his dates are enunciations. Joseph Woolley’s written words (and numerals) were distributed across six Old Moore’s Almanacks bound with interleaved blank pages. The Almanack-notebooks are not identical in format: the usual dimensions were 15 cm x 10 cm x 5 cm, though the one for 1804 was thicker, and the one for 1813 very thin, at just over one centimetre. Thickness depended on the number of inserted blank sheets.7 They were bound in embossed sheepskin dyed red or green (except for the 1803 volume, which compensated for its plainness with very nice marbled end papers) and all had a paper-lined clasp-flap. These were not the cheapest notebooks Woolley could have bought, and certainly not the most expensive: in January 1813 he ‘pd for this Book 3s 0d’ – about 6 per cent of his income for that month, which he calculated at £2 11s 4d. Because of the page size the writing surface was cramped, but the diaries are neat little articles, satisfying to hold and highly portable.8 Above all, they were practical, providing a weekly calendar, much account of the weather (past and predicted) and ‘all things fitting’ for an almanac, including notable historical events and astronomical detail. The way in which the blank pages were bound with the Moore-material varied, with greater or 6 7

8

Lejeune, On Diary, pp. 79–92. NA, DD 1704/1–5. These are the original diaries. All references in the preceding pages are to the photocopies made available to researchers by Nottinghamshire Archives. I am grateful to Mr Mark Dorrington, Team Manager, Nottingham Archives and Local Studies for giving me permission to see the originals. There are five original volumes, not six: the one for 1809 was deposited in photocopy. We know a lot more about women’s pockets, and what they carried in them, than we do about men’s. Barbara Burman and Jonathan White, ‘Fanny’s Pockets: Cotton, Consumption and Domestic Economy’, in Jenny Batchelor and Cora Kaplan (eds), Women and Material Culture, 1660–1830, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, pp. 31–51. But see Christopher Todd Matthews, ‘Form and Deformity: The Trouble with Victorian Pockets’, Victorian Studies, 52:4 (2010), pp. 561–90; and work on men’s legs, and what was carried next to them, is well under way: Karen Harvey, ‘Men of Parts, Shape and Style: Men’s Legs in the Eighteenth Century’, unpublished paper.

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lesser numbers of blanks before and after Moore, and the number of sheets interleaved with it, either one or two. Woolley’s use of this layout was practical as well: all his monthly monetary accounts were written opposite the Moore calendar pages; he began his narrative on the early blank pages, moving to the end pages when they were filled up. But the end part of the diaries was also used for the annals of Clifton (births, fornications, deaths) and his retrospective account of a particular year. Sometimes he repeated information and stories from the early pages. Only once, in 1815, when having filled in the early part and the Moore-pages in the usual way, did he turn the notebook over and continue his narrative in reverse. The organisation of his own material was well thought-through and efficient. In the 1804 volume he noted ‘memorandums for the year 1805 beginning June the 30 and the reason I write them in this book I had filled my book that I had for the year 1805 So I put wat I thaught in this’.9 In the later volumes he overtly presented himself as Clifton annalist, with ‘I begin this year with an accedent that hapened’ (1813) and ‘I begin this year with the account of a great flood that happened in Janewary’ (1815). By now he had many years experience of journal writing behind him. He wrote not only to make up his accounts and record the daily life of Clifton, but to put down what he thought about things – that is what he said (‘wat I thaught’). There are other indications of his reflection on being a writer – not least the number of pages that are left empty across the six volumes. Twenty blanks out of a total of some five hundred pages filled with writing is not a high proportion; but Woolley was not some naive writer in the early stages of literacy-acquisition who thought the purpose of pages was to fill them up to the very edges: he consciously used his writing and his notebooks; they did not use him. His adoption of a writerly persona has been noted throughout this book. He addressed imagined audiences and interlocutors in his narratives, with ‘alf a Crown or 2 shillings and Six pence which you please to Call it’, and ‘he built them by the Great or by measure which you please’.10 ‘[Y]ou would be surprised to see what Long faces Some of them made’, he wrote of the Bunny Volunteers brought home to the seriousness of what they had undertaken in September 1804. He explained his tactics as a writer and enlarged on circumstances that he did not need to explain to himself, as with ‘makes me note this he was the Clarke in the top room for the Club that is at widersons at rudington of wich I am a member’. 9 10

NA, DD 311/3 (after an entry for January1804). This entry is the clearest sign that diaries were kept for the missing years 1802, 1805–1808, 1810–1812 and 1814. Italics inserted to highlight a particular language feature of Woolley’s prose.

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His direct address to some imagined audience in ‘you’ inscribes his own consciousness of telling a good story with a full range of literary devices, as with the Nottingham Theatre incident in 1805. The Clifton stockinger and cobbler paraded around the racecourse ‘Just Like Some people of vast Great property and was above Speaking to their betters So I Leve you to Gess if they would Spek to their infearers’. He frequently stated ‘What makes me note this is’ or what ‘makes me make a memorandum of this’. The notebooks were for the expression of his own opinion on matters described, most clearly when he used the word, as of a cricket match in 1801: ‘it is my apinyon that he Could have beat them if he had had a mind’, but also when his judgement was inextricable from the story being told. Two men doing a work task on the roads ‘fell out a bout some thing as all other fools do and . . . [one] kicked . . . [the other] very bad and beat him with his fises and made him all over blood and he fetched a warrant for him and . . . [the aggressor] paid him 4 Shillings to make it up withe him and So it is Settled till the first Club night and then . . . [he] pays another Shilling for striking him’. ‘Fool’ and ‘fools’ did a great deal of evaluative work in eighteenthcentury writing about low life, as they did in Joseph Woolley’s observation of it in the new century.11 ‘Fools’ were on the cast-list of the running narratives he composed: ‘Soe I Shale bid our fool farewell till I have an occasion to Call of [on] him again and I think it will not be Long’, he wrote in 1804 of a malicious and unfounded complaint of theft taken before Sir Gervase by that well known one, William Quinton of Wilford. We have seen him concerned to use the judicious, impartial language of the law in his reporting of what he had heard tell. Phrases like ‘how the matter Whent any further I canot tell at presson’, ‘how the young Loyian went on when he got home I have not heard yet’, ‘wether it was true I Canot tell’, ‘which is a Great Lie I am shore’, ‘I Saw it with my own Eyes’, ‘as I am informed’, ‘I am very Credditable informed’, ‘this information I had from Thomas bolton of thrumpton’, or ‘I don’t believe my informer’ . . . are a regular base-note of his writing. He knew the power of the pen, that is to say, he knew that he was in charge of the stories he told. He could bring them to conclusion with his familiar ‘So it Ended’; he could withhold information (‘I shall forbare to mention all their names’ he said of a Ruddington crew which had gone off to a wrestling match in Derbyshire and not ‘restled aney person but one among another’); he could stop narratives if they bored him (or he reached the bottom of a page) with ‘there was more of this tale but I have [been] long at it’; he could write 11

