William Lovett[1] was born in Newlyn, Cornwall, on 8th May 1800, the son of William Lovett, captain of a small trading vessel and a native of Hull, who was drowned before Lovett’s birth. His mother, Kezia (c.1778–1852), raised Lovett and his four siblings with the help of her family and by her own efforts, which included selling fish in Penzance market. He was sent to the local dame-schools, but he was always to regret the limitations of this education and of the reading materials available during his youth, inadequacies accentuated by his strict Methodist upbringing. After serving seven years’ apprenticeship to a rope maker, he was unable to secure employment at the trade and turned instead to his natural skills as a woodworker. When, in June 1821, he left Cornwall for London he was to learn a second trade of cabinet-making by working for ‘a trade-working master’ in Somers Town[2]. Within a few years, he was able to serve a qualifying period at a respectable shop and eventually gain admittance to the élite West End Cabinet-makers’ Society, of which he was later elected president.
It was as a young man in London that Lovett was able to indulge his passion for the pursuit of knowledge, by joining several mutual improvement societies and attending lectures, as he recalled, at the recently opened mechanics’ institute, as well as frequenting the radical coffee houses, where he was influenced by such speakers as John Gale Jones, Richard Carlile, and the Revd Robert Taylor. On 3rd June 1826 at All Souls, Langham Place, he married Mary Solly, a lady’s maid from Pegwell, Kent, who was to be his unobtrusive, uncomplaining support. Of their two daughters, Kezia died from an accident in infancy, and the other, also Mary, was at the end of Lovett’s life attempting to make a living in the theatre. The Lovetts proceeded to open a confectioner’s shop off St Martin’s Lane, but this was the first of several failed business ventures. By now an advocate of Owenism, Lovett had joined the First London Co-operative Trading Association and, having given up the shop, he took over from James Watson as storekeeper at the close of 1829. This position too did not provide a livelihood and he was for much of 1831 secretary of the nationally important British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge, launched after the First London Association had hived off its propagandist functions. By the late 1820s, in addition to Watson, Lovett had also got to know his other principal lifelong radical associates Henry Hetherington and John Cleave. This key grouping, which was to provide a highly visible leadership within metropolitan working-class radicalism for most of the 1830s, differed from Owen himself in considering political reform to be as important as the transforming powers of co-operation, and they engaged in both activities concurrently.
The first political society to which Lovett belonged was Henry Hunt’s Friends of Civil and Religious Liberty of 1827. Two years later, this was renamed the Radical Reform Association, with a programme of universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, and the ballot, and held weekly meetings at the Rotunda amid the excitement occasioned by the French revolution of July 1830 and Wellington’s cancellation in November of the king’s annual visit to the City for fear of insurrection. Lovett’s traditional reputation as an uncompromised proponent of moral force, while entirely valid for the Chartist period, is out of kilter with his outspoken militancy during the years of the reform agitation. An experienced police spy described him as ‘a dangerous man’ for advocating arming and declaring ‘he for one would fight’ against the aristocracy[3]; and Lovett vehemently opposed Hunt’s efforts to prohibit the display of the tricolour at meetings and to purge Gale Jones, Carlile’s supporters, and other revolutionaries when the Radical Reform Association disintegrated in December 1830.
Although Lovett was also a member of the councils of both the Metropolitan Political Union and the National Political Union, these were organisations created by the middle-class reformers—at the inaugural mass meeting of the latter, after Cleave was howled down for seconding his amendment in favour of universal suffrage, he denounced the middle class for wanting to make the working class ‘tools of their purposes’[4] and it was the National Union of the Working Classes, founded in April 1831, that was the ultra-radical successor to the Radical Reform Association. Despite joining the union belatedly, in September 1831, he rapidly became a member of its committee and one of the twenty-four class leaders, as well as drafting with Watson the rules, including the widely circulated ‘Declaration of the National Union of the Working Classes’. The union’s most successful demonstration was against the national fast day of 21st March 1832, proclaimed by the Whig government in expiation of the outbreak of cholera, when tens of thousands attempted to march from Finsbury Square to Westminster. Lovett, Watson, and William Benbow were arrested but acquitted, amid acclamation, of the charge of causing a riot. The previous year, on refusing as a non-voter either to serve in the militia or to find a substitute, Lovett had had, to great publicity, his household goods distrained and auctioned; balloting for the militia was thereafter discontinued. His intensive activity of these years also included a significant contribution to the campaign for an unstamped press, for whose victim fund, in operation from July 1831, he acted as sub-treasurer and secretary.
