8 William Cobbett, ‘Resurrection Man’: The Peterloo Massacre and the Bones of Tom Paine

No radical leader loomed so large and yet was so noticeably absent from the mass gathering at St Peter’s Field on 16 August 1819 as the journalist William Cobbett. Most scholars agree that Cobbett’s Political Register and Henry Hunt’s oratory were the most persuasive radical influences encouraging the people to demand reform before Peterloo.¹ Yet Cobbett was living in America during the Peterloo massacre. He had fled to America in order to continue publishing his Political Register unimpeded by threats of imprisonment due to the suspension of habeas corpus in 1817. Even though Cobbett was physically absent from England when Peterloo occurred, conservative and pro-government broadsides and pamphlets published after the event blamed Cobbett’s Political Register for the working-class discontent that culminated in the mass gathering at St Peter’s Field. Cobbett provoked and shaped working-class discontent first and foremost through his widely disseminated address, ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland’. Working-class readers bought and distributed 200,000 copies of the open letter, which appeared in Cobbett’s unstamped two-penny Political Register on 2 November 1816.

‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ insists, ‘the real strength and all the resources of a country, ever have sprung and ever must spring, from the labour of its people’.² Cobbett’s focus on labouring bodies’ rightful place in the body politic counters the idea of the working class as an animalised surplus population. The radical Samuel Bamford documented the influence of Cobbett’s cheap Register on the working class: ‘Cobbett’s books were printed in cheap form; the labourers read them, and thenceforward became literate and systematic in their proceedings’.³ Cobbett’s ‘Two-Penny Trash’, as his detractors called it, was considered so dangerous that two short-lived journals, the Anti-Cobbett and The Detector, were published in 1817 exclusively to counteract its message. Thus, even though Cobbett was not living in England at the time of the Peterloo massacre, conservatives and radicals alike understood that his argument for working-class inclusion in the body politic circulated amongst the people as they gathered for the mass political protest on St Peter’s Field.⁴

Due to the time delay in news reaching America, Cobbett did not find out about the Peterloo massacre until he read the Irish newspapers on 26 September 1819.⁵ Cobbett was outraged by what he called the ‘Manchester Murders’, and the government’s indiscriminate injury and slaughter of the men, women and children protesting at St Peter’s Field confirmed Cobbett’s suspicion that the linguistic animalisation of the working class was accelerating into institutionally sanctioned violence. Cobbett alleged that the representation of the poor as animals by those in power – such as in Burke’s reference to the working class as the ‘swinish multitude’ in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Malthus’ depiction of the poor as a population whose fertility should be managed similarly to farm animals – was designed to disenfranchise them of their political and common rights. Cobbett’s political enemies, moreover, called him the ‘Hampshire Hog’ throughout his life; thus he had intimate experience with the strategy of animalising the working class to undermine their political status.⁶ Cobbett’s concern about the animalisation of the working class, I argue, reflects his prescient understanding of Giorgio Agamben’s observations about the biopolitical animalisation of humans in modernity: the ‘anthropological machine of the moderns’ is a representational and political force that functions ‘by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human’ and thus strategically denies animalised humans full political rights and protections.⁷

Cobbett’s response to the Peterloo massacre was based on his attunement to the ways in which the working class were animalised by contemporary discourse. On 29 September, three days after reading about the Peterloo massacre, Cobbett writes that he had personally disinterred the body of Tom Paine as his first step in a plan to return Paine’s bones to England in order to create a memorial to the ‘Noble of Nature’.⁸ Paine died in obscurity after publishing The Age of Reason (1792), in which he denied the sacredness of the Bible. After his death, the Quakers refused to bury his body in a churchyard, so he was buried unceremoniously in a field at his farm in New Rochelle, New York.⁹ Although Cobbett had considered a memorial to Paine previously, it was the event of Peterloo – the slaughter of working-class people like animals – that spurred him finally to disinter Paine’s body.¹⁰ While both his enemies and allies were baffled by Cobbett’s response to Peterloo, Cobbett enthusiastically believed that establishing a memorial in England for the remains of an influential, working-class, political writer would validate radicalism as an important intergenerational movement that could not be snuffed out by the murder and prosecution of present-day radicals. Even his allies, however, distanced themselves from the project, and Cobbett’s enemies emphasised the material ghastliness of Paine’s disinterment with delighted derision. At least ten caricatures were published in pamphlets or broadsides (1819–20) that depict a deranged Cobbett carrying or interacting with Paine’s skeleton or coffin.