Carolyn Steedman, ‘Sights Unseen, Cries Unheard: Writing the Eighteenth-century Metropolis’, Representations, 118 (2012), pp. 28–71.

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about not writing everything down (‘I Cold Say Great deal more about hir but it is needless’). He could conceal himself by metaphor, as perhaps he did at Glapton in 1803, as a sly little dog behind a hedge, his mouth watering for Mary Ketley.12 His writing disguised as much as it revealed. His diaries are volumes of secrets, many of them never to be told.13 He liked a balanced sentence, as in ‘all was dissatisfied some because they thaught they were Cheted and some because they Could not Cheat more than they did’; and ‘he is a man of vast Great business and makes a deal of bustle about nothing at all’. His was the choice of similes and metaphors. That many of them were used to denigrate (or make laughable) human beings by comparing them to animals, makes them no less figures of speech. Clifton lads had the ridiculous appearance of fan-tail pigeons as they paraded around town; the Clifton Bulldog really wasn’t one; the Bunny Volunteers Band ate the cucumbers provided in lieu of payment like ‘hogs at a troff ’; a man slinks out of an ale house like ‘a dog that hath burnt his tail’. There was a lot to be done with ‘lyon’ [lion], for as we have seen it came with discernible literary reference to one of the novels he read. A cowardly lion framed ‘a Cereous tale about 2 taylors of ruddington’ told in July 1801. They were making tup cloths at mr breedons old barn in the field where there his a fire place for the shepherd to make a fire in winter and mr breedon thought the Chimney wanted Sweeping So as they sat at work one day making up cloths mr breedon Got a chimney sweeper Boy to Go down the Chimney and it was unknown to the taylors so when the boy dropped upon the fire place where the taylors were at work they thought it rely was the devil So they never Stayed to prove the Joak but up they Got and away they run the young Loyean home and the old one to his den in the barn and down on is knees to prayer for fear the devil Should fetch him how the young Loyian went on when he got home I have not heard yet . . . mr bredon hurt is Side with Laughg at them.14

Early nineteenth-century newspapers printed many curious local anecdotes like this one; in using their form, Woolley reflected on himself as a writer. He knew when he was telling a story, or a tale: ‘So Ended the Boar storey to the no small mereyment of the parish and all the neighbirur towns Round about.’15

12 13 14

15

‘[A] dog must have is day’, as he remarked on another occasion. NA, DD 311/3, May 1804. See above, Prologue. NA, DD 311/1, 6 Jul 1801. What are ‘tup cloths’? I do not know. Were tupping rams provided with some sort of cover? Or the ewes? Were the tailors working on special shepherds’ clothing for the autumn mating season? Breedon was a noted sheep breeder. A man bought a boar by mistake at a local sale and had difficulty getting rid of it. Everyone knew the story and his new nickname ‘Boar Fletcher’: ‘for a while [he] was

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Woolley’s stories and tales are best understood as the eighteenthcentury ‘anecdote’: as a literary form. Anecdotes were tellable stories believed to exemplify an ethical truth, or as enactments of an ethically significant moment of human character. Language theorist and philosopher James Beattie argued that anecdotes ‘worked’ (in modern teminology) because ‘nothing in nature so powerfully touches our hearts, or gives so great variety of exercise to our moral and intellectual faculties’ . . . as other people: ‘Human affairs and human feelings are universally interesting.’16 In the 1780s Samuel Johnson described how ‘anecdote’ had developed, moved on in recent times from connoting something unpublished – a secret history – to mean ‘a biographical incident; a minute passage of private life’.17 Woolley’s stories shared a form with the newspapers’ alarms and curiosities. A maidservant of Long Eaton helping with hay harvest in the dreadful heat expires in ten minutes, vomiting a quantity of blood; this is reported next to an item from Islington in London. Or one from Hull.18 She has no name; but Woolley’s anecdotes, on the other hand, were about a known world in which the writer was involved. Their point was frequently to delineate or confirm character in a minute passage of many private lives lived out in public (and in the domestic spaces to which Woolley had narrative access).19 Their comic form is that of the modern ‘What’re you like? What is she like, eh?’: the knowing judgement of familiarity and faint contempt. Most of Woolley’s jokes were told to confirm what his friends and neighbours were like. His ‘tales’ denoted characters as ‘everyone’ knew they were.

