Talk:William James Linton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, now in the public domain. |
 |
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page. | ||
| Start | This article has been rated as start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ] | ||
Some time ago I have written this essay at the university. I think my english is too bad tu put it in the article. Perhaps one could do it.--Ot 13:38, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
William James Linton was born in London, on 7 December 1812 and died 29.12.1897. He was a radical artisan.
The "Lintons must have ranked comfortable."(p. 1) But the Lintons are not rich. The father "had some commercial education"(p. 1). The mother had "some education"(p. 1), too. "The family moved to Stratford in 1818 and in this swampy village, ..., Linton attended Chigwell School"(p. 2). It was a middle class school and Linton "was probably poorer than most of his school fellows"(p. 3). "Commercial subjects were taught, and Linton learnt Latin and French, but he was a drummy, undistinguished boy"(p. 3). Linton showed a precocious skill in drawing. "His father paid for drawing lessons"(p. 3). When Linton was 16 years old, his father consented to William James Linton apprenticeship as wood engraver. "In the usual fashion for apprentices Linton moved to live with his master's family at the workshop at ... Kington."(p. 3) "Engravers in Linton's time ranked as superior artisans."(p. 4) The other advantages, in comparison to other artisans or workers, was that the "tools pertaining to the trade were cheap, accessible, and portable."(p. 4) "The cheapness and portability of the tools meant that engravers found it easy to setup for themselves and they could often work on their own, far from the artist or printer, as Linton mostly did."(p. 5) One other advantage was that wood engraver are "more independent and more initiately associated with artists, editors, and publishers than other craftsman associated with the production of books."(p. 5f) A fellow apprentices of Linton "recalled the workshop as a hotbed of radical discussion and that the apprentices read Thomas Paine, Southey's What Tyler, and Bryon's Vision of Judgement."(p. 6) The apprentices also had the job of delivering the engraved blocks to the printers. So Linton learned a bit about the streets of London. "To Linton, London was a moral wilderness."(p. 8) Linton was emancipated from institutional religion. It was furthered by a acquaintance, "with whom he read Voltair's Philosophical Dictionary."(p. 8) The towntrips enabled Linton to make acquaintance "with Thomas Wade (1805- 75), the radical, romantic poetic dramatist, and Wade's friend with a similar aspirations, Richard Henry Horne (1803-75)."(p. 9) Both were scions of gentry families. This all and the time of the Reform crisis in 1831-2 excited Linton.
As we have seen, Linton has a lot of advantages. When we are looking in David Vincent's book it will be more clear. Among other working men Vincent cite William Lovett: "... in looking back upon this period of my youth and contrasting it with the present, and the advantages that young people have in the present age - in the multiplicity of cheap books, newspapers, lectures, and other numerous means of instruction - I cannot help regretting that I was so unfortunately placed; for, with a desire for knowledge I had neither books to enlighten nor a teacher to instruct".
The acquaintance with Wade was very fortunate for Linton. When Linton was 25 years old he was at the Sunday soirus which hold the Wades. "He listered there to a coterie of brilliant, advanced thinkers, among them W. J. Fox, Dr. Southwood Smith, Douglas Jerrold, Magaret and Marry Gilles, William Bridge Adams and his second wife Sarah, and her sister Eliza Flower."(p. 11) Fox was the leader of the group. "Linton found in him a model of the self-made prophet, able to speak both to the middle-class intellectuals and to working-class radicals."(p. 12) In Fox's house Linton met Home, Robert Browing, Harriet Taylor, and John Stuart Mill. This place "was Linton's finishing school".(p. 13)
Linton married Laura Wade on 21.10.1837, but Laura died a half year later. It was hard for Linton to get the "yes" to the marriage, because he was "only" a artisan and the Wade's are a good middle-class family. After the death of Laura "he was to submerge himself in work, partly to employ the days and nights he had to live through without her, and partly to fortify that ambition to become a poet which had awakened under her inspiration and was jeopardized by her passing."(p. 16)
I think that the death of Laura was very important in the life of Linton. It was the impulse for Linton to work, to learn, to think, to life for ideas. When we are looking on other biographies, we will see that there is always a point, why they are working so hard, so methodical. Not in the sense of Max Weber and the protestantic ethic, because Linton don't think of a life after his death, he don't think and he don't know nothing about predestination. Nevertheless, his further life is influenced from a secular kind of the protestantic ethic.
Even here we found a special Oeffentlichkeit, as we don't find it any more today. I mean the discussion, the communication about theories and theorists in Fox's house. Nowadays, we don't discuss an origin theory in private circumstances. We have "experts" - journalists for example, which are specialised for different subjects (science, politics, arts, sport), which explained us what a thinker is thinking. And the meaning of the journalists is transported within TV, radio, newspapers, or magazines - the new Oeffentlichkeit.
The question is now what was useful knowledge for Linton? Useful for Linton was that he has learned the french language and that he had learned a profession which allowed him to be relative independent from a employer, respectively to become a employer later. The first is not so important as the latter. The latter enabled Linton to be relatively free. The first to read different books which has made his thinking broader. Both enabled Linton to improve his knowledge, "a fortress of ideas painfully built from his years of hard reading in the British Museum."(p. 19) He was later working as a journalist and as a translator. So his broad knowledge and the ability to read french has made him "free" later, too. He was able to realize himself.