Isaac Robert Cruikshank’s caricature, The political champion turned resurrection man! (December 1819), for example, depicts Cobbett riding a flying demon-like monster across the Atlantic. Suspended between America and England, Cobbett holds a quill in his right hand, a symbol of his writing in the Political Register, and in the other hand he grasps the skeleton of Tom Paine (Figure 8.1). Paine’s skull is capped with the bonnet rouge, while Cobbett says, ‘How to delude the populace – An advantageous distribution of the words Liberty, Tyranny, Slavery & c’. Behind Cobbett follow four smaller flying monsters in the shape of scourge-carrying insects: they carry Cobbett’s Political Register, Paine’s Age of Reason, plague, revolution and corruption, with other monsters following in the distance. The flying monsters that trail behind Cobbett and Paine’s skeleton suggest that the mass publication of working-class political ideas might amount to a dangerous, uncontrollable contagion. On the coast of America, people are celebrating that Cobbett has left the country; however, on the coast of England, post-Peterloo radicals welcome him waving their red caps of liberty and carrying banners.

By calling Cobbett a ‘resurrection man’, Cruikshank was unfairly associating Cobbett’s disinterment of Paine’s body with the widely reviled men who robbed graves in order to sell the dead for anatomical dissection. However, Cruikshank’s caricature nonetheless is uncannily perceptive about Cobbett’s political influence on the working class in the years just before and after Peterloo. This essay analyses, first, Cobbett’s ‘advantageous distribution of words’ in ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’, which contributed to the mass meeting in St Peter’s Field and, second, Cobbett’s reaction to the violence of Peterloo, disinterring Paine’s bones and shipping them back to England in order to create a memorial. Cobbett’s ‘resurrection-man’ style of politics has been criticised as politically ineffectual nostalgia. E. P. Thompson contends that Cobbett ‘nourished the culture of a class, whose wrongs he felt, but whose remedies he could not understand’.¹¹ Yet I argue that Cobbett’s radically-conservative, ‘resurrection-man’ style of politics arose from his prescient understanding that violence against the working class stemmed from the rise of biopolitical discourse that animalised the poor. The animalisation of the poor sought to silence them, and both Cobbett’s Register before Peterloo and his resurrection of Paine’s bones after Peterloo were meant to engender forms of relational discourse that would interpellate the working classes into a conversation that would weave their collective voices into demands for inclusion in the body politic.

Countering the Animalisation of Labour in ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’

In ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’, Cobbett uses rhetorical strategies to shift the affect of his working-class readers from those who are downtrodden and begging for help to those who are in a position of power to claim assistance and representation. First, by addressing his audience in a conversational style as equals, he interpellates the working class into the political realm. Second, Cobbett creates class solidarity by addressing his prose to all the striations of the working class: journeymen, labourers, women and children. Third, Cobbett asserts that workers’ bodies are the producers of England’s intergenerational wealth, not a drain on it.¹² Representing working-class bodies as the producers of wealth serves as a counter-discourse to the animalisation of the poor in Malthusian discourse.