Lovett was ‘a tall, gentlemanly-looking man with a high and ample forehead, a pale, contemplative cast of countenance, dark-brown hair, and … a very prepossessing exterior, in manner quiet, modest and unassuming, speaking seldom, but when he does so always with the best effect’, although for Place ‘his is a spirit misplaced’, being ‘in ill-health’, and ‘somewhat hypochondriacal’; ‘a man of melancholy temperament, soured with the perplexities of the world’[5]. From 1832, the Lovetts took over the former Hatton Garden premises of the First London Co-operative Trading Association and ran them as a coffee house and discussion centre, with a reading-room and library. While financially unsuccessful, these two years marked a transition for Lovett, in the aftermath of the failure of both co-operative trading and radical parliamentary reform. He began to allot education a major role in the attainment of political and social change, and to move towards his ultimate repudiation of Owenism. He was shortly to enter into collaboration with the middle-class reformers Dr James Roberts Black and Francis Place.
The outcome of these developments was the foundation on 16th June 1836 of the (London) Working Men’s Association (LWMA), with Lovett as secretary, whose membership, costing 1s. monthly, was further restricted to ‘persons of a good moral character among the industrious classes’[6] over three years only 318 were admitted, although honorary members could be elected from the middle class. During its first year the working men listened receptively to lectures on, and discussed, orthodox political economy. In February 1837, a public meeting was held at the Crown and Anchor tavern in the Strand to petition parliament for what were to become known as the ‘six points’ of the People’s Charter. Meetings in May and June between the working men and radical members of parliament led to a committee of six from each group, and then (probably in December) to Lovett and J. A. Roebuck alone being appointed to draw up a parliamentary bill incorporating the Crown and Anchor petition. When Roebuck withdrew from the task it was Place who provided the drafting expertise. The writing of the Charter was therefore the combined work of Lovett and Place, although suggestions of the committee of twelve and of the LWMA did result in revisions to the original document. The People’s Charter was published on 8th May 1838 and adopted by the Birmingham Political Union, but was also taken up by the very different movement which was mobilising in the north and the midlands and increasingly under the influence of Feargus O’Connor and his Northern Star. Already the LWMA had been wrong-footed when in the winter of 1837–8, during the trial—ending in the transportation—of the five Glasgow cotton spinners, Daniel O’Connell, one of its parliamentary coadjutors, made his extreme hostility to trade unions explicit and was successful in instituting a select committee to investigate them. In February O’Connor’s attack on the LWMA was answered by Lovett’s denunciation of him as ‘the great “I AM” of politics, the great personification of Radicalism’[7]. Open conflict between its two opposing wings had broken out even before the new movement of Chartism had emerged. The LWMA was still able to control events in the capital sufficiently to fix the election of its eight candidates, including Lovett, at the New Palace Yard meeting of September as London’s delegates to the first Chartist convention, which when it met in February 1839 unanimously appointed him as its secretary; but both the LWMA and its leading member, Lovett, were now relegated to the sidelines, never to recover their former influence.
After the convention had moved to Birmingham, Lovett, as the signatory of its resolutions condemning the Metropolitan Police’s dispersal of the Bull Ring meetings, was arrested on 6th July and sentenced four weeks later at Warwick assizes to twelve months’ imprisonment for seditious libel. On his release from Warwick gaol in July 1840, he declined to join the newly established National Charter Association, which he condemned as an illegal organisation; and, after publishing the short book Chartism: a New Organisation of the People (1840), which he had written in prison with John Collins, he proceeded to launch in 1841 in London only the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, which it had proposed. This ambitious vision of a network of halls, schools, and libraries was denounced as ‘knowledge Chartism’ and a ‘new move’ by the National Charter Association and the Northern Star, and all who wished to participate were compelled to isolate themselves from mainstream Chartism. Financial support was barely enough for a national hall to be opened in High Holborn in 1842; W. J. Linton, himself a member, provided a damning assessment: ‘Lovett was impracticable; and his new association, after obtaining a few hundred members, dwindled into a debating club, and their hall became a dancing academy, let occasionally for unobjectionable public meetings’[8]. Lovett’s espousal of class collaboration made him a natural supporter of the Complete Suffrage Union, of which he became a council member; yet at its second conference, in December 1842, he rejected a proposed ‘bill of rights’ in place of the Charter and, seconded by O’Connor, his resolution was carried overwhelmingly. This caused the exodus of the middle-class delegates but, equally, Lovett spurned the detested O’Connor’s offer of reconciliation.
For the remainder of his career Lovett scraped a living as a teacher in various schools and published two textbooks, one on Elementary Anatomy and Physiology (1851); but in old age he was reduced to poverty, dependent on the charity of friends: ‘Perhaps few persons have worked harder, or laboured more earnestly, than I have; but somehow I was never destined to make money’[9]. Although he had begun his memoirs as early as 1840, not until the year before his death at his home, 137 Euston Road, London (long since a deist inclining to Christianity), on 8th August 1877, did he publish The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom. It is one of the outstanding working-class autobiographies, but in it Lovett underplays the importance of his early political activities and excises their extremism, distortions that have been followed until recently by most historians. He was buried in Highgate cemetery. Lovett was a creative leader of metropolitan artisan radicalism in the late 1820s and early 1830s, he was joint author of the Charter, and he was the perfect political secretary. He also became a respectable Victorian Liberal and thereby estranged himself from the great and turbulent movement of Chartism which he had helped to create.