16

17

18 19

Laughfing stock for all Companeys that knew aney thing about it’. NA, DD 311/6, 8 and 9 Jun 1815. James Beattie, ‘Essays on Poetry and Music’, in Essays. On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind. On Laughter, and Ludicrous Composition. On the Utility of Classical Learning, William Creech, Edinburgh, and E. & C. Dilly, London, 1778, p. 36. William McCarthy, Hester Thrale Piozzi: Portrait of a Literary Woman, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, 1985, pp. 111–12; For ‘tellability’, William and Joshua Waletzky, ‘Narrative Analysis: Oral Versions of Personal Experience’, in J. Helm (ed.), Essays on Verbal and Visual Arts, University of Washington Press, Seattle WA, 1967, pp. 12–44; William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1972. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language. In Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, and Illustrated in Their Different Significations . . . In Two Volumes, John Fielding, London, 1786, vol. I. Nottingham Review, 29 Jul 1808. David Allen Brewer, The Afterlife of Character, 1726–1825, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2005, pp. 1–24. For modern historians and ‘anecdote’, Lionel Gossman, ‘Anecdote and History’, History and Theory, 42:2 (2003), pp. 143–68.

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Anecdotes or stories like his briefly stay the great grey stream of the quotidian, by the very textual act of the writer announcing an incident, or a tale. He recounts the story as if he were present, and so moves it out of the time frame of his own chronology. The necessary fiction promulgated by all who write about what they have not witnessed, is that they are, or have been, in two places at once. It was thus with Woolley’s story about the bright lights, big city, of Birmingham, written in the second diary (‘October the 18 1804 this was wrote’) about 1803, when John francis Junor went in to Warwick shire to see is aunt it was the first time that he Evere was there in is Life and they took him to see birmingham and he gazed and Stared at Every thing that he saw that is Eyes was So blood shot that he Cold Scarse See aney thing at the Last and is mouth being open as it allways is when he stars at aney thing that he was almost Choaked with dust and is Cuson that went along with him was obliged to keep hold of is hand when they was in any Crowd for fear of Lowsing him for he was so intent on Every thing he saw that it would have been impossiable to have kept with him with out having hold of him.

Later, the Warwickshire relatives got him a horse; when Jack went back to fetch her he stared just the Same at Every thing he saw upon the rode and dreamed of being in warwick shire Every Night for months after for they treated him with roasted duck and Every thing that was nise and so he as Longed to be there ever since for he is a great Lad for is belley and such fine denty [dainties] he never had been use to.20

What’s he like, eh?–A great lad for his belly. All writers beyond the initial stages of literacy learning behave as Joseph Woolley behaved. They make their prose work for the purposes of their everyday life and the task in hand, whether that be drafting a Watch and Ward Bill or making up their framework knitting accounts. In the latter case, with pen in hand and released into the wide world of blank paper overleaf, they may come to describe, opine, assess events, make judgements, have a laugh, fashion something by the satisfying uses of alliteration, assonance, common phrases, allusions, metaphors, similes, and many rhetorical devices. All writers, however untutored they may be in the formal presentation of written language are, in the meaning established by sociolinguistics, competent users of a system. And to write in the first place, they must imagine, or figure, or have in mind, an audience, or at the very least, the notion that their written words can be read: know that that is their words’ condition of being: their quality, or quiddity. Writing embodies knowledge of reading and readers, for as you 20

NA DD 311/2, 25 Oct 1803. This was written in 1804, in the 1803 volume.

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write, you read your own words. Written words could not be fashioned if the writer could not read, though indeed, the reader you conjure as you write may well be only yourself. But the hazy outlines of a reader – implied or imagined – are a constant presence in any writer’s mind. It may be that some late eighteenth-century children who could not read were taught to ‘write’ nothing but their own name; taught to use a pen for just one purpose, as if being taught to use a tool by repeating a motion with it, over and over again. The child would know the inked shape on a surface was its name, but would recognise it rather than read it, and would inscribe it rather than ‘writing’ it. Woolley wrote – wrote something nearly every day; did he also write ‘the Everyday’, or ‘everyday life’? In modern theory the Everyday is: ‘someone walking dully along’, or setting up a knitting frame, or performing a routine of some kind that has been performed a thousand times before. It is not reflected on, or subjected to analysis, by the performer or historical subject, because it is a conceptual framework in the observer’s mind, not the mind of those walking, or working a frame, or watching the antics of drinkers in the Coach and Horses. But there are correctives to the social-theory ‘everyday’, in historian Michel de Certeau’s description of the way in which ordinary people (all of us) theorise everyday life. He said they were, and we are, ‘unrecognized producers, poets of their own acts, silent discoverers of their own paths in the jungle of functionalist rationality’.21 Just noticing it, thinking about it, daydreaming, perhaps writing about it, is a poetic act.22 In the 1770s James Beattie described the relationship between the everyday, the extraordinary, and the writing of them both (which he called ‘poetic arrangement’) in the following way: I hear a sudden noise in the street and run to see what is the matter. An insurrection has happened, a great multitude is brought together, and something very important is going forward. The scene before me . . . is in itself so interesting, that for a moment or two I look in silence and wonder. By and by, when I get time for reflection, I begin to inquire into the cause of all this tumult, and what it is that people would be at; and one who is better informed than I, explains the affair . . . or perhaps I make it out for myself, from the words and actions of the persons principally concerned. This is a sort of picture of poetical arrangement . . . 23

He did not mean that he wrote verse, or poetry, out of what he saw, heard tell, and thought about (though you might, and some of his examples are epic poems). ‘Poetical arrangement’ described the intentional organisation of his experience of an event. It suited the ‘order and 21 22

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984, p. xviii. 23 Rak, ‘Dialogue with the Future’, p. 18. Beattie, ‘On Poetry’, Essays, p. 104.