By explicitly addressing the working class in epistolary form, Cobbett interpellates readers into a relationship with him. Cobbett wrote letters in the informal vernacular, and, moreover, he was continually talking with his readers and including accounts of those conversations in his letters. As Thompson argues, ‘Cobbett’s thought was not a system but a relationship’, and it contained an element of reciprocity within the discourse.¹³ In his journalistic style of the open letter, Cobbett thus modelled a central element of the early modern moral economy, reciprocity between those in power and those without it. ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ emphasises the structural violence and exclusion experienced by skilled and unskilled labour due to their common animalisation by those in power. He argues, they ‘call you the mob, the rabble, the scum, the swinish multitude, and say, that your voice is nothing; that you have no business at public meetings; and that you are, and ought to be, considered as nothing in the body politic!’¹⁴ By addressing this particular letter to both journeymen, who were highly-skilled labourers with access to guilds and social protections, and labourers, who were often unskilled and completely subject to the vicissitudes of wage labour, Cobbett sought to create relational discourse between those classes.¹⁵

The style of the open letter, in which Cobbett gave an account of his personal life alongside his political ideas, brought the English masses into a relationship not only with him but also with other workers, and engagement with readers was an important precursor to Peterloo because it created community while situating the working class within a world of political discourse. As James Grande argues, ‘Within early nineteenth-century literary culture, letters carried particular strong associations with reading aloud within the domestic sphere, a practice that Cobbett was keen to encourage’.¹⁶ Perhaps even more radically, Cobbett’s Register was intentionally designed to conflate the public/private distinction by politicising working-class domestic life. Describing the benefit of his cheap publication, he argues,

And besides, the expense of the thing itself thus becomes less than the expense of going to the public-house to hear it read. Then there is the time for reflection, and the opportunity of reading over again, and of referring to interesting facts. The children also have an opportunity of reading. The expence of other books will be saved by those who have this resource. The wife can sometimes read, if the husband cannot. The women will understand the causes of their starvation and raggedness as well as the men, and will lend their aid in endeavoring to effect the proper remedy. Many a father will thus, I hope, be induced to spend his evenings at home in instructing his children in the history of their misery, and in warming them into acts of patriotism.¹⁷

Cobbett seeks to move radical meetings out of the taverns frequented by men and into the home occupied by men, women and children. Addressing women and children greatly expands Cobbett’s audience and also those who might be involved in agitation for radical change. Women are admonished to understand politics ‘as well as the men’ and even serve as leaders and teachers of the family. As Cobbett would later outline in more detail in his Cottage Economy (1822), he viewed domestic space as a place of political activism where even mundane domestic decisions, such as baking bread instead of buying it or drinking beer instead of tea, were legible signs of political engagement.¹⁸

By publishing ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ and other twopenny Registers, Cobbett seeks to politicise the home and make reading the Register and political conversation a daily habit. As Altick argues, Cobbett’s Register was a ‘revolutionary development in the history of the reading public’.¹⁹ Habitually reading and discussing political issues prepares the working class to enter politics, even if they had not yet won the franchise. Ian Dyck notes that the two-penny Register was designed for ‘the pedlar’s pack, from where it was vended at hiring-fairs, market-places and public houses, together with other cultural productions such as chapbooks, almanacs, broadside songs’.²⁰ Cobbett’s cheap Register may have been sold along with other cheap pamphlets and tracts, yet at the same time the Register countered the messages of the widely distributed ‘moral tracts’ intended for the poor. Directly after his ‘Address’ was published and just before leaving for America, Cobbett warned about the debilitating effect of moral stories written for the poor:

Simple, insipid dialogues and stories, calculated for the minds of children seven or eight years old, or for those of savages just beginning to be civilised. These conceited persons have no idea that the minds of the working classes ever presume to rise above this infantine level.²¹

The Political Register’s open letters invited its readers to rise above being the mere recipient of didactic, moral discourse into being critical and informed participants in an open-ended political dialogue.

