Edward Aveling (1897)
Source: The Social-Democrat, Vol. 1, No. 1, January 1897
Transcription: by Graham Seaman for MIA, July 2023
One of the most effective characters in the répertoire of our great actor, Henry Irving, is that of Corporal Gregory Brewster. Everybody knows it as an extraordinarily finished portrait of a ninety-year-old Guardsman. In 1815, at the Battle of Waterloo, this same Brewster has driven through a narrow lane, the hedges aflame on both sides, a waggon carrying gunpowder for the Guards at Hougoumont. His predecessor in the attempt had been blown to pieces, Brewster wins through somehow, is greatly honoured of the regiment, and is here dying of old age and in something perilously near poverty. Among all the wonderful touches in that most pathetic portrait, there is one that always moves me more than any other—more even than the dying finish, “The Guards need powder, and by God they shall have it.” That is where the old man, speaking to the young Colonel of his regiment that was, describes himself. with uncertain fingers straying over the table, as “a straggler—a straggler.”
I was reminded of the little play, of Irving’s beautiful impersonation when, the other day, I went down to Richmond to see George Julian Harney. Here is a straggler—a straggler of 1848. Here is a man that carried intellectual gunpowder to the Lifeguards of the Chartist movement. As he sits there in his lonely room, crippled by rheumatism, and nearly eighty years of age, it would be difficult to realise that this is the man of whom Ernest Jones said, “He was the boldest of the champions of the Chartist cause,” if you did not look at his face.
When you try to get from Harney some reminiscences of that old time, you find the task not too easy. He tells you at the outset “One may live too long;” and indeed from the neglect by the English workers of this fighter in the van, he might not unnaturally conclude that he had worn out his welcome amongst them.
Harney was born on February 17, 1817, in Kent. That is as near as he will let you get to his birthplace. His schools were the inevitable Dame School of that time, and one or two private schools which he says were of no account. His university, from the age of eleven to fourteen, was the Royal Naval School, Greenwich, After all, his university, like that of the Shakespeare of his adoration, was the big world of thought and action. According to himself, he did not learn much at school, and was very often in poor health, He never had any trade, except that of seafaring, and afterwards drifting generally into and along with the advanced movement of his time, until he reached the crest of the oncoming wave, and was at once leader and driven. For six months he was at sea, going to Lisbon and Brazil. After his return, just as some of us have a great fancy to be a railway guard or a circus master, Harney had a great desire to be a printer. But the fates were adverse, although, after all, he was to do more for printing than perhaps any compositor that ever lived.
From the age of sixteen te that of nineteen he was in the thick of the Unstamped Fight. Those were the years of stamped newspapers. The tax upon knowledge took the official form of a fourpenny stamp upon every newspaper; so the energetic spirits of the time declared roundly for unstamped newspapers. The movement was led by Hetherington, Watson, Collet, Moore, and others, and the fight centred especially around the Poor Man’s Guardian. Under an Act of Queen Anne, Harney was clapped into prison twice for short terms in London, and then, as there was a vacancy in Derby, he went there in place of some unknown fighter, imprisoned. At Derby he sold the unstamped Political Register—not on any account to be confused with Cobbett’s paper of the same name. At Derby he got six months, at the very revolutionary age of nineteen. But his imprisonment was a triumph; for whilst it was still going on, the Government gave way, and the fourpenny newspaper stamp was abolished. The victory for education had been won, even if one of the victors was laid by the heels in Derby Gaol. The three prisons that were honoured by the temporary residence of Harney were Coldbath Fields, the Borough Compter, and Derby Gaol. They have all gone the way of all bricks and mortar, been transformed or else vanished, as completely as the church at Luddington, two miles from Stratford-on-Avon, at which William Shakespeare and Ann Hathaway were married.