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manner in which the actions of other men strike one’s senses’ and was thus ‘a more exact imitation of human affairs’. Its formal arrangement was a product of his thinking about it; his active ‘reflection’ on it. He made (in this instance) no distinction between telling and writing (though writing is implied strongly throughout these passages). ‘Just noticing’ is the poetic act. However, to conceive of Joseph Woolley (and many others like him) as a poet of the everyday, we must pay attention to writing as much as telling. Writing fashions out of the sounds in the street, the magical, the out-of-theordinary, the noteworthy and the strange. In Woolley’s written words, Everyday has always, already, been turned into something else, into writing: a narrative and thus poetical arrangement. The Everyday of modern social theory is not very useful for reading a written production like Joseph Woolley’s. This is not at all the same thing as saying that Joseph Woolley’s diaries give the historian no access to the ordinary everyday life of south Nottinghamshire, c. 1800–15. In fact they give detailed insight into the culture that produced Luddism. But as with nearly all material that comes before the historian, evidence of the social process and practices to be found in Woolley’s diaries is mediated by writing. The writing is what we have. We need to know more about what writing is, and what writing does: how it conceals as well as speaks; how it papers over the past with secrets. We could perhaps, treat writing – written language – as a thing made in time and social circumstance. We could read it, as Ludmilla Jordanova reads handbags and terracotta figurines, and paintings, and paperclips, in The Look of the Past, that is, describe and account for what went into its making; how, when, where, and why produced; the formal and informal theories that informed its maker, or producer; the tools used; the labour time of its production; other things like it and not like it. In this way, a written word, or a page of notes, are only different from the artifact that is the Wren Library in Cambridge, because ideas (about reading, education; love, the law . . .) informed it as much as the composition of the ink the writer used, the weight of his paper, the shape of her nib. Writing is there to be read for the immaterial as well as the material. It is a thing of two bodies, or two main aspects. I have attempted to read Woolley’s diaries as material things made out of words.24 I have accounted for the form by which the evidence of Woolley’s diaries comes to us, by paying as much attention to how he wrote as to what he wrote about. I have attempted to relate to him as a writer. This has had some effects on my own writing, and on the 24

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press, 1977, pp. 21–44 for language as a most material object.

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particular written form (the ‘history’) that I have been taught to use. When James Beattie finished describing the extraction of the extraordinary from the everyday as a primary poetic act, he went on to speculate about how historians might write up the example of tumult in the street. We might for current purposes (and only a little bit ludicrously, and if Beattie had lived until 1812) imagine him looking out of a window one late January night to dimly make out a band of men with blackened faces, carrying hammers, approaching a Clifton frame shop.25 Beattie had already sketched out how disturbance in the town street might be poeticised from event into story, as we have seen: in a poetical arrangement, the event takes on meaning by the observer working out ‘what it is that people would be at’. But a historian, says Beattie, would behave (and by extension, write) differently. He would provide a different kind of explanation. He would begin his narrative not with the noise in the street, but with context, perhaps ‘the manners of . . . [the] age’ and a description of the political constitution of whatever country he or she was writing about. Then she would introduce a ‘particular person’: birth, parents, social circumstances – a full biography of the life events that shaped her subject as someone of particular viewpoint and opinion. The historian will have in mind a cumulative event (the thing to be explained), like the revolution which was Beattie’s implied example. The historian (unlike the poet) has stepped away from the window, focuses in imagination on one particular person, one ‘turbulent spirit’, one rebel or revolutionary. She will then provide an account of how her historical subject got acquainted with ‘other turbulent spirits like himself ’, and how later, found himself making tumult in the street. And so the narrative would proceed, ‘unfolding, according to the order of time, the causes, principles, and progress of ’ – whatever was being described and explained. The purpose of it all would be to explain the already given event or person. History-writing like this, said Beattie, is ‘more favourable to calm information’; but the poetical method has the advantage as far as the pleasures of ‘the passions and imagination’ are concerned.26 Beattie did not say that the pleasures to be found in a poetical arrangement were the reader’s alone. They were the certain pleasures of Joseph Woolley, the writer. 25

26

Roger J. Robinson, ‘Beattie, James (1735–1803)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Oct 2006 [accessed 27 June 2012]. Beattie’s essay ‘On Laughter and Ludicrous Composition’ (1778) has guided me in interpreting Woolley’s writing. But Simon Dickie, ‘Hilarity and Pitilessness in the mid-Eighteenth Century: English Jestbook Humor’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 37:1 (2003), pp. 1–22, suggests why this may not have been a good idea. Beattie, Essays, p. 105

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Index

abortion 117–18 Acts of Parliament 201 Allen, Edward 209, 214–15 Allen, Harry 155 Almanacs 46–8, 119, 251–3 Alsop family dispute 107 Ambrosio the Monk 35 anecdotes 255–7 ‘Anti-Conventicle’ (pseudonym) see Clifton, Sir Gervase APF (Clifton, Wilford, and Barton Association for the Prosecution of Felons) 237 Arack, William 184 Aram, Gervas Jnr. 141–2 Armstead, Francis 234–5 Arnold (Notts) frame breaking 229 Asher, William 213–14 assault, and recourse to law 132–7, 139–40, 213 atrocity 31 Auslander, Leora 6 autobiographical pact 250 autobiography 250–1 and diary 250–1 bag-hosiers 209–11 Baker, Robert [Robert Barker] 229, 242–3 Balinese cockfighting 95–6 Ball, George 239 barbers shops 45 Barker, Tom 112 Barker, William 85–7, 106–7 Barnes, Elizabeth 102–3, 119 Beattie, James 16, 256, 258, 260 belonging 76–7 Belton, Josiah 84–5, 183 Bill for Preventing Frauds and Abuses in the Framework-Knitting Manufacture 222 Binfield, Kevin 26, 219–21, 223, 225–6, 228, 231, 233–4