After creating such a broad audience and interpellating them into the national conversation about politics, Cobbett further develops a new sense of subjectivity for the labourers. ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ opens with a description of the dignity and necessity of labour: ‘the real strength and all the resources of a country, ever have sprung and ever must spring, from the labour of its people’.²² Cobbett then advises workers to see themselves reflected in the affluence around them:

Elegant dresses, superb furniture, stately buildings, fine roads and canals, fleet horses and carriages, numerous and stout ships, waterhouses teeming with goods; all these, and many other objects that fall under our view, are so many marks of national wealth and resources. But all these spring from labour. Without the journeyman and the labourer none of them could exist; without the assistance of their hands, the country would be a wilderness, hardly worth the notice of an invader.²³

In this revision of biopolitical discourse about the poor, the ‘numerous’ and ‘teeming’ bodies of the working class are reflected in ‘elegant’, ‘superb’, ‘stately’ and ‘fine’ durable objects. Such numerous bodies, instead of being a drain on England’s wealth, created the wealth and civilisation of England.

To depict the working classes of England as the creators of intergenerational wealth counters the representation of the working class as animals. Cobbett argues, ‘With this correct idea of your own worth in your minds, with what indignation must you hear yourselves called the Populace, the Rabble, the Mob, the Swinish Multitude’.²⁴ This list of dehumanising epithets alludes to the animalisation of the working class as the ‘swinish multitude’ in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and as a ‘populace’ in Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798). Cobbett’s argument suggests that this discourse has done representational violence to the poor and has limited their understanding of their place in the body politic. Stephen F. Eisenmen reminds us that Burke’s term ‘swinish multitude’ was meant to ‘explicitly recall market day mayhem at Smithfield’.²⁵ Cobbett understood that the conceptual erasure of localised human communities precedes a real erasure through forced emigration or restrictions on marriage and childbearing. He argues, ‘these corrupt and insolent men are busied with schemes for getting rid of you’.²⁶ Cobbett, whose opposition to the Malthusian understanding of the poor would only increase in frequency and ferocity in the 1820s, disliked Malthus’ writings because of the way they animalised the people. He argues, ‘The writings of MALTHUS, who considers men as mere animals, may have had influence in producing of this change; and we now frequently hear the working classes called, “the population,” just as we call animals upon a farm, “the stock.”’²⁷ Unlike working-class Romantics such as William Blake and John Clare, who try to draw parallels between the working class and animals as a form of radical solidarity, Cobbett performs his resurrection politics by reinforcing the divide between animal and human life.²⁸

Cobbett suspects that the animalisation of the working classes sought to render them submissive, silent animals in all political matters. Cobbett argues that those in power seek to:

Keep all quiet! Do not rouse! Keep still! Keep down! Let those who perish, perish in silence! It will, however, be out of the power of those Quacks, with all their laudanum, to allay the blood which is now boiling in the veins of the people of this kingdom; who, if they are doomed to perish, are, at any rate, resolved not to perish in silence.²⁹

The poor are biopolitically controlled and made to be subservient, Cobbett reveals, because there is another kind of quiet violent resentment seething under the veneer of their submissiveness. While often the working class were accused of committing violence, Cobbett warns, presciently, that this linguistic and systemic violence might turn into real violence: ‘Such men, would kill you or me or any man who talks of the people’s sufferings … And I have not the least doubt, those men would see one half of the people’s throats cut in order to reduce the rest into silent submission.’³⁰ This prescient statement all but predicts the violence of the Peterloo massacre, during which working-class people lost their lives over their refusal to remain politically silent.