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[1] The life and struggles of William Lovett, in his pursuit of bread, knowledge, and freedom, 1876, ‘William Lovett’, Howitt’s Journal, 8th May 1847, J. Wiener William Lovett, 1989. D. Large ‘Lovett, William’, Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume. 6, D. Large ‘William Lovett’, Pressure from without in early Victorian England, ed. P. Hollis, 1974, pages 105–30, I. J. Prothero Artisans and politics in early nineteenth-century London: John Gast and his times, 1979, D. Goodway London Chartism, 1838–1848, 1982, M. Hovell The chartist movement, 2nd edition, 1925, B. Harrison ‘“Kindness and reason”: William Lovett and education’, Victorian values, ed. G. Marsden, 1990, pages 13–28 · E. J. Yeo ‘Will the real Mary Lovett please stand up?’, Living and learning, ed. M. Chase and I. Dyck, 1996, pages 163–81 and G. D. H. Cole Chartist portraits, 1941.
[2] The life and struggles of William Lovett, in his pursuit of bread, knowledge, and freedom, 1876, page 28.
[3] D. Large ‘William Lovett’, Pressure from without in early Victorian England, ed. P. Hollis, 1974, page 116.
[4] D. Large ‘Lovett, William’, Dictionary of Labour Biography, volume. 6, page 167.
[5] M. Hovell The chartist movement, 2nd edition, 1925, pages 55-56.
[6] D. Goodway London Chartism, 1838–1848, 1982, page 22.
[7] The life and struggles of William Lovett, in his pursuit of bread, knowledge, and freedom, 1876, page 161.
[8] D. Goodway London Chartism, 1838–1848, 1982, page 41.
[9] The life and struggles of William Lovett, in his pursuit of bread, knowledge, and freedom, 1876, page 400.
Wednesday 22 August 2007
Tuesday 21 August 2007
Chartist Lives: William Linton
Linton[1], a wood-engraver, polemicist, and poet, was born on 7th December 1812 in Ireland’s Row at Mile End in London, probably the second among four children of William Linton, a provision broker in the London docks and his second wife, Mary (née Stephenson), apparently of a ‘superior’ shop keeping background. The family moved to the village of Stratford, Essex, in 1818, and the young William was sent to the grammar school in Chigwell, a distinguished early seventeenth-century foundation attended by sons of the Essex and City of London middle classes. With the advantage of a rounded education, William seemed destined for the world of London commerce, but persuaded his father to pay for drawing lessons, and in 1828 was bound apprentice to the engraver George Wilmot Bonner (1796–1836) in Kennington in south London. With this declaration of Romantic belief in the superiority of a life of art over that of the counting-house, Linton signalled the future direction of his whole career: a life driven by the conviction that he had much to tell the world, yet held back by his unworldliness. Not that the decision to become an engraver was itself unworldly: engraving was the principal means of mass visual communication in the early nineteenth century and, for a young man without capital, could promise good wages and the possibility of an independent establishment in a market certain to expand. This was doubtless why William Linton senior allowed his younger son, Henry Duff Linton (1816–1899), to enter the same trade and Henry, less prudent even than his brother, also found the mobility of his trade a valuable resource in later life.
On 21st October 1837, Linton married Laura Wade (1809–1838), who was well educated and freethinking and belonged to a family of independent if insufficient means. Fulfilling another Romantic stereotype, she had been a governess and died of consumption six months after her marriage. Linton never ceased to mourn for her, and some of his late poems (Love-lore, 1887) look back to this tragic moment. By about 1839, he was living with Laura’s sister Emily and a child registered later as William Wade Linton (d. 1892), known as Willie, was evidently born soon afterwards. At this time, Linton publicly advocated an end to all state interference in marriage, with partners associating as consenting equals, free if they wished to use contraception. Since 1835, the biblical prohibition against marrying a deceased wife’s sister had been incorporated into English law, so there was never a formal marriage, and Emily simply assumed the name Linton, bearing some seven children: three boys (Willie, Lancelot, who died in December 1863, and Edmund) and four girls (Emily, Margaret, Ellen, and Eliza, who died in December 1857), the youngest of whom was born in July 1854. Emily died, also of consumption, in December 1856.