1838, Linton decided to publish his work - poems - in his own periodical. His idea was to enlighten the lower classes with cheap and understandable periodicals. All his future life long, Linton tried to launch a periodical. But always without great success. The first one was the National, and the first issue "appeared on 5 January 1839"(p. 19). In June was his capital already exhausted, because the National didn't sell. One reasons is that Linton "was not the leader of a local group which might secure him a minimal circulation."(p. 17)
Linton published his "political creed' within the National. These are the following six points: "universal suffrage and the abolition of property qualification for M.P.'s, ... a free press, the emancipation of women, abolition of oaths, tithes, and church-rates, corn laws, and poor laws."(p. 20)
One further step in Linton's thinking about the society was the book from Lamennais, De l'eschavage moderne. Linton translated it into English 1840. "Linton was fired by Lamennai's projection of a world of sanctified communities as the end of political endeavour."(p. 25) "Henceforth Linton saw his duty in teaching fellow Chartists to lift their vision beyond the six points."(p. 26) But Smith mentioned that the "profoundly religious caste of Linton's radicalism at first sight places him apart from his Chartist contemporaries, although repeated hints in the literature suggest that millenarianism, biblical rhetoric, and a Bunyanesque sense of individual responsibility in the battle between good and evil were much more influential in nineteenth-century popular radicalism than historians have allowed."(p. 26)
The next teachers Linton have had are the "Finsbury radical group"(p. 28). And in this group three men especially impressed him: Watson, Henry Herrington, and Richard Moore. From this point out, Linton developed his ideas of a republic, witch included three essentials. "Its first, political, basis was, ... universal suffrage, the symbol of equality and the instrument of participation, duty, and altruism. The second, economic, essential of the republic was to be the fair distribution of the produce and profits of industry among the workers who created them, with a resultant lessening of competition."(p. 31) But it was not a socialistic republic, because small property was "sacred". The third, and in our context the most important essential of the republic, was education. But the finally version of Linton's idea of a republic was 11 years later, 1851. Meanwhile the revolutionary years are passed, and he has made the acquaintance with Giuseppe Mazzini. Linton published his ideas in the English Republic, a monthly paper edited by Linton. Parts of the English Republic are in the appendix (See p. 218-239). Smith has summarized Linton's ideas about education, and this is now following.
"The people, through the State, were to provide education for all children and citizens. The system was to be free and compulsory, independent of denominational control, and financed from public revenue. Formal education was to begin at seven when the children were to enrol at local kindergartens to learn 'to read, write, draw and sing', in order to cultivate their 'perceptive faculties' and discover 'the broad facts of Nature and Got in relation to [their] position in the Universe'. At nine their compulsory attendance began with the entry into state boarding-schools, where they were to begin their practical lessons in living together equally. Until the age of 14 both boys and girls were to learn bodily exercises - swimming, riding, and shooting - and in the classroom music, drawing, arithmetic, geography, history, and 'the divine laws of duty' together with introductory lessons in astronomy, geology, and botany. Out of school hours the chief relaxation was to be gardening. From 14 the girls could choose to reside at home with their mothers, continuing their lesson part-time at the local school until the age of 18, while boys in this age-group were to remain boarders. The curriculum for both was to include human physiology, the 'serious' study to history, English grammar, and two other languages - one modern, one ancient - mathematics, and 'the use of arms'. All boys would be apprenticed in the trade workshops and model farms attached to each school and success in these pursuits was to rank equally with that academic subjects. Between 18 and 20 both youths and girls were to become 'national apprentices', each serving the state with his or her special skill and so reimbursing the community for the money spent on their education. From 20 to 21 each would be sent at public expense to travel abroad 'that he might enlarge his nature by learning in what other countries differed from his own'. Upon their return they were to be accepted into full citizenship and would be free to marry."(p. 103f)
The English Republic have had much more "importance in English radical history far beyond its intrinsic force"(p. 107) considered Smith. Smith argued that it
"supplied a social democratic programme, a focus for egalitarian fervour, and a commitment to parliamentary reform and class harmony that kept alive the 'moral force' Chartist ideology through the period of Chartist demoralization and permitted it to be taken up by the parliamentary reform movements of the 1860s and the radicalism of the early 1870s. The programme of the London Land and Labour League of 1869, for example, with its emphasis on national education, a single tax, Ireland, and land nationalization (despite Marx's claim to have shaped it), owes as much to Linton as anyone else. The Leagues's emphasis upon 'soul' in politics is pure Linton. Moreover, the manner in which the League quickly eluded Marx's attempts to use it suggests that his boats to Engels about begetting and controlling the League were delusory. The adhesion of Harney, Newton, and Mottershead to republicanism removed from Marx's and Engel's following three leading potential disciples and thereby helped preserve the two German revolutionaries' isolation in England and limit the spread of their ideas among the British working classes. Even Ernst Jones, their chief disciple in England, was forced to come over to parliamentarianism and social democracy in the late 1850."(p. 107f)
To complete the biography about Linton, I have to mention briefly that he has had 7 children with Emily Wade, a sister of his first wife Laura. He was living with her in the Lake District. After the death of Emily in December 1856, he married Eliza Lynn. She was a successful journalist and has written several books. But Linton was not happy with her. Perhaps he married Eliza because of the 7 children. However, in November 1866 he emigrated to New York. He was living later in Connecticut until his death in 29.12.1897. He was living there with three children, but without his wife. He was earning sometimes a lot of money there. Mostly with wood engraving, but with some writing, too. Therefor it was possible for him to travel to Europe a couple of times. "His friends agreed in their obituaries that Linton was one of the most versatile and interesting men they had known. He was a patriot, poet, essayist, political, editor, translator, printer, publisher, artist, engraver. Several remarked that he was the busiest man they had ever seen. Withal, he retained his charm and primitive idealism."(p.215)
[edit] Literature
Johnson, Richard, Really useful knowledge, in Lovett, Tom (Ed), Radical approaches to adult education, 1988
Smith, Francis Barrymore, Radical Artisan William James Linton 1812-97, Manchester University Press, 1973
Vincent, David, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom. A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography, London, 1981
Weber, Max, The Protestantic Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism, London, seventh impression 1965