As ‘The Political Champion Turned Resurrection Man’ suggests, Cobbett’s ‘advantageous distribution of words’ was thought of as a plague-like contagion that spread among the working class. The radical Samuel Bamford records,

At this time, the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottager hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire; in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible; he directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings – misgovernment; and to its proper corrective – parliamentary reform.³¹

Bamford describes the way in which reading Cobbett’s two-penny Register prompted the working classes to assert themselves into the political order. ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ clearly argues that misgovernment, resulting in taxation, paper money and the national debt are leading to the suffering of the poor, but, most importantly, he seeks to expose the rhetoric that is used to blame the poor for their own bodily existence. As Olivia Smith argues, ‘Cobbett’s prose is essentially an act of healing, of transforming previously domineering and antagonistic images and styles into a resource of self-knowledge and a basis of action’.³² Cobbett’s rhetoric seeks a transformation of the affect of the poor, to give them a ‘correct idea of your own worth in your minds’, that might counter negative messages internalised from a culture that describes them as an over-large, supplemental population. By attempting to resurrect the intergenerational, historical significance of the working class as a collective political body, Cobbett sought to ground their existence in a history that discursively transcends their individualised, animalised bodies.

‘Nothing New’: Resurrecting the Bones of Tom Paine after Peterloo

‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ challenges the rhetoric of animalisation in discourse about the poor by interpellating all striations of the British working class into a political conversation that represents the working class as stable, intergenerational contributors to British politics and culture. The mass production and distribution of Cobbett’s two-penny Register undoubtedly inspired much of the radical discontent that culminated in the large crowds gathering in St Peter’s Field to agitate for parliamentary reform. The suspension of habeas corpus in 1817, in Cobbett’s view, was designed at least in part to intimidate him from continuing to publish his Register. Thus, Cobbett fled to America to continue publishing without the threat of imprisonment. Cobbett’s hasty departure for America just as he was beginning to persuade the working class to agitate for political reform left other radicals in dismay, yet his choice of self-exile in America is not all that surprising. Although Cobbett is often represented as a local, rural British writer, he always demonstrated, as James Chandler observes, a ‘deeply ingrained transatlantic orientation’ through his creation of a knowledge commons that promoted the exchange of periodicals and ideas across the Atlantic.³³ In ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’, Cobbett suggested that residual British liberty and freedom can be found only in America: ‘The Americans, who are a very wise people, and who love liberty with all their hearts, and who take care to enjoy it too, took special care not to part with any of the great principles and laws which they derived from their forefathers’.³⁴ Because the Americans ostensibly preserved British principles, Cobbett sought to associate the reform movement with the American Revolution rather than the French, which dangerously cut ties with the past.³⁵ Cobbett sought to invoke discontent among the working classes which might be channelled into a resurrection of ideals from the past, such as the moral economy and common rights.

‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ argues for working-class inclusion in the body politic through the resurrection of ideas and values from the past: ‘We want great alteration, but we want nothing new. Alteration, modification to suit the times and circumstances; but the great principles ought to be and must be, the same, or else confusion will follow.’³⁶ Cobbett refers here to what Leonore Nattrass calls the ‘radical ancient constitution’, the common right to food, clothing and living space.³⁷ A pamphlet deriding Cobbett’s reaction to the events of Peterloo, Sketches in the Life of Billy Cobb (1819), argues that Cobbett’s desire for ‘nothing new’ culminates in the absurdity of disinterring the body of Thomas Paine and travelling back to England with his bones. The pamphlet asserts, ‘B STANDS FOR BONES, that “nothing new”’, and the page is illustrated with an image of Cobbett stooped over the earth, putting Paine’s arm and skull in a coffin, as more human bones are scattered around the coffin in disorder.³⁸ Digging up and attempting to memorialise the bones of Paine is the most material version of Cobbett as ‘resurrection man’, and figuratively it is consistent with Cobbett’s radically conservative politics that sought to ground political radicalism in past principles and institutions. In the wake of the Peterloo massacre, Cobbett resurrected Paine’s body in order to establish a monument to which the working class would make a bodily pilgrimage. By meeting together at a memorial in the landscape, a collective, intergenerational working-class body might emerge and persist.

