WATSONWORKS

James Watson

HISTORY’S NEGLECTED
WOMEN
Apart from the pleasure of happening upon new
knowledge, researching for a book, whether fiction
or non-fiction, springs memorable surprises.
Currently I’ve been reading up on 19th century
radical editors and journalists for a five-part play for
voices, Out Damned Spot! Such radical wordsmiths as William Cobbett, Richard
Carlile, Henry Hetherington, Bronterre O’Brien, John Cleave, James Watson (no
relation, alas) and George Julian Harney were men of unbounded resolution
facing, throughout their professional lives, the most brutal censorship.
They faced prison sentences, bankrupting fines, the seizure of their presses,
type-founts and stocks of paper. Not only were the producers of the radical
press persecuted by successive Tory and Whig governments for evading Stamp
Duty, those who sold their papers – the hawkers – also faced imprisonment or
transportation to Botany Bay.

Women in the thick of it

What has tended to be overlooked is the role and contribution of women in the
so-termed War of the Unstamped and in the Chartist campaign for the reform
of the British Parliament. Notable among these stalwarts of liberty were Jane
Carlile, first wife of Richard Carlile, and his sister Mary-Anne.
When Richard was thrown into jail for publishing the works of Thomas Paine –
the Rights of Man and The Age of Reason – Jane and her sister-in-law took on
the editorial, management and distribution responsibilities of the Republican.
In 1921 Jane in her turn was charged and sentenced. She ended up joining her
husband in Dorchester Jail. Mary-Anne carried on the family business –
campaigning against monarchy, the established church and demanding
parliamentary reform.

O Susannah!
Among Richard Carlile’s shopmen and women and the hawkers of his
publications, was another remarkable woman – Susannah Wright. The wife of a
Nottingham bookseller, she was one among scores of volunteers who rallied
round the radical editors and defied the government spies who were as
numerous as modern-day CCTV cameras.
Susannah was subjected to a charge of blasphemy in 1821. Such were the
passion and articulacy demonstrated in her first court appearance that on her
return to court she was greeted by cheering crowds. Leaving her baby in safe
hands, Susannah challenged the validity of both the charges against her and the
status of the court which dared obstruct an Englishwoman’s right to freedom of
speech.
‘I should enjoy even a dungeon,’ she declared, ‘in advocating such a cause as
that in which I am engaged…I am bold to tell these persecutors, they never
can, they never will, put down these publications.’

Love at first sight

If Susannah Wright became a celebrity, Eliza Sharples was to become a star. On
Carlile’s release from jail, he toured the country condemning the imprisonment
of his friend, the Reverend Robert Taylor, nicknamed the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’. In
the audience for Carlile’s visit to Bolton in Lancashire was a highly intelligent,
highly impressionable and strikingly beautiful young woman, Elizabeth
Sharples.
Privately educated, the daughter of a counterpane manufacturer, and the issue
of a strict Methodist family, Eliza listened, took note – and fell passionately in
love with Carlile. After corresponding with him, she headed for London,
bewildering this middle-aged man with an ardour he could scarcely
comprehend in a woman 14 years his junior.
Soon they were lovers. By this time the marriage of Jane and Richard had
cooled, in part due to the stressful experience of sharing prison quarters at
Dorchester. Though displaced, Jane never relented in her support for Carlile
and the cause to which they had dedicated their lives. As for Eliza, she became
Carlile’s pen and his voice during his next term of imprisonment, and self-
confessedly his ‘disciple’.

The Lady of the Rotunda

Carlile and Taylor had together established at the Rotunda in London’s
Blackfriars Road a centre for meetings and debate. Carlile’s current
publication, the Prompter (renamed after being called the Lion), had given
rousing support to protests about pay and working conditions by agricultural
workers. This provoked the wrath of the Whig government. Carlile was swiftly
back in jail, at the Giltspur Street Compter.
Eliza became her lover’s conduit to the free world. At first, the speeches she
delivered at the Rotunda were composed by Carlile, but soon she stepped out
of his shadow: her beauty, elegance, passion and radicalism, especially her
advocacy of equality for women, drew the crowds.
She was no longer Eliza but Isis, after the Egyptian goddess of fertility and
wisdom. She was also referred to as Eve, as Liberty and, less optimistically, as
Hypatia, a Greek philosopher and martyr raped and murdered by the Romans.
Till superstition is extinct
At the Rotunda Eliza dispensed the poetical as well as the political, standing on
a floor of white thorn and laurel. In her first address, she urged the women
present to ‘seek that equality in human society which nature has qualified us
for, but which tyranny, the tyranny of our lords and masters, hath suppressed’.

The Prompter became Isis. The May 1834 folio volume of the periodical Eliza
dedicated ‘To the Young Women of England for Generations to come, or until
superstition is extinct’. She declared that human society would not improve
‘until women participate in an equality of knowledge’. She signed off with the
designation EDITRESS.
A grateful Carlile said of her, ‘Such a lady shall be my daughter, my sister, my
friend, my companion, my wife, my sweetheart, my everything’. Eliza worked
closely with the Female Society, also known as the Friends of the Oppressed,
established in 1932. She saw women’s oppression at the hands of husbands as a
parallel to the working class’s oppression by a government unrepresentative of
British society: ‘If we cannot be your rational companions, we will not be your
slaves’.

Falling star
Eliza bore three children to Carlile, and it was one of her two daughters,
Theophilia, who eventually wrote her father’s biography. Crippled by debts and
increasing poor health, Richard Carlile died in 1843.The Lady of the Rotunda
was no more, faced as she was by unremitting poverty: Isis had become
Hypathia.
Yet Eliza Sharples Carlile was to continue serving the cause of humanity, giving
the young radical Charles Bradlaugh a home after his family had disowned him.
Bradlaugh described Eliza as ‘quiet and reserved…who had her ardour and
enthusiasm cooled by suffering and poverty’.
I’d like to think that the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square might one day
feature and celebrate the radical women that history has tended to forget; but
I hear the whispers – ‘Some hopes!’

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Eliza Sharples features in a play for voices, Out Damned Spot!

by James Watson. The five parts are: Peterloo, The War of the Unstamped,
Knowledge is Power, The Lady of the Rotunda and Kennington Heath. Part 1,
Peterloo, will shortly be posted on Scribd.

Recommended reading
Martin Priestman, Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780-1830 (UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), see illustration; and Radical Femininity Women’s
Self-representation in the Public Sphere (UK: Manchester University Press, 1998),
edited by Eileen Janes Yeo. See Chapter 2, Helen Rogers’ ‘The prayer, the passion and
the reason’ of Eliza Sharples: freethought, women’s rights and republicanism, 1832-52.