Blackner, John 173, 203, 209–10, 220–1 body-mind theories 116–17 book-keeping advice 174–8 Bowring, Cornelius 137 Boyer, Samuel 63–7, 69–70, 76, 103, 184, 195 Braithwaite, Francis 239 Brooks, John 115, 119 Brown Bread Act 72 Bulwell (Notts) frame breaking 231 Bulwell (Notts) letter 233–4 Bunny Volunteers see Ruddington and Bunny Volunteers Burn, Dr Richard 133–5, 153 Burton, Joseph 118 butchering, on Sundays 152–3 Butler, John 130, 153 Cambridge Intelligencer 45 ‘Captain Right’ 242 ‘Captain Rock’ 242 Cartwright, Joseph 144–5 categories of magisterial records 128–9 Caunce, Stephen 139–40 celibacy 120 Chapman, J. D. 156 Chapman, Stanley 207 Charter of Incorporation (framework knitting trade) 220–1, 226, 229 church disturbances (Nottingham) 159 Church of England livings 149, 157–8 church/civil authority 158–61 class consciousness 225–6 clerico-magisterial despotism 166 Clifton, Sir Gervase absence of 237–8 accuracy of record keeping 127–9 alias ‘Anti-Conventicle’ 163–4 alias ‘Layman’ 164–8 assault 132–7, 139–40 background of 10–11 categories of magisterial records 128–9

291

292

Index

Clifton, Sir Gervase (cont.) charitable donations 237–8 and Church of England livings 149, 157–8 and common/statute law 132–7 conscience 165–7 and defamation 140, 142–3 and domestic violence 108–9, 134, 143 drunkenness reported to 96–7 ecclesiastical powers 149 employment disputes 131–2, 134–5, 155 events unrecorded 141–3 fighting reported to 79–81, 139–40 Flagellator’s writings on 166–7 and framework knitters 213–14 and indecent exposure 137–8 and industrial relations 215–18 Joseph Woolley’s account of 15–17, 53, 126, 140–1 as Joseph Woolley’s landlord 184–5 Joseph Woolley’s understanding of 53 justicing notebooks 125–7 land acquisition by 156–7 as landlord 157–8 as landowner 149 language use 134 and ‘law talk’ 122–4, 132–7 legal imagination 134 legal knowledge 132–7 legal language used 132–3 as magistrate 126–7, 147–8 meets Revd William Clifton 150–1 and poor law 77–8, 125, 129–30, 134, 139–40, 143–4 and postal service 164 and poultry poisoning 144–5 powers of 77 private writing 146 prose style 163 relationship to Joseph Woolley 27 and riotous assembly 136–7 and sexual assault 137–8 sexual behaviour 53, 101–2 of servants 102–3 similarities of records to Joseph Woolley’s sexual narratives 138–9 and Sunday trading 152–3 as tax payer 160 and tenant discipline 157–8 use of Justice of the Peace (Burn) 133–4 use of term ‘contrary to law’ 134–7, 162 verbal abuse 140, 142–3 and William Clifton’s gardener 153–4

and William Clifton’s path blocking 155–6 and William Edward Miller 164–8 and William Kirwin 124–5, 137 writing content 14–15 Clifton Raid (frame breaking) 229–30, 236–40 Clifton, Revd William 56–7, 60, 75 death of 160 employment trouble 154–5 hypocrisy of 152–3 as landlord 157–8 malice of 155 and Methodists 162 as new rector 150–1 pathway blocking 155–6 and Sunday trading 152–3 as tax payer 161 trouble caused by 151–5 trouble with gardener 153–4 as Woolley family’s landlord 184–5 Clifton Society transcription of Joseph Woolley’s diaries 1 Clifton stocks 152 Clifton, Wilford, and Barton Association for the Prosecution of Felons (APF) 237 Coach and Horses, Clifton (Langfords) 71, 73, 84–6, 94–5 cockfighting 95–6 cognitive reading 52–3 Coke, Daniel Parker 216 Coldham, George 236–7 ‘colting’/‘colts’ 208, 219, 221, 230 Coltman (Hosier) 218 common people 9–10, 16 common/statute law 132–7 companionship 75–6 Conant, Nathaniel 235, 242–3 conscience 166–7 contracts 216–17 conversations in the law 122–4 conversible worlds 124 court record categories 128–9 Critical Review 30 cross-gendered reading 40 culture of framework knitting 202–3 custom, and law 217–20 ‘cut-up’ work 179 ‘cut-ups’ 205–6 Dalton, Michael 135 Davy, Sam 118 de Certreau, Michel 258 De Quincey, Thomas 20–2

Index defamation 140, 142–3 Desmoulins, Camille 19–20 despotism 34 clerico-magisterial 166 of property 156 Deverill, Benjamin 130 dialogic model of language 241 diary, and autobiography 250–1 Dickenson, George 136 Diggle, Daniel 244–8 division of labour 200 doctoring 195–7 domestic violence 93, 106–9, 134, 143 doors, in court proceedings 248 Dreyer, Frederick 168 drink and conviviality 87–8 and distasteful behaviour 93–4, 111–12, 182 and domestic abuse 93 and fighting 73–5, 79–99 Joseph Woolley’s expenditure on 187 and magistrates 96–7 and sexual behaviour 120, 182–4 and women 93–4, 111–12, 182–4 Duffy, John 130 ‘Duke of Blusters’ 95, 183 ‘The Dukeries’ 156 Ecclesiastical Law (Burn) 153 ecclesiastical revenues 160 ecclesiastical/civil authority 158–61 economic depression 225–6 Edgeworth, Maria 16–17 Edmond, Orphan of the Castle (Broster) 32 Edmund Oliver (Lloyd) 33–6 Edmund/Edmond, possible novels read by Joseph Woolley 30–6 Elliot, Mary 132, 136 employment disputes 131–2, 134–5, 154–5 English Trades (Anon.) 203 Enlightenment (Porter) 6 ethnographic material 25 everyday life 22–7 and political life 25 experience 25–7 family budget 188–9 family secrecy 78 family wage 180–1 Felkin, William 203–4 Fergus, Jan 40 Fielding, Henry 13–14, 29, 35–6, 44–5, 79, 90–1