Starting in the 1810s, Cobbett increasingly acknowledged his debt to Paine’s thought, and he was disturbed by Paine’s life ending in obscurity without a proper memorial. Yet it was the event of Peterloo that prompted him to take action. Two days after reading about Peterloo while in America, Cobbett writes, ‘I have just done here a thing, which I have always, since I came to this country, vowed that I would do: that is, taken up the remains of our famous countryman, PAINE, in order to covey them to England’.³⁹ Wanting ‘nothing new’, Cobbett seeks to establish an influential political ancestor to continue the project he began in ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’: symbolically elevating working-class life above animal life by establishing their intergenerational importance and dignity. Seeking ‘to do justice to the memory of our famous countryman; this child of the “Lower Orders”’, Cobbett resurrected Paine as a form of working-class nobility whose writing would be forever recorded in the nation’s history and whose body would permanently mark the English landscape.⁴⁰

Paine would have been dismayed at becoming one of the ‘manuscript authority of the dead’ that he railed against during his lifetime,⁴¹ yet Cobbett’s radical conservatism always melded Burkean and Painite ideas. As Olivia Smith argues, Cobbett’s cheap Register ‘writes the swinish multitude into a dignified and traditional, particularly Burkean, social fabric’.⁴² In his resurrection of Paine, Cobbett attempts to establish Burke’s political foe, Paine, as a forefather in the Burkean sense. Given the intensity of the Burke/Paine debate in the 1790s, it is remarkable that almost thirty years later, spurred by the event of Peterloo, Cobbett collapses the theories of the two opposed thinkers. Yet Cobbett’s project of intergenerational stability – his ‘nothing new’ – can be located both in the stately and fine goods created by the working class that were lauded in ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ and in the proposed memorial to Paine. Materially, both durable goods and memorials create ‘a partnership not only between those who are living, but those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born’.⁴³ Tying the working class to durable material objects that last beyond their lifetimes performatively pulls the working class away from being associated with transient animal bodies into an intergenerational political movement.

Cobbett argues that his memorial to Paine will serve an active function among the working class: ‘the tomb of this “Noble of Nature” will be an object of pilgrimage with the people’.⁴⁴ During the Romantic period travelling to the memorials of writers become fashionable. Paul Westover calls this phenomenon ‘necromanticism’, which demonstrates ‘Romanticism’s dependence not just on the past, but more precisely on bodies dead and buried’.⁴⁵ Most travel to writers’ memorials contributed to middle-class canon-formation; somewhat similarly, by creating a memorial for Paine, Cobbett seeks to establish Paine as the forefather of a working-class canon. Paine’s The Rights of Man, as Haywood argues, initiates the plebeian public sphere, as it was widely published in cheap form and written in accessible language.⁴⁶ Mass publication was central to an important affective shift in the working class, as John Klancher describes, such mass-produced radical texts ‘confront their readers as collectives and representatives of collectives – “an inseparable part” of the social order, undetachable members of an audience contesting its position in social and cultural space’.⁴⁷ Paine is indeed a forefather of Cobbett’s two-penny Register and other radical publications of the same time such as The Black Dwarf, Gorgon and Republican, which all used mass publishing to cultivate a working-class audience.

Cobbett’s project for Paine’s memorial aspires to more than literary canonisation; by encouraging pilgrimage to Paine’s tomb, Cobbett sought to initiate a process of self-formation through the bodily mobility of the working class. Pilgrimage prompts the working class to exercise the ‘right of loco-motion’: ‘The laws of England secure to us the right of loco-motion; that is to say, the right of moving our bodies from one place to another.’⁴⁸ The right of locomotion amounts to what Foucault called a ‘technology of the self’, a ‘mode of action that an individual exercises upon himself’ in creating political freedom.⁴⁹ ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’ had also admonished the working class to exercise the ‘right of loco-motion’: ‘Any man can draw up a petition, and any man can carry it up to London, with instructions to deliver it into trusty hands, to be presented whenever the House shall meet.’⁵⁰ This particular piece of advice caused a great deal of agitation: a journal that sprung up in response to the popularity of Cobbett’s cheap Register, the Anti-Cobbett (1817), addressed it directly. It warns that if people travel to London with petitions, then large groups of men will starve and die together on the roads, creating nothing more than an embarrassing spectacle. Instead, the people were advised, ‘by waiting patiently at your own homes, you will certainly gather the fruit of these exertions made by your best and real friends [the upper classes]’.⁵¹ Cobbett, however, insightfully suggested that exercising a freedom of movement to travel is a technique for self-formation; it transforms the working class from penned-in animals that wait quietly in their homes like animals in a barn to an empowered collective body. Cobbett later performs the political ‘right of loco-motion’ in his Rural Rides in the 1820s.

