William Cobbett, John Thelwall, Radicalism, Racism and Slavery: A Study in Burkean Parodics

The cultural interface between radical reform and race in the period 1790-1820, as in any period, is contentious, a tricky terrain. The English radical collective consciousness was an ideological mongrel, but one of the few constants in its evolution was a well defined sense of Nationhood, and this Nationalism/Patriotism, when it did incorporate the colonies, defined itself in contra-distinction to them. Indeed for Radicals being British meant being free, and Britannia and Liberty existed in a precise contradistinction to slavery. In this sense the radical consciousness defined the Caribbean slave as the personification of the opposite of British Liberty. Such a dynamic encourages parodic positioning. And I hope to show the suffering of the slave can be constructed as a parodic version of the suffering of the white labourer and vice versa. Laws were passed in England which claimed to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and plantation slavery in 1833. The fifty years from 1780 to 1830 saw the generation of a fantastically varied set of literatures concerning slavery written by men and women and directed at every available area of the publishing market. Publishing focused on slavery appeared in the form of reports of parliamentary debates, criminal pamphlet literature, the periodical press, and daily newspapers, travel literature, the novel, lyric and epic poetry, every form of advertising outside the press, the drama, ballads and also children's literature in all its varieties. Radicals could not avoid exposure to, and the influence of, the slavery debates, and their writings on race were parodically moulded around the dominant forms of these polemics. I will focus upon the writings of two English radicals which addressed the English and French colonies in the Caribbean, and which provide very different reactions to the inheritance of the Atlantic slave trade and colonial slavery. John Thelwall and William Cobbett adopted extreme and opposed positions on these issues, but ironically and perhaps inevitably, given his sheer rhetorical power, the force which unites them in terms of the intellectual perameters of their engagement is Edmund Burke. In the final analysis both Cobbett and Thelwall operate forms of Burkean parody in their writings on race. Parody is a strangely open phenomenon and the transformations which Burke undergoes in the writings of these two very different radicals raise a number of questions relating to where parody begins and where influence and even exaggerated reiteration end. Burke was, of course, the most influential anti-revolutionary propagandist of the first phase of the French Revolution, and his name is centrally linked with that of Tom Paine, whose phenomenally popular The Rights of Man, is basically a, frequently parodic, dialogue with Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. This dialogue has dominated discussions of Burke's influence on, and engagement with, radicalism. But the impact of Burke's writings upon British radical polemic stretches far beyond both Paine and the Reflections, but not in ways which we might now anticipate. In the first half of the 1790s Burke's writings developed, with a unique vigour, the fashionable Loyalist link between French Jacobinism and revolutionary developments in the French Caribbean. He reserved his most lethal moves for developments in San Domingo. The emotionally unstable Letters on the Prospect of a Regicide Peace, the last of which Burke was compulsively working on at the time of his death, set up a series of comparisons between developments in France and revolutionary San Domingo. This work assaulted events in Revolutionary France, and their colonial fallout, with a ferocity which dictated the terms in which Cobbett and Thelwall subsequently wrote about slavery and race. Cobbett swallowed Burke's positions …