293 fighting among women 89, 109–10, 139–40, 182 and betting 88 between children 79–80 between men and women 109–10 and drinking 73–5, 79–99 and press gang 83 seen as humorous 90–1 fighting words 223 ‘Flagellator’ 166–7 Fleatcher, Martha 182 Fletcher, William Sr 73–5, 79 Flowers, Hannah 138 food prices/crises 72 fools 254 forced marriages 105, 144, 171 40-gauge frame see under framework knitting Foster, Elizabeth 194 frame breaking 215, 226, 228–31, 234–41, 243–8 frame rent 207–9 Framework Company Charter 220–1, 226, 229 Framework Knitters’ Company of London 220 framework knitting 201–24 Bill for Preventing Frauds and Abuses in the Framework-Knitting Manufacture 222 Charter of Incorporation (framework knitting trade) 220–1, 226, 229 ‘colts’ 208 communal technological development 203 culture of 202–3 ‘cut-ups’ 205–6 elasticity 205–6 40-gauge frame 207, 210, 238–40 and framework knitters 213 framing/frame theory 17–18 and hand knitting 202 and income 180–1 industrial relations 215–18 lace 203–4 law of 148, 212–24 and men’s fashions 222 payment in goods 214–15 petitions by workers 202, 205 and prices 179–80 romance of knitting frame 202–3 Select Committees on 202 ‘selvedges’ 205–6 short-sightedness among workers 204 silk 203–4

294

Index

framework knitting (cont.) ‘Statistical Account of the FrameworkKnitting Trade’ [Blackner] 210 stocking frames 203–4 unfitness of legislation on 214–15 and weaving 203 wide frames 206 yeoman framework knitting 207 Francis, John 105, 117–18 Freeman, William 96–7 friendly societies 70–7 brawls in 73–5, 182 and friendship 75–6 friendship 33, 75–6 gambling 194 Geertz, Clifford 26, 95–6 ‘General Ludd’ see Luddites ‘General Ludd’s Triumph’ (Anon.) 227 Giles, Widow 130 gleaning dispute 142–3 Goody, Jack 173 Hale, Matthew 135 Hallam, Elizabeth 140 hand knitting, and framework knitting 202 Handley, Ann 137 Handley, William 137 Hardy, John 132–7 Hardy, Mary 132, 134, 138, 183 Hardy, Samuel 121 Hardy, Thomas 86, 110–11, 144 Harpham, George 152–3 Hazlitt, William 114 Heath, William 234–5 Heathcoat and Boden 243–4 Henson, Gravenor 203–4, 206, 209, 211, 220–1, 233 herbalism 195–7 Herrick (Arack), William 184 Highmore, Ben 26 historical writing 3–6 History of the Framework Knitters (Henson, 1831) 203–4 History of the Machine Wrought Hosiery (Felkin, 1867) 203–4 ‘History as a Magistrate’ (Michelet) 11–12 Hodget, Charles 73–5, 89, 93, 110–11, 138, 182–3 Hodget, Martha 183 Hodget, William 183 Hoe, Dolly 143 Hoe, George 143, 162, 167 Holcraft, Thomas 34 Holt, John 84–5, 89, 116–17, 183

Holt, Mary 116–17, 183–4 Holt, Sall 111 honour 69–70 Hooley, James 218 House of Commons Select Committee on Framework Knitters Petition [sic] (1819) 173–4 Hudson, John 234–5 human rights 38–9 human suffering, as humorous 90–1 ‘Hurry Scurry: or the Tailors’ Rumpus’ 114 identification with characters 40–1 Ifversen, Jan 26 indecent exposure 137–8 individualist self, in writing 250 industrial relations 215–18 interpretive reading 52–3 Jameson, Frederic 20 Johnson, Samuel 256 Jordanova, Ludmilla 259 Joseph Andrews (Fielding) 90–1 jurisdiction and policing 235–6 Justice (Dalton) 135 Justice of the Peace (Burn) 133–5 Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice 161, 164 Kerry, George 246–7 Ketley, Mary 115, 119–20, 255 King, Peter 128 Kirkby frame breaking 234–5 Kirwin, William 124–5, 139–40 knitting see framework knitting ‘knobstick weddings’ see forced marriages La Nuit des prolétaires (Rancière) 7–8 Lamb, Charles 23 land acquisition 156–7 landlord/tenant relationship 58 Lane, William 30–1 Langford, Thomas 71 Langford, Thomas Jr 85–7, 92–3, 113–14 language of wages 178–9 Large, Thomas 208, 219–20 Launder, Master 209 Launder, Revd Abel Collin 150, 169–70 law assault 132–7 Bill for Preventing Frauds and Abuses in the Framework-Knitting Manufacture 222 Charter of Incorporation (framework knitting trade) 220–1, 226