Tho Unstamped men of 1836 became the Chartists of succeeding years. It is an interesting study in evolution—the Unstamped movement, the Chartist movement, the Freethought movement, which afforded, after the apparent downfall of Chartism, the only outlet for the energies of the advanced working men, until the next stage in evolution came, and the Socialist movement grew, more or less directly, out of those just named. It is very interesting to see in England how, at your Socialist meetings, you have especially the old and the young rather than the middle-aged. Some stragglers from the Chartist movement are still with us, and they are the youngest of us all. Their grandchildren, rather than their children, form the ever-increasing mass of the class-conscious workers, On the other hand, in many cases, but not in quite all, the children of the Chartists and the fathers of the present race of young workers are, as the inevitable result of their surroundings a few years back, often hide-bound in a hard-and-fast Radicalism diluted with Freethought. None of us will forget, although I have no time to work it out here, the stages of intellectual and political development precedent to the Unstamped movement—the Utopian Socialism of Robert Owen, and from him back through the centuries to the Lilburnes and the Kets.
Harney was a delegate to the first National Convention of the Chartists. Its full name was the General Convention of the Industrial Classes. In his room there hangs, upon walls full of interesting pictures, a picture of that Convention as it met on Monday, February 4, 1839, at the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street. The British Coffee House has vanished, or undergone such transformation as to have practically vanished. After the second or third day, the Convention removed to the Doctor Johnson Hotel, Bolt Court, Fleet Street—which is now, says Harney, with a half-cynical humour so characteristic of him, “a sporting den.”
He was delegate to the Convention from Newcastle, and the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, owned by his faithful friend Joseph Cowen, still retains his services as a writer. Between the Derby prison time and the meeting of the Convention he had been, to use his own language, “padding the hoof, preaching the gospel of discontent.”
The year 1839 was memorable to him not only for the Convention. At the latter end of July in that year he was arrested again at Bedlington, about eleven miles from Newcastle. It will be observed how faithful he was to Newcastle. This arrest was for a speech made early in the same month at Birmingham. It took place at two o’clock in the morning, and he had to be got across country to Birmingham, handcuffed to a constable of that inspiring town, and hemmed in with Newcastle police. The journey was in a hackney coach to Newcastle; in a ferry across the Tyne to Gateshead; from Gateshead by rail to Carlisle; by stage coach right across Shap Fell, that highest point among the Westmoreland mountains, up to which the London and North Western engines so slowly climb; finally by rail from Preston, at that time the extreme north of the North Western Railway, to Birmingham.
As one heard of the handcuff business, one’s eyes involuntarily strayed to the poor rheumatic and yet vigorous hands of nearly fifty-seven years after. At Birmingham there was a commital and a letting out on bail. “I never knew,” said the veteran, with a laugh, “how rich I was until then. I was worth one surety in £1,000 and two in £500. The trial did not come off in Warwick in April 1840. The Grand Jury, of which for the first time I began to understand the function, and for which for the first time I began to have some respect, declined to find a true bill.
“The next taking event was my arrest at Sheffield. I was one of fifty or sixty, all of whom were arrested, in 1842, all over England, for taking part in a Convention at Manchester. The real fact was that this convention was connected in point of time, but in no other way whatever, with a big trade union strike in Lancashire, with which were mixed up plug-drawing and other wicked devices of the workmen. We were to be tried at Liverpool before Lord Abinger, alias James Scarlett. He was Scarlett by name and scarlet by nature, and we know that he, like certain judges of to-day—at least so they tell me—had made up his mind to the verdict before a word of evidence was given. It was necessary to play the lawyers with their own cards, and so we “traversed,” that is, we contended for a beautiful legal fiction; that as forty days had not elapsed since the time of the arrest, we had not had enough time for the defence. So away to Lancaster—to the Castle, I think—and the Monster Trial at March, 1843. The Judge was Rolfe, and the indictment was riddled through and through by the lawyers on our side. Some of our fellows were represented by Counsel. For those not represented, I “led.” Fergus O`Connor brought up the rear of the self defenders, and everybody knows that the big actor always likes to have the stage at the end of the play.” The chief Counsel for the prosecution was the Attorney-General, Sir Frederick Pollock, of whom Harney speaks with the greatest respect. “He was a prosecutor, not a persecutor.” Ultimately Harney and O’Connor were found guilty on one of the innumerable counts, and the others upon two. Goodness only knows now, and nobody whatever cares, what the counts were, as there was an arrest of judgment—which was turning the tables by the arrested with a vengeance —and a quashing of the whole business in the Court of Queen’s Bench, as far as Harney and the rest were concerned, on the ground that the indictment was bad.
