Philip Anthony Brown - The French Revolution in English History

First published 1965 by

Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.

Published 2014 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxfordshire OX14 4RN

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

First issued in paperback 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

ISBN 978-0-415-76045-4 (pbk)

ISBN 978-0-7146-1458-8 (hbk)

W HILE much labour has been spent over the period of the French Revolution, no general account of its influence in English history exists. An attempt is here made to fill the gap, and to sketch in outline the workings of a force which penetrated English life, directly and by reaction, far into the nineteenth century. The general thread of politics, theory, and literature are traced, and concrete illustration is also supplied from the experiences of individuals, poets, politicians, and working men.

Some unused material remains in the Public Record Office, the British Museum, and in the Privy Council records; and this has been drawn upon. Printed biographies, pamphlets, and newspapers supply the bulk of the evidence.

P.A.B. 1914

T HIS book is published as it was left, but the reader will remember that Mr Brown did not live to revise its final form. It seemed to the Editor that no one could take the responsibility of making changes in text or structure, and he has confined himself to securing, as far as possible, accuracy in statement and quotation. Mr G. P. Gooch, Mr Michael Heseltine, Mr R. V. Lennard, and Mr R. H. Tawney all helped Mr Brown by reading the book in proof and making suggestions.

A FULL memoir of Philip Brown will soon, I hope, be written by the hand of a close friend and contemporary of his college days, who knew him without that interposing barrier which twenty years difference of age must make in intimacy, if not in affection. But a few words about him here may be useful as throwing some light upon the purpose of a book left unrevised when its author enlisted as a private in the first hundred thousand of Kitcheners Army.

Philip Anthony Brown (born 27th January 1886) was the fourth son of Mr Anthony Brown, of Beckenham, in Kent; he was educated at Malvern, and won an open History Scholarship at New College, Oxford, where he obtained First-Class Honours in History in 1909. For a term or two he stayed 0n in Oxford, acting as my private secretary and doing a certain amount of teaching and lecturing for the Workers Educational Association. This work fascinated him, as it fascinated other brilliant men of the same generation. In 1911 he went to Newcastle as a tutor in the classes held under the joint management of the University and the W.E.A.; this led in 1912 to his appointment as Lecturer in Economics in Durham University, which he combined afterwards with a similar post in the London School of Economics. The amount of work and of travelling he got through at this time was enormous. The conditions were very hard, and the payment small. Only a man who had in him the spirit of an apostle would have carried it on uncomplainingly, but Brown had exactly that spirit. I remember one occasion when he found in a particular mining village that the arrangement of the shifts prevented some of the men from attending his class as they wanted to; he decided at once to come regularly on two successive days, so as to repeat the class for the benefit of the few excluded men, though doing so involved a considerable extra railway journey and a heavy congestion of work. I suppose the explanation is really given, simply enough, in the words spoken of him by one of his worker students: He was like a brother to usand so clever! He both loved his work, and he did it easily.