Keymer Thomas - Poetics of the Pillory: English Literature and Seditious Libel, 1660-1820

This project began life with an invitation to give the Clarendon Lectures in English for 201415. I thank everyone present for their stimulating questions, and Im especially grateful to David Womersley and Seamus Perry for their warm hospitality, and to Jacqueline Norton and Aimee Wright for their ongoing support as the monograph came to fruition. Dorothy McCarthy was a tactful and meticulous copy-editor. Generous fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the University of Torontos Jackman Humanities Institute allowed me to expand and enrich the lectures, and I thank the Warden and Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for hospitably giving me, as Visiting Fellow, the perfect environment in which to complete the book. Throughout this time, and to cumulatively transformative effect, numerous friends and colleagues offered advice, read drafts, arranged talks, answered questions, and wrote letters; Im especially grateful to Paul Baines, Ros Ballaster, Paddy Bullard, Brian Cowan, Simon Dickie, Joe Hone, Paulina Kewes, Deidre Lynch, Nick McDowell, Paula McDowell, Jim McLaverty, Jon Mee, John OBrien, Annabel Patterson, Claude Rawson, John Richetti, Pat Rogers, Michael Rossington, Valerie Rumbold, Peter Sabor, Simon Stern, Paul Stevens, Noel Sugimura, Kathryn Sutherland, David Taylor, Cindy Wall, Dan White, and Steve Zwicker. Thanks to the University of Torontos Work-Study and Jackman Scholars in Residence programmes, I had the opportunity to involve outstanding student assistants in the project, including Shamaila Anjum, Ka Wing Chu, Graham Coulter, Angela Du, Keith Garrett, Rachel Hart, Dana Lew, Kevin Liu, Edward Sakowsky, John Siferd, Sushani Singh, Rachael Tu, and Alex Zutt; special thanks to Chris Geary, with whom I co-published a related essay on seditious libel in eighteenth-century Dublin, and Austin Long, whose astute and energetic work, not least in creating the index, was invaluable in the final stages. I also thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada) for supporting my work and that of my students over time. Our research would have been impossible without the expert assistance of many University of Toronto Libraries colleagues, not least in providing access to indispensable resources such as State Papers Online, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, and the Burney Newspapers; warm thanks too to Salvy Trojman for helping us get the best from these databases, and to special collections librarians in numerous other institutions for their prompt and generous help in particular cases. As ever, Pru, Toby, and Ben were a constant source of inspiration and love, and I could have done nothing without them.

If Men are forbid to speak their minds seriously on certain Subjects, they will do it ironically. If they are forbid to speak at all upon such Subjects, or if they find it really dangerous for em to do so; they will then redouble their Disguise, involve themselves in Mysteriousness, and talk so as hardly to be understood, or at least not plainly interpreted, by those who are disposd to do em a mischief.

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury

There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.

Idi Amin

Across the swathe of time addressed in this study, a variety of offences, some of them no longer offences at all, could land a malefactor in the uncomfortable, often dangerous, position depicted in A similar but fatal episode in 1780 prompted the celebrated speech in which Edmund Burke called on Parliament to abolish the pillory, though the institution endured for another half-century in Britain, and longer elsewhere.

Figure 0.1 A View of the Corn Exchange London and Mr Atkinson the Contractor in the Pillory (1785), broadside etching, the Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved. By this date, pillories were often designed to be rotated 90 every fifteen minutes, to maximize shaming; an official instructs Atkinson to Walk Round Sir.

Figure 0.2 This Is Not the Thing: or, Molly Exalted (1762), illustrated broadside ballad, by courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. This image typifies the scapegoating of sexual offenders in the pillory, in this case a London shopkeeper named Shann.

Most famously, the pillory was a tool for the retrospective censorship of print; it was, as Daniel Defoe put it when preparing to undergo his sentence for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters in 1703, that Hiroglyphick State Machin, | Contrivd to Punish Fancy in. In 1703, Defoe was not only exhibited before three of the citys most conspicuous landmarks (the Royal Exchange, the Cheapside Conduit, Temple Bar) but also heavily fined and imprisoned in Newgate until he could find sureties for future good behaviour. In practice, that took several months, and, it now seems, covert assistance from ministers who were planning to recruit him.