“Tom” Cooper, as Harney calls him, was not so lucky. I have a dim memory of Cooper, when I was a very small youth, lecturing to me and a lot of other people, and more or less converting us from the error of our orthodox ways. Cooper had two years in Stafford Gaol, and took them out of humanity in general by writing “The Purgatory of Suicides.” He became converted in his later days to Christianity and general respectability.
In the summer of 1841 Harney went in for his first political contest. It was against Lord Morpeth, and the arena was the West Riding of Yorkshire. To get rid of the political contests once for all, there was another opened on July 30, 1847, against that arch-friend of Russia, Lord Palmerston. The Palmerston constituency was Tiverton, and Harney swears that for his fame (Harney’s not Palmerston’s) he “should have died thereafter.” When he went out to America later, even such a man as Horace Greeley knew him chiefly on the ground that he opposed Palmerston. Of course these more or less abortive runnings of candidates were chiefly with the intention of making propaganda by speech. For example, the opposition to Morpeth gave Harney the opportunity of speaking at such towns as Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, Dewsbury, Wakefield. There was never any serious intention of going to the poll.
The rest of this life of struggle and event is chiefly journalistic. Thus, in 1843, he joined the Northern Star at Leeds, and was first sub-editor and afterwards editor. This connection was ended by disagreement with Fergus O’Connor. The grounds of the diagreement were, according to Harney, that he made too much of the foreign refugees, whilst O’Connor made too much of the old political ideas, and was too much of a King, Lords and Commons man. One epigrammatic summary of O’Connor by Harney is worth preserving. “He was like William Cobbett, without his particular form of genius.”
The Democratic Review, 1849, the Red Republican and Friend of the People (June 1850 to July 1851) were his next journalistic and pugilistic ventures. From 1855 to 1862 he was in Jersey, looking after the Jersey Independent. He seems to have been attracted to the Channel Islands chiefly because Victor Hugo (whom he knew and loved well afterwards) had been expelled from Jersey to Guernsey. “The first week I was in Jersey,” says Harney, “I heard the Bailiff reading the Proclamation of Peace with Russia.”
Since the Jersey time, there are the little interludes in such a life as this of a journey to and a sojourn in America, and a return to this country.
I do not think I can give any better idea of the intellectual, moral, and political characteristics of Harney than by telling the reader of the portraits and the like that crowd his walls. 1 take them just as I saw them, working round his room. Fergus O’Connor; Frost; Joseph Cowen; Oastler, the Factory King; “Knife and Fork” Stephens, the physical force man, who spent eighteen months in Chester Castle; W. J. Linton, engraver and Chartist ; Harney himself (he is even now a delightful bit of a beau in his way, as scrupulously dressed and groomed as ever), as a Yankee, with a moustache only, instead of the present venerable beard ; Lovett, who drew up the People’s Charter; Frederick Engels and Karl Marx, very fitly side by side (Harney had the high honour of their friendship); “Ironsides” Adams, of the Newcastle Chronicle. All these are on the walls by his bed and the fireplace that runs to the window, looking south. Over the mantlepiece is a group that reminds some of us younger workers in the workers’ movement that perhaps we hardly pay as much attention to pure literatura as our political forefathers did—Byron, Scott, Burns, Shelley, Moore, Pope, Dryden, the grave of Fielding, and, high over all, Shakespeare. Between the windows looking south are Miss Eleanor Cobbett, now ninety-one years of age, a letter from Cobbett himself, and the People’s Charter. Between the windows and the door, Magna Charta, Darwin, Ruskin, Sidney, Chaucer, Raleigh, De Stael, Mary Wollstonecroft, together with a bust of Shakespeare again. And, by the door, there is a picture of Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman.
