TOM POOLEY'S LATER WRITINGS

 “Man and Woman must reform themselves and not Trust to Christian Priestcraft”  (2135)

I felt it was an auspicious day when I discovered that the later writings of Tom Pooley had survived and had been safely archived.  I would not have known of them if I had not consulted a scholarly work by Professor Joss Marsh of the University of Kent.  In her excellent book, Word Crimes:  Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth Century England, she covered the Pooley Case in detail and there drew my attention to Pooley’s writings, I must admit I envied the incisive way in which she covered Tom’s story in a few pages.  As I have already written, I am not a scholar but I know one when I see one and although I am anxious not to misrepresent the history of Tom Pooley this is not intended to be a scholarly work so much as the telling of a curious tale. 

When George Holyoake died in 1906, The Co-operative Union, of which he had been leader, promoter and historian, was building its grand new headquarters on Hanover Street in Manchester.  In his honour they named it Holyoake House.  It is now home to the National Co-operative Archive and there among the many papers that came from the offices of The Reasoner at 147 Fleet Street are the later writings of Thomas Pooley.  These are Tom’s later writings only in so far as we know that for some fifteen years prior to his trial he had been writing largely on walls and gate, in Bibles and goodness knows where else.  Nearly all these earlier ephemeral writings are lost to us but after his release Tom wrote for posterity.  He was writing long confused letters and sending them to London.  All the letters in the Co-operative archive, and there are at least fifty densely written foolscap pages ,are from the two or three years immediately after Tom’s trial.  Nearly all of Tom’s convictions and opinions given as chapter headings or quoted in the telling of his story have been taken from this source but there remains a handful of ideas, interjected chaotically in his writings, strange idiosyncratic thoughts, that illustrate both the limitations of his understanding and the intensity of his wish to be a ‘thinker’ and to contribute to the reform of the world that he knew.  None of these letters are dated with the year in which they were written although they sometimes record the day and the month.  This peculiarity is explained by Tom as being due to his reluctance to pen a ‘Christian’ year.   “For I can look back on the Christian history with horror of horrors, its wars, its misery, its vice, its torture, its blasphemy.” He would have wanted, like the French revolutionaries, to have devised a non-Christian scheme of his own but did not get farther than to head one or two of his letters with a statement of his determination not to subscribe to the Julian calendar. 

It matters little that his papers cannot easily be put into chronological order. These ae not the outpourings of an ordered mind.  Tom wrote impulsively, he wrote his feelings of the moment and he switched from one subject to another in the twinkling of an eye, even within a single sentence, always returning to his fantastic core dogma that this Globe is a living and thinking body and that the tides ebb and flow by the living and thinking power of this Globe and so on ad nauseam.   Somewhat like Judge John Coleridge writing in his private journal, Tom found it difficult to write anything without reference to the ‘religion’ which would seem to have been the very essence of his being. 

The style of Tom’s writing is as remarkable as its content. From what Tom wrote it is apparent, despite all his orthographic peculiarities and grammatical failings, that he was a man in love with language and one who was fascinated by his own ‘mastery’ of words.  Ironically, but not surprisingly, his idea of high style was the Authorised Version of the Bible, from which he quoted and misquoted with gay abandon.  Like many another wordsmith he played games with sentence construction and with word-order, he loved to list nouns or adjectives and he relished the poetry of an inversion as, for example, “For the Queen on her throne in splendour, may sit.” or again, “Happy would be those days when all men could plant their own vines and eat the fruit thereof.”  He relished the drama of the rhetorical question “What has T.Pooley done to receive this Christian torture and punishment from thy mouth?” and he liked to use an exclamatory phrase, “O grave, o grave, grand is thy laws!” and his obsession with repetition and reinforcement, though tedious to the reader, created a mantra that was somehow therapeutic to him. He liked to alternate between first and third person in a single sentence. Amazingly, he seems to have spoken much as he wrote. The same wild poetry that was in his scribblings, Holyoake recognised in his speech. His handwriting was perhaps childish but was perfectly competent and much easier to read than that of most Victorian letter-writers.  Today’s reader might well struggle to imagine how ignorant of letters and logic a poor man could be in Victorian Cornwall but ignorance did not prevent Tom from being passionate in his opinions and an imaginative  dreamer of dreams.     