On 24th March 1858, at St Pancras Church, Linton married Eliza Lynn (1822–1898), the writer and moralist. His marriage to Eliza was childless and unhappy. She soon began to dislike his distinctive clothing, the peculiar cut of his long-waisted coat, which lacked the two buttons at the junction of the skirts at the back—Linton seeing these, according to Walter Crane, as ‘superfluous reminders of gentlemanly, militaristic dress’. She found him ‘ungraceful—careless in the matter of dress and generally unkempt—with unstarched collars and long hair’, adding: ‘I could not convince him of the need of method, regularity, foresight, or any other economic virtue. He was sweet in word and acquiescent in manner; smiled, promised compliance and indeed did much that I wished because I wished it. But I never touched the core.’ The couple grew steadily apart during the early 1860s, separating informally but finally in 1867 when he emigrated to the United States.
The craft that Linton learned from George Bonner was not that of the woodcut, which had been historically the cheapest means of image-making and the mainstay of popular religious and topical publications well into the eighteenth century. Linton was a wood-engraver and his was the craft which, more than any other nineteenth-century printmaking technique, pushed forward the illustration of books, periodicals, newspapers, and ephemeral publications and transformed visual awareness in all advanced societies. Wood-engraving was the first of the major printmaking media to exploit photography, and it was partly as a reaction against the effects of lithography and photo-mechanical printing that the so-called original printmaking media of etching and engraving were re-invented in the second half of the nineteenth century as a major vehicle of artistic expression. Linton’s career spans these developments, in craft terms linking Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) to Walter Crane (1845)–1915 (Crane was Linton’s apprentice from 1858 to 1862) and linking the world of art to that of the Illustrated London News and the pictorial advertisement boom of the last quarter of the century. In his own practice, Linton increasingly found the personal independence and control over the means of production associated with the ideology of the arts and crafts movement by operating his own small private press.
No one was more aware than Linton of the large professional and social issues involved in these developments. He wrote extensively on the technical aspects of his craft (Specimens of a New Process of Engraving for Surface Printing, 1861), on the inherent tension between the artistic and the artisanal aspects of printmaking (‘Art in engraving on wood’, Atlantic Monthly, volume 43, June 1879), on the history of the craft in Britain and America (History of Wood Engraving in America, 1882; Masters of Wood Engraving, 1889), and on his own life (Three Score and Ten Years?, New York, 1894; published in London as Memories, 1895). As a reproductive engraver, he participated in many of the most important publishing projects of the epoch, including Moxon’s edition of Tennyson and George Eliot’s Romola, on which he and his brother worked after designs by Frederic Leighton. Beyond his vast output of relatively ephemeral material, Linton’s most important works are the botanical studies for his own Ferns of the Lake District (1864), and the views and other subjects for Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Lake Country (1864) and for Harriet Martineau’s The English Lakes (1858). A considerable group of his flower drawings, probably intended for another botanical work on the Lake District, was presented by Kineton Parkes to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1938.
Linton ‘discovered’ the Lake District during a walking tour of 1846. He acquired the lease of a house at Miteside in Eskdale, where he installed his family in April 1849. In March 1852, they moved to Brantwood, on Coniston, which Linton then managed to buy outright by means of mortgages. At Brantwood he set up his first private press, using it with help from a group of intense young radical printers to produce a stream of pamphlets on English and European politics, mostly written by Linton himself.
From his earliest years in London, Linton had been heavily involved in fringe republican and Liberal nationalist circles, becoming acquainted with Giuseppe Mazzini about 1842 and regarding himself as the leading English agent and interpreter of the master’s views. Within the Chartist movement Linton tended to take his own line. He strongly opposed O’Connor and in 1848 backed the People’s Charter Union, which favoured collaboration between middle and working classes. In the 1840s, he had regularly composed anti-odes on royal birthdays and he now proposed the sovereignty of a single legislative chamber, elected by universal adult suffrage, its laws subject to referendum. At the general election of 1852, however, he toyed with the idea of standing as a Chartist candidate at Carlisle, but found that he lacked adequate support.
The Chartist failure in 1848 led Linton and other radicals increasingly to find their inspiration in European nationalism: ‘for true civilization, for the free growth of national peculiarities of character; for the unlimited development of the boundless resources of varied clime and country … that every man may have the opportunity of placing himself in that sphere to which his energies may be turned in the best account for the public service … We claim for every People the right to choose their own constitutions, to determine their own way of life.’ Italy, Poland, Switzerland, France, and Ireland successively and simultaneously aroused Linton’s journalistic intervention during the 1850s and 1860s, and it was in this cause that he launched his own most important contribution to this ferment of constitutionalist debate in early January 1851. This was the English Republic, published weekly and monthly until April 1855, virtually all of whose copy and illustrations Linton himself supplied. The English Republic’s programme involved individual self-realisation under the law providing ‘opportunity for growth even for the least and weakest’. A leading function of the state was to provide education for all, to cultivate the ‘perceptive faculties’ of children, and to teach the ‘broad facts of Nature and God in relation to [their] position in the Universe’. Later the curriculum would include geology and botany, with gardening as the principal out-of-school activity. This was the curriculum experienced by his own children at Brantwood, the family being packed into the house together with Emily’s mother, four bachelor printing assistants, the Polish carbonaro Karl Stolzman (1793–1854) and his wife, and Agnes, the servant. The children were all dressed in shifts of blue flannel, and all had shoulder-length hair and wide hats. Their food was home-grown by Linton, and in winter consisted largely of porridge.