The words of Harney about Engels and Marx (I put them in the order in which he began to know them) will be of interest. “I knew Engels, he was my friend and occasional correspondent over half a century. It was in 1843 that he came over from Bradford to Leeds and enquired for me at the Northern Star office. A tall, handsome young man, with a countenance of almost boyish youthfulness, whose English, in spite of his German birth and education, was even then remarkable for its accuracy. He told me he was a constant reader of the Northern Star and took a keen interest in the Chartist movement. Thus began our friendship over fifty years ago. In later years he was the Nestor of International Socialism. Not more natural was it for Titus to succeed Vespasian than for Frederick Engels to take the place of his revered friend when Karl Marx had passed away. He was the trusted counsellor whose advice none dared to gainsay. Probably the private history of German Socialism could tell how much the party is indebted to his wise counsels in smoothing acerbities, preventing friction, mildly chastening ill-regulated ambition, and promoting the union of all for each and each for all. The author of ‘Das Kapital’ was supremely fortunate in having so devoted a friend. The friendship of Marx and Engels was something far from the common. lf not positively unique we must go back to ancient legends to find a parallel. Either would have emulated Pythias’ offered sacrifice for Damon. In their public work as champions of their ideas they were like the ‘Great Twin Brethren who fought so well for Rome.’ Engels, like, I believe, most short-sighted people, wrote a very ‘small hand;’ but his caligraphy was very neat and clear. His letters were marvels of information, and he wrote an immense number in spite of his long hours of original composition or translation. He attended most of the large Eight Hours Demonstrations in Hyde Park [all, except that of 1895, the year of his death, and was always on the International platform, of which I had the great honour to be chairman; E. A.] —but I doubt if sixteen hours covered his average day’s work when he was at his best. With all his knowledge and all his influence, there was nothing of the ‘stuck up’ or ‘stand-offishness’ about him. He was just as modest and ready for self-effacement at the age of seventy-two as at the age of twenty-two when he called at the Northern Star office. Not only his intimate friends, but dependents, servants, children, all loved him. Although Karl Marx was his great friend his heart was large enough for other friendships and his kindness was unfailing. He was largely given to hospitality, but the principal charm at his hospitable board was his own ‘table talk,’ the ‘good Rhine wine’ of his felicitous conversation and genial wit. He was himself laughter-loving, and his laughter was contagious. A joy-inspirer, he made all around him share his happy mood of mind.”
A letter from Harney to Marx just found by us among the papers of the latter is of great historical interest (look at the dates and names), and is here published for the first time.
DEAR MARX,—I have been and am very unwell, so can only say that the propositions for holding a Democratic Congress in Brussels in September next have been unanimously adopted by the monthly meeting of the Fraternal Democrats, the German Workingmen’s Association, the Metropolitan Chartist Committee, and the Chartist Executive.
I will write again in the course of the first week of 1848.
London, Dec. 18, 1847.
G. J. H.
Turning back from this beautiful retrospect upon one of his own kin by Harney, calling to mind the many happy days when I met him at Engels’ house, I am conscious that the two men, Engels and Harney, were cast in the same mould, soldiers in the same regiment.
And as I look in this darkening room at Richmond at this old warrior with his carefully brushed hair and beard, his strongly marked face, his clear eyes—as I listen to the clear voice that expresses his clear thought—my mind goes back to years before he was born, and forward to years after both he and I will be dead, and I see in this old man an unbreakable link between the years and the years. I know that long after the rest of us are forgotten the name of George Julian Harney will be remembered with thankfulness and with tears. A straggler of 1848. But a straggler who cried then, and who will cry with his latest breath that which shall be the motto helping us to remember him, “The people want powder, and by God they shall have it.”
EDWARD AVELING.