Index ‘contrary to law’ (term in justices’ records) 134–7, 162 and custom 217–20 domestic violence 93, 106–9, 134, 143 employment disputes 131–2, 134–5, 212–24 and framework knitting 148, 212–24 industrial relations 215–18 jurisdiction 235–6 ‘law talk’ 122–4, 132–7 on payment in goods 214–15 statute/common law 132–7 as unfit for purpose 214–15 verbal abuse 140, 142–3 and working man 17, 132–7 see also Acts of Parliament; Clifton, Sir Gervase; poor laws Lawson, James 245–7 ‘Layman’ (pseudonym) see Clifton, Sir Gervase Lefebvre, Henri 23–4 legal consciousness 148–9, 212–13 Lejeune, Philippe 250, 252 Lewis, Matthew 31, 35 life history 251 The Life of Baron Frederic Trenck 33–4 ‘Lincolnshire Lumpers’ 83, 178 Linebaugh, Peter 20–2 literary development 39 Little Goody Two-Shoes (Newbery) 40 lived experience 24 livings 149, 157–9 Locke, John 168 Lonsdale, John 132 The Look of the Past (Jordanova) 259 Loughborough frame breaking 243–4 low-life literature 23 ‘Ludd, Ned’ see Luddites Luddites 2, 7, 9, 20–2, 28, 33, 42–4, 72, 122, 126, 148, 206, 215, 219–20, 223, 225–49 see also frame breaking Macbeth (Shakespeare) 20–1 machine-breaking see frame breaking McMillan, Margaret 2 magistrates character of 147 and industrial relations 215–18 jurisdiction 235–6 role of 127 magistrates’ courts 124 categories of court records 128–9 see also Clifton, Sir Gervase Making of Bread Act (1800) 72

295 The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson) 7, 25–6, 225–6 male psychology 31 Maltby, Ann 140 Maltby, Penelope 140 manliness 69, see also masculinity Mann, John 54–5, 59–60, 69–70, 73–5, 105 Mantel, Hilary 19–20 marriages forced (‘knobstick’) 105, 143–4 number of people in 120 unhappy 106–9 masculinity 33–6, 96 see also manliness master/servant legislation 131 Measures, Thomas 180–1 medicine 195–7 Memoirs of the Life of Baron Frederic Trenck 33–4 men’s fashions 222 Merrin, Mary 146 Methodism 44, 161–71 Michelet, Jules 11–12 Miller, William Edward 164–8 Mills, William 96–7 Minerva Press 31 miscarriage 116–17 The Monk (Lewis) 31, 172 Morley, Thomas 95 Morris, Richard 130 Morton, Thomas 114 ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ (Auden) 241 name-calling 140 Nelson, Thomas 218 Newark, Viscount 237 newspapers 45–6 Nights of Labor see La Nuit des prolétaires Nottingham Fencibles 64 Nottingham Journal 120, 162 Nottingham Review 42–5, 164, 225, 230, 237–8, 242, 244 Nottingham Theatre incident 254 Nottingham Watch and Ward Bill 235–6 Nottinghamshire Archives 1 Nottinghamshire framework knitters 126 Nottingham(shire) Gazette 42, 164, 242 novel genres 39 Novel Repository (William Lane’s) 30 obscenity 31–2 Observations Upon Two Letters Addressed to Sir Gervas Clifton (‘Layman’) 164 Odget, Charles see Hodget, Charles The Old English Baron (Reeve) 32–3

296

Index

Old Moore’s Almanack 46–8, 119, 251–3 Oldham, John 155–6 O’Neil, Julie 72 Pagett, Sarah 130 Pamela (Richardson) 30–2, 36–9, 42, 47–8, 100–1, 197 and economic thinking 172–3 and reading skills 51–2 pamphlets 46–8 Parker, John 216–18 pathway blocking 155–6 Patronage (Edgeworth) 16–17 patronage 149, 157–9 payment for amusements 182 payment in goods 214–15 Pearman, John 2–3 Pearman, Rose 2 Perceval, Spencer 222 personal identity 76–7 A Place of Greater Safety (Mantel) 20 poetical arrangement 258 policing jurisdiction 235–6 poor laws 77–8, 125, 129–30, 134, 139–40, 143–4, 158, 171 Porter, Roy 6 poultry poisoning 144–5 pregnancy, pre-nuptial 78 Price, Martha 142–3 Price, William 211 prices schedules 219 Priesley, Alice 121 private enclosure acts 157 prose and everyday life 257–8 prosecution associations 237 ‘The Prostitute’ (poem) 119–20 prostitution 113, 119–20 Provincial Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Fergus) 40 psychology of reading 40–1 Quinton, William 152, 154–5, 254 Rancière, Jacques 7–8, 248–9 ‘Randan’, out on the 182, 184 Rawson, Sarah 138 reading skills 48–53 Reckless, Gervas 113–14 Red Hart, Ruddington (Widdowson’s) 45, 70, 73 Redfern, Thomas 131 Reeve, Clara 32–3 religion, and the state 161–71 Rempstone Overseer 134

Reports of the Trial of James Towle . . . of Daniel Diggle 244–8 reputation 70 respectability 67–70 Review see Nottingham Review rhetorical writing 26 Richards, Judge Richard 246–7 Richardson, Samuel 31–2, 36–9, 51–2, 100–1, 173 right of patronage 149, 157–9 Riley, Ann 140 Riot Act (1715) 136–7 riotous assembly 136–7 romance of knitting frame 202–3 Roper, William 134 Rose, John 130 Rose, Jonathan 29 Roulston, William 132 Ruddington and Bunny Volunteers 81–3, 253, 255 Ruddington frame breaking 229 Ruddington Friendly Society 70–5 Rue, Elizabeth 118 Rue, John 118 Rue, Mary 118 Rule, John 201 St Clair, William 41–2 St Mary’s Clifton revenues 160 The Satirist, or, Monthly Meteor 166 Saunders, Ann 138 Scenes of British Wealth in Produce, Manufacture, and Commerce (Taylor, 1823) 202 The School of Reform (Morton) 114 self-righteousness 117 ‘selvedges’ 205–6 servants and employment disputes 131–2 and sexual behaviour 102–3, 119 Sewell, William 25–6 sexual assault 137–8 sexual behaviour 33, 53, 57–8, 63–7, 70, 103–6, 183–4 by young men 113–14 and drink 120, 182–4 indecent exposure 137–8 and the law 101 in public places 121 of servants 102–3, 119 sexual assault 137–8 venereal disease 119 and violence 106–10, 128–9 see also prostitution Shakespeare, William 20–1