Emily’s death at the end of 1856 signalled the beginning of the difficult but, in terms of literary stimulus, not unfruitful relationship with Eliza Lynn. In 1865, Linton published Claribel and other Poems, illustrated with engravings after his own designs. They reflect his stoical acceptance of private adversity and their lyrical style shows the influence of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. But his financial circumstances reached a decisive crisis, and in November 1866 he set off to reconnoitre prospects in New York. Armed with introductions from Mazzini to the American enthusiasts for European national self-determination, he quickly made contact with the Cooper Union and the Society of Wood Engravers of New York, and secured a salaried appointment as artistic director of the local equivalent of the Illustrated London News. This enabled him briefly to return early in 1867 to London, where he began collecting material for his history of wood-engraving, gathered up his younger son Edmund, and (his wife having declined to accompany him) set sail again for the New World. Linton’s old life of financial deficits was now transformation into one of surplus and social acceptance in the liberal republic of the United States. His artistic and literary reputation secured election to the Century Club, the self-electing élite of artistic New York and he was honoured by the high-minded liberal intellectuals of New England society as an authentic voice of European radicalism. Not that this stopped him, as a journalist, from castigating various aspects of American life, social organisation, and foreign policy including the sentimental Fenianism of the New England Irish and the Monroe doctrine’s implementation in Spanish America nor from maintaining his voice in European affairs with a passionate but un-American advocacy of the Paris communards in 1870–71.
In 1870, Linton moved out of New York and acquired a farmstead at Hamden, near New Haven, Connecticut, which became his home for the rest of his life. Threatened with bankruptcy proceedings in the English courts, he suggested to Willie, who was looking after the house at Brantwood, that he should contact Ruskin and offer him the property at a nominal discount, for £1500. The sale was completed in May 1871, and was in many ways a serendipitous event, for the characteristic Ruskin works of the Brantwood years, apart from his own increasing interest in fine printing and book illustration, were the radical Fors Clavigera addressed to the workmen of Britain, Deucalion, and Proserpina, the last two respectively his reformulations of field geology and botany for the education of the young. Linton invested proceeds from the Brantwood sale in a new press for the house at Hamden, named Appledore, and again the tireless voice rang out, identifying significant long-term issues such as the corruptions of Tammany Hall politics and the anti-competitive practices of big business and finance. The family was now more or less gathered round him at Appledore, with the exception of his wife, Willie—who worked as a printer in London—and his eldest daughter, Emily, who was partially paralysed and was looked after in an asylum in Dumfries, Scotland. Margaret, the second daughter, was married locally to an engineer at Yale, Thomas Mather, and Ellen helped her father as amanuensis and typesetter. Edmund helped his father in growing vegetables for the house and, again as at Brantwood, in botanising.
Proximity to Yale’s libraries as well as his literary acquaintances encouraged Linton to publish in 1878 a volume of selected American verse, Poetry of America, followed by a limited edition of an anthology of English verses showing an exceptional knowledge for this period of the metaphysical poets, The Golden Apples of Hesperus (1882); another limited edition, Rare Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1882); and, with R. H. Stoddard, the five volumes of English Verse (1884). Alongside his genuine editorialising of early seventeenth-century verse, there is evidence that he flirted with producing forged pamphlets, probably, like some art forgers, to mock the scholarship of ‘experts’. But he himself was now an increasingly respected figure in the English-speaking world of art and letters. In 1882, he was elected to the American National Academy of Arts, and on his occasional trips to England he became a figure more familiar in the libraries and print rooms of London than on the radical fringes of politics. He particularly loathed W. E. Gladstone, however, regarding him as the betrayer of the old radical vision of land reform and universal suffrage, and he backed Disraeli during the Bulgarian atrocities controversy of 1876. On the last of his English trips in 1889, he brought his magnum opus—Masters of Wood Engraving, printed by hand at Appledore in only three copies—for reproduction in two limited folio editions at the Chiswick Press. In 1891, he was awarded an honorary MA degree of Yale University. Linton’s late books are mostly memoirs: European Republicans: Recollections of Mazzini and his Friends (1893), a Life of Whittier (1893), and his own Memories (1895). A further volume of his own verses, Poems, was published in the same year.
