DAN CHATTERTON:
ATHEISTIC, COMMUNISTIC, SCORCHER 1820-1895
By Terry Liddle
In
his history of British Anarchism, The Slow Burning Fuse (Paladin,
London, 1978) John Quail wrote of Dan Chatterton that he deserves to be rescued
from oblivion. In a period, the late 19th century, when remarkable people
were common among both secularists and socialists, Chatterton was one of the
most remarkable of all, a one man revolution against church and state.
Chatterton was born in August 1820 into an artisan family of fairly comfortable
means in Clerkenwell in London. His mother was a Christian but Chatterton
was early influenced by his father who worked as a furniture laquerer and
who took the young lad to radical and freethought meetings at Richard Carlile's
Rotunda in Blackfriars Road.
From an early age Chatterton suffered ill health and was sent away to be educated
in Aylesbury and later Barnet. His father suffered an accident and changed
his work from japaning to selling coal. Chatterton was apprenticed to a shoemaker
in whose workshop he had his political education. Shoemakers were then in
the vanguard of working class politics. Without success Chatterton tried to
start his own business. By 1871 he was listed as a travelling bookseller and
later as a newsvendor. In later years he made a slim living selling radical
papers and posting bills. He claimed to have been a waiter in a coffee house
and a baker's deliverer and even to have cut up a corpse for a doctor.
Chatterton became involved in Chartism and claimed to have been badly injured
in fighting between Chartists and police on Clerkenwell Green. In 1855 Chatterton
joined the army, doubtless like Bradlaugh for the bounty. He spent much of
his two years service in a military hospital bed.
Returning to London, Chatterton married Emma Cook, who died aged 32 in St
Pancras Workhouse. He married again in 1867 to Emily Scott aged 21. Her fate
is unknown; she was not living with Chatterton in his later life. Several
children died young. Only one, Alfred, reached adulthood. He was disabled
and lived with Chatterton. His circumstances undoubtedly put a sharp edge
on his politics.
In the 1860s Chatterton was active in the Reform League participating in the
Hyde Park riot of July 23, 1866. In the early 1870s he was a leading figure
in the Land and Labour League. He wrote for its paper the Republican
and spoke at its meetings. Unlike many League members he was not influenced
by the Chartism of Bronterre O'Brien. Nor was he a member of the First International.
He was, however, involved with the Universal Republican League.
The National Reformer for 26 May, 1872 reported a URL meeting in Camberwell
where 'citizen Chatterton' spoke on land and money lords. It is not recorded
if he spoke at Church Street in the morning or at the Rose and Crown in the
afternoon. Either way the land and money lords would be in for a good tongue
lashing. Chatterton always admonished the poor to revolt against their oppressors
and was always saddened when they didn't.
Chatterton was also in the Patriotic Society, which having been evicted from
the Hole in the Wall near Hatton Garden, purchased what became the Patriotic
Club in Clerkenwell Green (now Marx House). He also served on the general
committee of the Anti Game Law League.
Chatterton's first pamphlet (1872) was in support of Metropolitan police officers
who were agitating for a pay rise. It became a diatribe against all social
and political privilege. Chatterton argued that once the police and army started
to think for themselves they would join a popular revolt.
For the next twenty years there followed a stream of pamphlets, increasingly
intemperate in language and wild in appearance. All were militantly atheistic
and denounced the evils created by gin and gospel. The royal family and capitalist
politicians were favourite targets. Victoria, he said, should become a washerwoman
and Gladstone a bus conductor.
In an 1882 open letter to the Prince of Wales, Chatterton wrote: "...
the revolution of the belly without brains, a revolution that will sweep you,
Prince, and the entire gang of royal lurchers into the ranks of labour or
off the face of the earth, like the vermin you are." The Windsors
don't have such critics nowadays.
The Commune In England
The
nearest he came to a political programme was in his pamphlet The Commune
in England. Everyone over 20 would elect a senate to draft laws to be
submitted within a month to referendum. These laws would have included free
secular state education and nationalisation of land.
Chatterton was an active freethinker and had an exchange of letters with the
Archbishop of Canterbury which was published in The Times. Amongst the publications
he hawked were the Freethinker and the National Reformer.
He was also involved in advocating women's rights and family limitation in
his pamphlet Babies and Bunny Rabbits. He was an active worker for
the Malthusian League.
Chatterton's Commune
Around 1885 he established his own penny publication Chatterton's Commune
which was often printed with odds and ends of type on flimsy yellow paper.
Hand printed, it had a run of 100 copies. 'We are too hot for hell', he
wrote, and 'Too mad for Hanwell'.
Chatterton was a powerful orator although many of his interventions were not
well received. At a meeting organised by the Clerkenwell Branch of the Social
Democratic Federation he threatened to decapitate the guest speaker Lord Brabazon.
At a meeting at the Autonomie Club in 1890 the description by William Morris
of the beauties of a socialist society had no effect on him. He merely remarked
that hanging was necessary for the public good. EP Thompson deleted any mention
of Chatterton from later editions of his biography of Morris.
Chatterton drifted towards the newly formed anarchist groups. He sold Freedom
and spoke from the platform at a meeting to celebrate the Paris Commune and
from the floor at a meeting addressed by Peter Kropotkin.
In a pamphlet Chatterton had written: 'Oh if there be a hell and the atheists
are damned and double damned, at least give me warm quarters and respectable
companions.' Chatterton wanted to be cremated. To fund this he sold photographs
of himself at a shilling (5p) each. Alas he was to be disappointed. He was
buried in a common grave in St Pancras cemetary in Finchley. The funeral ceremony
was conducted by Robert Forder, a prominent secularist and radical publisher.
Forder himself would be buried in a common grave.
Sadly, we only know of Chatterton because of his habit of placing his writings
in the British Museum. He was an eccentric but he was the sort ofeccentric
that secularism and socialism need. Without extremists like Chatterton there
is a danger we will fall into the trap of wanting to offend nobody, even those
who roundly deserve to be offended.
Originally
given as a lecture to the South Place Ethical Society, 17 July 2005. Also
published in their journal, Ethical Record, July/August 2005
Ethical Record, Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL
there's more about Dan Chatterton and radical Clerkenwell in Reds
On the Green.
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