We have seen, throughout Tom’s story, that he always had plenty to say about his own sentiments.  From his sense of injustice at the confiscation of his fancy walking stick to his sense of elation at the discomfiture of Sir John Coleridge he was his own biographer.   Here and there, however, Tom broke away from his twin obsessions, his own troubles and his unique religion, there is no other word for it, views, and struggled to say something more-or-less objective.  The Reader can hear his brain creaking.  His ideas seem, in an age of general education, to have been shockingly naïve. They were the ideas of an ignorant man; they were sound and fury signifying next to nothing but they were not necessarily the ideas of a madman. Given his premise that Christianity is the source of all evil because its ‘laws’ are derived from demonstrably imperfect holy books there is sometimes something like logic in some of his cries for reform. “First let Christians show to all men honest law and honest books and destroy their old laws for they are very bad.”  Tom struggled throughout the years after his pardon with the concept of men who recognised no God.  He suspected that Christians might sometimes be insincere in their belief, “for injustice and tyranny will make a thinking man think and ask and seek and find out what is divine and what is not divine and whether the clergy magistrates have any Almighty or not  have is best known to themselves” but at least Christians were, like him, professed believers, “Where is that man who will dare to say “there is no Almighty”? and where is that Christian that will dare to say “There is more than one Almighty”?  Pitifully, it had been his ambition on his day in court to make common cause with Judge Coleridge as a fellow deist and he was bitterly disappointed that the judge failed to enter into a serious religious conversation with him, “It would have been the duty of Mr Judge Coleridge to have asked the Cornish Well-sinker whether he did believe this was the Almighty.  Then Bodmin Court would have born the truth of the One Almighty Law.”

He was soon, however, only too aware that it had been Christians who had condemned him and Freethinkers who had worked hard for his release.  At first this idea shocked him. He found it hard to conceive of men without an Almighty.  He wrote, “but I was found by them that knew me not and delivered from the horrid snares by those that do not believe there is a God.  But I hope there is no such man or woman to be found.”  On his release from the asylum he had been forced to ask himself the question: “But who delivered me?” and found the answer, “Not Christians but what Christians call Infidels.” And elsewhere he wrote, “I must return my honest thanks to those honest Infidels that did deliver me from the Christians that cast me into their dungeons.”   The copies of the Reasoner that Tom ordered and read seems to have influenced not only his vocabulary but his thinking and increasingly, he wanted to identify with his ‘friends’ in London and at some stage he began to sign himself, “T. Pooley, Infidel.”  and “that Infidel, Thomas Pooley.” And yet at the same time he never ceases to protest his undying loyalty to his “One Almighty Being.” 

What drove his writings was chronic discontent with everything he saw around him in Cornwall.  Everything, since the coming of Christ, had been done badly. Tom constantly expressed his belief that something was wrong with the world where once had been a golden age.  This may be what many of us feel and something like this has been the starting point for many would-be reformers but poor Tom made himself pitifully ridiculous because he was deluded into believing that Christianity and the Bible were the cause of all evils and that he, Tom Pooley, ignorant and poor but “the friend of man, peace and happiness”, could think up cunning plans that would change everything.  Burning Bibles would not only enable farmers to deal with the potato blight it would be a first step to restoring the human family to health, “Why is there so many idiots and fools, blind and lame with the human family as there is? Christians, your Bible is the author of this calamity because it never told the truth but falsehood.”  The Bible, Tom was convinced set quite the wrong moral tone. “First let them do away with their filthy Bible and their disgraceful characters. Christians, like mules, were degenerate, “I think the mule breed and the Christian breed are alike, for the human family are noble and grand beings formed but their noble breed is badly disfigured and thrown out of order with one filthy disease and the other; for what is man and woman after they converted to the Christian religion?  Sly, unjust, selfish, deceiving, lying!”   

Everyone, man and woman, should consider that he or she had to ‘meet death’ and all who held power, and where Tom saw power he saw Christians, should therefore consider themselves responsible for the dire state of the world.  Even the Queen, perhaps especially the Queen, “For the Queen on her throne in splendour may sit.  Death will come at that moment and call her away.  How can she meet death?  It is a question I ask.  How can she meet death when there are so many slaves and wretchedness to be seen at her feet?  