During the 1890s, Linton’s prodigious energies declined, and by autumn 1897 he was unable to continue to operate the press at Appledore. He died at his daughter’s house in New Haven on 29th December 1897 and was survived briefly by Eliza Lynn, who died in July 1898. His papers, the basis for F. B. Smith’s scholarly biography Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97 (1973) are preserved in three main collections: the Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan, the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Smith reproduces photographs of him in his forties as international agitator with long brown hair, and in his eighties as the benign patriarch, with a cloud of white hair and deep smile-lines around his eyes. The modern view, largely influenced by Smith, is increasingly to see Linton as a significant figure in the non-socialist tradition of European radicalism. He has benefited also from art historians’ changed valuation of ‘reproductive’ printmaking, and from the recognition of his own ‘original’ work as a designer of images, illustrator, and poet. His integrity, courage, and moral stature are beyond doubt.
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[1] G. White English illustrators of the sixties, 1897, W. Linton Specimens of a new process of engraving for surface printing, 1861, W. Linton Three score and ten years?, New York, 1894, published in London as Memories, 1895, J. Murdoch The discovery of the Lake District: a northern Arcadia and its uses, 1984 and F. B. Smith Radical artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97, 1973. Archives: Instituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan: correspondence and papers; National Australian Library, Canberra: papers; Yale University, Beinecke Library: correspondence, notebooks, journals, literary MSS; Bishopsgate Institute, London: correspondence with Charles Bradlaugh and J. G. Crawford: Co-operative Union, Holyoake House, Manchester, Co-operative Union archive: letters, mostly to G. J. Holyoake; Harvard University, Houghton Library: letters to W. E. Adams; and, John Rylands Library: letters to J. H. Nodal.
On 21st October 1837, Linton married Laura Wade (1809–1838), who was well educated and freethinking and belonged to a family of independent if insufficient means. Fulfilling another Romantic stereotype, she had been a governess and died of consumption six months after her marriage. Linton never ceased to mourn for her, and some of his late poems (Love-lore, 1887) look back to this tragic moment. By about 1839, he was living with Laura’s sister Emily and a child registered later as William Wade Linton (d. 1892), known as Willie, was evidently born soon afterwards. At this time, Linton publicly advocated an end to all state interference in marriage, with partners associating as consenting equals, free if they wished to use contraception. Since 1835, the biblical prohibition against marrying a deceased wife’s sister had been incorporated into English law, so there was never a formal marriage, and Emily simply assumed the name Linton, bearing some seven children: three boys (Willie, Lancelot, who died in December 1863, and Edmund) and four girls (Emily, Margaret, Ellen, and Eliza, who died in December 1857), the youngest of whom was born in July 1854. Emily died, also of consumption, in December 1856.
On 24th March 1858, at St Pancras Church, Linton married Eliza Lynn (1822–1898), the writer and moralist. His marriage to Eliza was childless and unhappy. She soon began to dislike his distinctive clothing, the peculiar cut of his long-waisted coat, which lacked the two buttons at the junction of the skirts at the back—Linton seeing these, according to Walter Crane, as ‘superfluous reminders of gentlemanly, militaristic dress’. She found him ‘ungraceful—careless in the matter of dress and generally unkempt—with unstarched collars and long hair’, adding: ‘I could not convince him of the need of method, regularity, foresight, or any other economic virtue. He was sweet in word and acquiescent in manner; smiled, promised compliance and indeed did much that I wished because I wished it. But I never touched the core.’ The couple grew steadily apart during the early 1860s, separating informally but finally in 1867 when he emigrated to the United States.
The craft that Linton learned from George Bonner was not that of the woodcut, which had been historically the cheapest means of image-making and the mainstay of popular religious and topical publications well into the eighteenth century. Linton was a wood-engraver and his was the craft which, more than any other nineteenth-century printmaking technique, pushed forward the illustration of books, periodicals, newspapers, and ephemeral publications and transformed visual awareness in all advanced societies. Wood-engraving was the first of the major printmaking media to exploit photography, and it was partly as a reaction against the effects of lithography and photo-mechanical printing that the so-called original printmaking media of etching and engraving were re-invented in the second half of the nineteenth century as a major vehicle of artistic expression. Linton’s career spans these developments, in craft terms linking Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) to Walter Crane (1845)–1915 (Crane was Linton’s apprentice from 1858 to 1862) and linking the world of art to that of the Illustrated London News and the pictorial advertisement boom of the last quarter of the century. In his own practice, Linton increasingly found the personal independence and control over the means of production associated with the ideology of the arts and crafts movement by operating his own small private press.