Index short-sightedness 204 single justices’ parlours 124 single men 181–4 budget 188–9 Smith, Adam 200 Smith, Dorothy 140 Smith, John 129, 211 Smith, Lisa 197 Smith, Robert 91–2 Snell, Keith 76 Spitzer, Leo 4 Sporting Ladies see prostitution Spufford, Margaret 51 ‘Statistical Account of the FrameworkKnitting Trade’ (Blackner) 210 Statute of Artificers 135, 219–20 statute/common law 132–7 Steinberg, Marc 223 Stevenson, Ann 132 Stevenson, John 132 stocking frames 203–4 see also framework knitting stockingers accounting 174 appeal to legislature 219–20 stocks (punishment) 152 Stoner, William 98 subjectivity of Luddite writing 241 Sunday trading 152–3 Sutton, Charles 31, 42–5, 164, 230, 237–8, 244–8 Suttons Libbery (Sutton’s Library) 30 syllabic reading method 49–51 Taylor, John 147 tempered despotism of property 156 temporalities 159 tenant discipline 157–8 text and audiences 29 Thomas, William 135 Thompson, E. P. 7, 25–6, 225–6, 243 Thorpe, John 179–80 Thrale, Hester 89 Throsby, John 157 Tom Jones (Fielding) 13–14, 29, 35–6, 42, 44–5, 79, 88, 90, 144, 172 Topley, Samuel 88 torture 34 Towle, James 243–8 Trenck, Friedrich, Freiherr von der 33–6 truck see payment in goods Tupman, Samuel 164 Tyke, Robert 114 tyranny/absolutism 34

297 United Committee of Framework Knitters 223, 233, 249 unlicensed preaching 162–4 Vai writing system 173 venereal disease 119 verbal abuse 140, 142–3 Vincent, David 78 voyeurism 120–1 wages 178–9 Waldram, Sall 112 weaving 203 weddings see marriages Wells, F.A. 211 Wesley, John 168 White, Hannah 129 Widdowson (Widerson), William 45, 73 Wilkeson, John 118 Willis, Francis 134–5 Wilson, John 88 Wilson, Thomas 134–5 Wilson, William 213–14 windows/window framing 18–20 Winfield, John 136, 213–14 Winfield, Thomas 95 Wittson, John 91–2 women drunken behaviour 93–4, 111–12 Joseph Woolley on sexuality of 115–18 sexual behaviour see sexual behaviour Woolley, Anne 54–5, 60–1, 197 Woolley, Edward 54–5, 61, 71, 125 Woolley, Elizabeth 54–5, 185 Woolley, Joseph on abortion 117–18 absence from magistrates’ records 124 accounting by 173–4, 178–9, 189–95 accounting and writing 173, 175–8 and almanacs 46–8, 119, 251–3 and anecdotes 255–7 and assaults 139–40 background of 54–5 as bag-hosier 210–11 as ‘being in’ Luddism 242–3 and books 29–53 business enterprises 197–9, 207 candle sales 197–9 cheerfulness 195 on Clifton stocks 152 clothing 194–5 cotton yarn trading 197–9 daily work experiences 210 description of 99 detail in diaries 201

298

Index

Woolley, Joseph (cont.) diary contents and Luddites 223 disorderly behaviour by 97–9 and dissent 168 doctoring 195–7 and drinking 73–5, 79–99, 187 drinking habits of 94–5 as employer 210–11 and the Everyday 258 expenditure on board 186–7, 207 breakdown of 189–95 on drink 187 financial outgoings 184–7 on household expenses 184–7 on tobacco 187–8 family and friends 54–78 family responsibilities 184–7 and fighting stories 79–99, 139–40 on fools 254 and 40-gauge frame 207, 210, 238–40 as frame owner 200, 238–41 frame rent 207–8 and friendly societies 70–2, 238 gambling 194 garden produce trading 197–9 on Gervase Clifton 15–17, 140–1, 145–6 herbalism 195–7 on human suffering 90 humour of 113–14 imagined audiences 253 income 178–81, 207, 238 as independent 208–9 interest in work 195 knowledge of the world 227 and language of the law 254 language use 134 on ‘law talk’ 122–4 and law/legal thought 126 lay church duties at St Mary’s 169–71 Luddite connections 238, 241–3 as Luddite victim 238–41 on magistrates 126 on malice of William Clifton 155 marital status 120 medicine 195–7, 238

on Methodists 161–2 on operation of law 145–6 and poor laws 77–8, 125 prose and everyday life 257–8 public houses frequented 73, 77 randomness of diaries 141–2 reading habits 41–2 reading skills 48–51 relationship to Sir Gervase Clifton 27 religious belief of 171 and Revd William Clifton 151–2, 169 school days 48 on self-righteousness 117 as sex narrator 115 and sexual behaviour 57–8, 63–7, 70, 100–21 sexuality of 120 on sexuality of women 115–18 silence on crisis of state 227–8 similarities of sexual narratives to Clifton’s magistrate records 138–9 spinning 210 syllabic reading method 49–51 understanding of Sir Gervase Clifton 53 in Volunteers 81–3, 253, 255 and voyeurism 120–1 on whores 103–4 as William Clifton’s tenant 184–5 working days 189–94 writing content 14–15 writing style 251–60 as yeoman framework knitter 207 Woolley, Joseph (of Barton) 198, 210 Woolley, Louisa 54–5 Woolley, Mary 59–60, 77–8, 103–4 Woolley, Rose 54–5, 61–3, 65, 69–70, 77, 103, 184 Woolley, Samuel 56–8, 77, 125, 184 Wooten, Thomas 141–2 work distribution 211 working-class budgets 188–9 working-class legal consciousness 148–9 worsted hose fraud (cut-ups) 179 Writings of the Luddites (Binfield) 26, 225 yeoman framework knitting 207