By creating a memorial for Paine, Cobbett sought to establish a working-class necro-geography in the wake of the senseless deaths of the Peterloo massacre. Thomas Lacqueur argues that in the nineteenth century, people ‘engaged with creating, through bodies, specific memorial communities and specific histories’.⁵² Cobbett indeed considered the project to be communal; he argued, ‘Let this be considered the act of the reformers of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In their name we opened the grave, and in their name will the tomb be raised.’⁵³ In a private letter to J. W. Francis, Cobbett further explained:

I have done myself the honour to disinter his bones … they are now on their way to England. When I myself return, I shall cause them to speak the common sense of the great man; I shall gather together the people of Liverpool and Manchester in one assembly with those of London, and those bones will effect the reformation of England in Church and State.⁵⁴

Cobbett wanted Paine’s body to engage in what Lacqueur calls ‘the work of the dead’ as they ‘speak the common sense’ of radical politics. The memorial to Paine would thus establish a necrogeographic meeting point for people from different locations to gather together in ‘one assembly’, a collective working-class body. Whether by memorialising Tom Paine or by inviting the working classes to see themselves in the wealth and built environment of England, Cobbett gestures towards a working-class collectivity to come. Brian Massumi suggests, ‘resistance is of the nature of a gesture. Resistance cannot be communicated or inculcated. It can only be gestured. The gesture is a call to attunement.’⁵⁵ Both the memorial for Paine and the reciprocal nature of Cobbett’s writing are gestures towards an attunement, invitations into affective shift in the working class that resists their individualisation and animalisation in order to assert a collective political body.

Cobbett brought Paine’s bones back to England during a resurgence of interest in Paine’s ideas. In 1818, Richard Carlile published an edition of Paine’s Age of Reason. He was sent to prison for blasphemous publication for almost ten years, but the sensationalism of the trial and his subsequent imprisonment caused the book to sell in great quantities.⁵⁶ Haywood argues that the figure and ideas of Paine reasserted a ‘spectropolitical’ presence of the ‘deferred promise’ of revolution after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Cobbett’s ‘hagiographical adventure’, however, was the most literal resurrection of Paine’s ghost.⁵⁷ While figures on the right resurrected Paine in caricatures that demonised his legacy, Cobbett sought to establish him as a saint or ‘natural Noble’ who would legitimise a tradition of working-class politics.

In the Political Register, Cobbett documents the dismay of both radical activists and loyalist, pro-government writers at his return with Paine’s body. He records,

To bring the bones of PAINE amidst such a state of things was to put public opinion, and especially with regard to myself, to the severest test. By way of preparation, the newspapers (about three hundred in number) had proclaimed me to be coming with a design to carry the bones at the head of a Revolutionary army.⁵⁸