No one was more aware than Linton of the large professional and social issues involved in these developments. He wrote extensively on the technical aspects of his craft (Specimens of a New Process of Engraving for Surface Printing, 1861), on the inherent tension between the artistic and the artisanal aspects of printmaking (‘Art in engraving on wood’, Atlantic Monthly, volume 43, June 1879), on the history of the craft in Britain and America (History of Wood Engraving in America, 1882; Masters of Wood Engraving, 1889), and on his own life (Three Score and Ten Years?, New York, 1894; published in London as Memories, 1895). As a reproductive engraver, he participated in many of the most important publishing projects of the epoch, including Moxon’s edition of Tennyson and George Eliot’s Romola, on which he and his brother worked after designs by Frederic Leighton. Beyond his vast output of relatively ephemeral material, Linton’s most important works are the botanical studies for his own Ferns of the Lake District (1864), and the views and other subjects for Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Lake Country (1864) and for Harriet Martineau’s The English Lakes (1858). A considerable group of his flower drawings, probably intended for another botanical work on the Lake District, was presented by Kineton Parkes to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1938.
Linton ‘discovered’ the Lake District during a walking tour of 1846. He acquired the lease of a house at Miteside in Eskdale, where he installed his family in April 1849. In March 1852, they moved to Brantwood, on Coniston, which Linton then managed to buy outright by means of mortgages. At Brantwood he set up his first private press, using it with help from a group of intense young radical printers to produce a stream of pamphlets on English and European politics, mostly written by Linton himself.
From his earliest years in London, Linton had been heavily involved in fringe republican and Liberal nationalist circles, becoming acquainted with Giuseppe Mazzini about 1842 and regarding himself as the leading English agent and interpreter of the master’s views. Within the Chartist movement Linton tended to take his own line. He strongly opposed O’Connor and in 1848 backed the People’s Charter Union, which favoured collaboration between middle and working classes. In the 1840s, he had regularly composed anti-odes on royal birthdays and he now proposed the sovereignty of a single legislative chamber, elected by universal adult suffrage, its laws subject to referendum. At the general election of 1852, however, he toyed with the idea of standing as a Chartist candidate at Carlisle, but found that he lacked adequate support.
The Chartist failure in 1848 led Linton and other radicals increasingly to find their inspiration in European nationalism: ‘for true civilization, for the free growth of national peculiarities of character; for the unlimited development of the boundless resources of varied clime and country … that every man may have the opportunity of placing himself in that sphere to which his energies may be turned in the best account for the public service … We claim for every People the right to choose their own constitutions, to determine their own way of life.’ Italy, Poland, Switzerland, France, and Ireland successively and simultaneously aroused Linton’s journalistic intervention during the 1850s and 1860s, and it was in this cause that he launched his own most important contribution to this ferment of constitutionalist debate in early January 1851. This was the English Republic, published weekly and monthly until April 1855, virtually all of whose copy and illustrations Linton himself supplied. The English Republic’s programme involved individual self-realisation under the law providing ‘opportunity for growth even for the least and weakest’. A leading function of the state was to provide education for all, to cultivate the ‘perceptive faculties’ of children, and to teach the ‘broad facts of Nature and God in relation to [their] position in the Universe’. Later the curriculum would include geology and botany, with gardening as the principal out-of-school activity. This was the curriculum experienced by his own children at Brantwood, the family being packed into the house together with Emily’s mother, four bachelor printing assistants, the Polish carbonaro Karl Stolzman (1793–1854) and his wife, and Agnes, the servant. The children were all dressed in shifts of blue flannel, and all had shoulder-length hair and wide hats. Their food was home-grown by Linton, and in winter consisted largely of porridge.
Emily’s death at the end of 1856 signalled the beginning of the difficult but, in terms of literary stimulus, not unfruitful relationship with Eliza Lynn. In 1865, Linton published Claribel and other Poems, illustrated with engravings after his own designs. They reflect his stoical acceptance of private adversity and their lyrical style shows the influence of Tennyson’s In Memoriam. But his financial circumstances reached a decisive crisis, and in November 1866 he set off to reconnoitre prospects in New York. Armed with introductions from Mazzini to the American enthusiasts for European national self-determination, he quickly made contact with the Cooper Union and the Society of Wood Engravers of New York, and secured a salaried appointment as artistic director of the local equivalent of the Illustrated London News. This enabled him briefly to return early in 1867 to London, where he began collecting material for his history of wood-engraving, gathered up his younger son Edmund, and (his wife having declined to accompany him) set sail again for the New World. Linton’s old life of financial deficits was now transformation into one of surplus and social acceptance in the liberal republic of the United States. His artistic and literary reputation secured election to the Century Club, the self-electing élite of artistic New York and he was honoured by the high-minded liberal intellectuals of New England society as an authentic voice of European radicalism. Not that this stopped him, as a journalist, from castigating various aspects of American life, social organisation, and foreign policy including the sentimental Fenianism of the New England Irish and the Monroe doctrine’s implementation in Spanish America nor from maintaining his voice in European affairs with a passionate but un-American advocacy of the Paris communards in 1870–71.