He was first and foremost concerned with his own poverty but he had concerns for the poverty of other ‘honest’ neighbours.  This led him, like many a rebel before him, to question the relationship between poverty and honesty. “I have worked hard on one meal a day and forced to do so for to live an honest life.” And again, “I ask the Christians or the Clergy Magistrates whether it is justice for a man to work hard on one meal a day.”   Tom saw himself as the poor man, this had been one of Holyoake’s epithets for him, who was all the poorer because he was ‘honest, “The poor man is robbed of his honest labour and he can’t get no redress but laughed at, scoffed and threatened if he does not hold his tongue they will send him to the Union or prison.  Is this the spirit of Christianity?  If it is the quicker it is destroyed the better, for injustice and hungry bellies will make some men do that which no man has a right to do – plunder and rob.” (compared with prison where 3 meals a day are served.&c.)

After Bodmin gaol, Tom found he had opinions about prison reform.  In his own case, he advocates what sounds like a personal open prison. He observes in a letter to his wife from the asylum, the prison authorities would have done better if they had “built a rough cottage on the south side of Saint Cleer Down and let your husband have all the lands that he could have brought into cultivation in one year.” He envisages this cottage and land as a permanent gift to himself and one that he somehow merited.  If only they had been so enlightened, he could have supplied the prison with food and “how grand this would have looked in ages to come! Then some men might have smiled at this kind deed and your husband, Mary, would have been the happiest man on this Globe with this land to call his own, and why shall this honest request be denied?” 

When he could Tom downed a glass of beer but this, rationally enough, did not stop him being savagely critical of drunkenness in others.  His One Almighty had placed man on this Globe to live an honest and sober life.   He had read that Judge Coleridge had said, “that most all the crimes that has come before him, drunkenness is the author.” Tom accepted this opinion and proclaimed, “England will never be a happy nation until all drunken drinks is stop.”  He was, as we have seen, disgusted by the “drunken” chaplain at Bodmin gaol, “As I told that drunken parson in Bodmin gaol or Christian hell to look at Lot and his two daughters and let no drunken parson come against me 

He was possibly thinking of the prison Chaplain when he wrote, “I will appeal to every thinking father and loving mother whether they would place their children under a drunken schoolmaster to learn.” In practice, .it was claimed on his behalf that Tom did not interfere unduly with the education of his wife and children.  They apparently trotted off to school and church as and when they wanted and had bibles that escaped the fire. It is likely that Tom’s wife was the power in the home and the arbitrator in such matters.   In his writings, however, we find him touching on his own ideas of education,” For it is the duty of man and woman to live very careful and to be very careful of their children not to teach them bible blasphemy for this Globe is the mother and the giver of all life.”

One of Tom’s ill-formed brain-children was in the form of advice which he offered to ‘clergy’.  His misunderstanding here of what were and what were not the responsibilities of clergy and of clergy magistrates, is remarkable.  Phenomenologically, Tom lived all his life under an oppressive theocracy.   He seems to have believed that the Anglican parsons in Liskeard were the providers and paymasters of the police force that he distrusted and distained but also envied.  He wrote, “My advice to the clergy is to give every labour man in their parishes the same laws, the same dress and the same pay as they do to their policemen.  Then peace will return on this Globe.”  This ‘advice’ was the least rational of Tom’s recipes for peace on earth.  In his dreams, no doubt, he and his fellow-labourers swaggered happily around Liskeard in police uniform, dressed at the Clergy’s expense and jingling enough money in their pockets for three meals a day, every day of the week.

Frustratingly, apart from the fact that he was being denied ‘honest’ work Tom tells us very little about his daily life nor do we learn anything from him about how his family were faring during the few years that he was writing.  He reveals, however, that he took an interest in the Methodist Revivals and perhaps attended them.  Tom was predictably contemptuous of the preachers who addressed these meetings.  They were in their preaching in much the same business as he was in his writing, warning sinners and imploring them to repent, but, whereas Tom was undoubtedly sincere, many of them were the worst kind of sponger and hypocrite.  For Tom because they were Christian Bible readers they were in any case wasting their time, “What good can they do by their Revivals?  They are only to wash a black man white.”  And he shows more ignorance and is more obscure than usual in his advice to the Revivalists, rather than wasting their time in   preaching, they should endeavour to “bring all the waste lands that is in England into cultivation and make those sin-makers work for their living.”

And then, as suddenly as they began, Tom’s writings to London ceased and, as far as I know, there are no more of his scribblings to be found.   He had generated some heat but no light and, understandably, only, at the most, a handful of people had ever looked at his outpourings.   He, no doubt, however, felt that he had delivered his gospel to the world and fulfilled his obligation to his One Almighty.