Indeed, due to the fear of another popular uprising, the constables of Manchester prevented Cobbett from entering the city with Paine’s bones. At the same time, loyalists published many caricatures, pamphlets and broadsides ridiculing Cobbett’s venture.⁵⁹ One response to Cobbett’s return was to emphasise the instability in his political views by republishing Cobbett’s own The Life of Thomas Paine (original publication in 1796, republished in 1819) – a vitriolic attack on Paine that Cobbett wrote during his earlier career as the loyalist Peter Porcupine during the 1790s. In the preface, the new editor performs shock and horror by asserting no one could believe that Cobbett ‘would actually bring over his [Paine’s] mouldering bones from a distant land, and expose them as relics to the veneration of the British public’.⁶⁰ The ghastliness of Cobbett’s venture is emphasised in the number of British caricatures that depict him literally carrying the coffin and/or bones of Tom Paine on his back. The Life and Times of Billy Cobb and Tom Paine describes a custom house scene that accuses Cobbett of mental instability:

Look! how the officers did stare,

   Transfixed – like stocks or stones,

When they beheld BILL COBB was there,

   And with him TOM PAINE’s BONES!

Prepared they were for taking heed,

   If fever they should find;

But quite at fault how to proceed,

   With what infects the mind.⁶¹

The attack on Cobbett’s mental state sought to delegitimise Cobbett’s goal of creating Paine’s memorial. Similarly, radicals disapproved of the project: ‘Former friends, or pretended friends, shrugged up their shoulders; and looked hard in my face, as if in wonder that I was not dismayed.’⁶²

Without support for the memorial, Cobbett promptly abandoned the project and stored Paine’s bones unceremoniously in his attic. Cobbett’s failure at this point mars his legacy. William Hazlitt’s sketch of Cobbett records,

The only time he ever grew romantic was in bringing over the relics of Mr Thomas Paine with him from America to go a progress with them through the disaffected districts. Scarce had he landed in Liverpool when he left the bones of a great man to shift for themselves …’.⁶³

While his plan to create a memorial for Paine was not successful, it arose out of an impulse to elevate the poor above an animal death into an intergenerational existence in the wake of the Peterloo massacre. Death and burial were a locus for treating the poor as animals, as Lacqueur argues:

In life the pauper was a drain on the commonwealth; in death she was pure waste, a relic that might only be redeemed if it could somehow find a use in anatomy theaters or, more fantastically, in marling the field. Anonymous mass graves in urban churchyards and in specialised new grounds belonging to poorhouses starting in the early eighteenth century and the mass graves in the nineteenth century cemeteries largely worked to erase the poor from the community of the dead.⁶⁴

Cobbett sought to restore Paine to the community of the dead and thus ensure the dignity and continuity of the working class. To establish a celebrated memorial and funeral for Paine accompanied by the spectacle of ‘twenty waggon loads of flowers … to strew the road before the hearse’ is a territorial gesture on behalf of the working class to confirm their part in the larger political and social body.⁶⁵

Cobbett believed that the violence of Peterloo occurred because of a rhetorical rendering of the poor as animalised ‘stock’ and ‘surplus population’ who were excluded from political rights.⁶⁶ As mentioned previously, before Peterloo, in ‘To the Journeymen and Labourers’, Cobbett warned that those who wrote about the problem of the poor were ‘busied with schemes for getting rid of you’ through emigration, prisons and workhouses, and the prohibition of marriage. Due to the decline of the commons and common right and the simultaneous rise of a capitalist economy, the poor were being turned into what Giorgio Agamben would later call ‘bare life’, excluded from rights within the established political order.⁶⁷ The violence of Peterloo confirmed Cobbett’s suspicion that linguistic and conceptual violence against the poor easily morphs into institutionalised physical violence, so he literally resurrects the bones of Tom Paine in order to build the intergenerational value of the working class. Both of these movements may have been conservative, resurrecting something from the past, but they were also attempts at inclusion, at countering the animalisation and marginalisation of the working class by insisting that they are connected to intergenerational monuments and institutions beyond their animal bodies. While Cobbett ultimately failed in his role as ‘resurrection man’ for Paine’s memorial, he continued to refine and rearticulate his theory of working-class inclusion through resurrection of the past and recourse to intergenerational stability in his publications of the 1820s such as Rural Rides, Cottage Economy and History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’.