In 1870, Linton moved out of New York and acquired a farmstead at Hamden, near New Haven, Connecticut, which became his home for the rest of his life. Threatened with bankruptcy proceedings in the English courts, he suggested to Willie, who was looking after the house at Brantwood, that he should contact Ruskin and offer him the property at a nominal discount, for £1500. The sale was completed in May 1871, and was in many ways a serendipitous event, for the characteristic Ruskin works of the Brantwood years, apart from his own increasing interest in fine printing and book illustration, were the radical Fors Clavigera addressed to the workmen of Britain, Deucalion, and Proserpina, the last two respectively his reformulations of field geology and botany for the education of the young. Linton invested proceeds from the Brantwood sale in a new press for the house at Hamden, named Appledore, and again the tireless voice rang out, identifying significant long-term issues such as the corruptions of Tammany Hall politics and the anti-competitive practices of big business and finance. The family was now more or less gathered round him at Appledore, with the exception of his wife, Willie—who worked as a printer in London—and his eldest daughter, Emily, who was partially paralysed and was looked after in an asylum in Dumfries, Scotland. Margaret, the second daughter, was married locally to an engineer at Yale, Thomas Mather, and Ellen helped her father as amanuensis and typesetter. Edmund helped his father in growing vegetables for the house and, again as at Brantwood, in botanising.
Proximity to Yale’s libraries as well as his literary acquaintances encouraged Linton to publish in 1878 a volume of selected American verse, Poetry of America, followed by a limited edition of an anthology of English verses showing an exceptional knowledge for this period of the metaphysical poets, The Golden Apples of Hesperus (1882); another limited edition, Rare Poems of the Seventeenth Century (1882); and, with R. H. Stoddard, the five volumes of English Verse (1884). Alongside his genuine editorialising of early seventeenth-century verse, there is evidence that he flirted with producing forged pamphlets, probably, like some art forgers, to mock the scholarship of ‘experts’. But he himself was now an increasingly respected figure in the English-speaking world of art and letters. In 1882, he was elected to the American National Academy of Arts, and on his occasional trips to England he became a figure more familiar in the libraries and print rooms of London than on the radical fringes of politics. He particularly loathed W. E. Gladstone, however, regarding him as the betrayer of the old radical vision of land reform and universal suffrage, and he backed Disraeli during the Bulgarian atrocities controversy of 1876. On the last of his English trips in 1889, he brought his magnum opus—Masters of Wood Engraving, printed by hand at Appledore in only three copies—for reproduction in two limited folio editions at the Chiswick Press. In 1891, he was awarded an honorary MA degree of Yale University. Linton’s late books are mostly memoirs: European Republicans: Recollections of Mazzini and his Friends (1893), a Life of Whittier (1893), and his own Memories (1895). A further volume of his own verses, Poems, was published in the same year.
During the 1890s, Linton’s prodigious energies declined, and by autumn 1897 he was unable to continue to operate the press at Appledore. He died at his daughter’s house in New Haven on 29th December 1897 and was survived briefly by Eliza Lynn, who died in July 1898. His papers, the basis for F. B. Smith’s scholarly biography Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97 (1973) are preserved in three main collections: the Istituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli in Milan, the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Smith reproduces photographs of him in his forties as international agitator with long brown hair, and in his eighties as the benign patriarch, with a cloud of white hair and deep smile-lines around his eyes. The modern view, largely influenced by Smith, is increasingly to see Linton as a significant figure in the non-socialist tradition of European radicalism. He has benefited also from art historians’ changed valuation of ‘reproductive’ printmaking, and from the recognition of his own ‘original’ work as a designer of images, illustrator, and poet. His integrity, courage, and moral stature are beyond doubt.
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[1] G. White English illustrators of the sixties, 1897, W. Linton Specimens of a new process of engraving for surface printing, 1861, W. Linton Three score and ten years?, New York, 1894, published in London as Memories, 1895, J. Murdoch The discovery of the Lake District: a northern Arcadia and its uses, 1984 and F. B. Smith Radical artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97, 1973. Archives: Instituto Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Milan: correspondence and papers; National Australian Library, Canberra: papers; Yale University, Beinecke Library: correspondence, notebooks, journals, literary MSS; Bishopsgate Institute, London: correspondence with Charles Bradlaugh and J. G. Crawford: Co-operative Union, Holyoake House, Manchester, Co-operative Union archive: letters, mostly to G. J. Holyoake; Harvard University, Houghton Library: letters to W. E. Adams; and, John Rylands Library: letters to J. H. Nodal.
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