Born: St.
Francis
Xavier, Christian missionary, 1506, Xavier Castle,
Pyrenees; Dr. Hugh Blair, author of Lectures on
Rhetoric, &c., 1718, Edinburgh; William Wordsworth,
poet, 1770, Cockermouth; Francois M. C. Fourier,
French socialist, 1772; It. W. Elliston, actor, 1774,
London; Sir Francis Chantrey, sculptor, 1782
Giambattista Rubini, 'the greatest of tenor singers,'
1795 Sir J. E. Tennent, author of works on Belgium,
Ceylon, &c., 1804, Belfast.
Died: Charles VIII of
France, 1498, Amboise; Jerome Bignon, French
historical writer, 1656; Sir William Davenant, poet,
1668; Charles Colardean, French dramatic writer, 1776,
Paris; Peter Camper, Dutch anatomist, 1789, Leyden;
Rev. William Mason, poet, 1797; William Godwin,
novelist and miscellaneous writer, 1836, London; Sir
James Scarlett, Lord Abinger, Chief Baron of the Court
of Exchequer, 1844, Bury St. Edmunds; William L.
Bowles, poet, 1850, Salisbury.
Feast Day: St.
Hegesippus, a primitive father, 2nd century. St. Aphraates, anchoret,
4th century. St. Finan, of
Ireland. St. Aibert, recluse, 1140. St. Herman Joseph,
confessor, 1226.
FOURIER
Among the dreamers and
contrivers of new social worlds, Fourier is
unquestionably the prince; no one ever brought to the
task a more imperial intellect, or evolved a grander,
more complex, and more detailed Utopia. His works are
voluminous, and to master the laws and ordinances of
his ideal kingdom would be a labour more than
equivalent to the comprehension of Blackstone and the
Code Napoleon.
Fourier, the son of a
linendraper, was born at Besancon. His father dying in
narrow circumstances, he commenced life behind a
haberdasher's counter in Rouen, from whence he moved
to Lyons, in which city, as a clerk and as a merchant,
he spent a large part of his life. The Revolution had
filled the air with daring social speculations, and
Fourier quickly arrived at the conviction that the
existing constitution of society was radically rotten.
In 1796 he was draughted into the army as a private
soldier, but after two years of service he was
discharged as an invalid, and bearing with him a
notable stock of ideas derived from his experience of
military discipline and organization. Whilst a clerk
at Marseilles, in 1799, he was ordered to superintend
the sinking of a quantity of corn in the sea at
midnight, which had become spoiled by hoarding when
the people were dying of famine. This, and sundry
encounters with commercial knavery, inspired him with
an increasing aversion to trade. He gave all his spare
hours to study, and among his acquaintances had a
repute for universal knowledge, and for some
unfathomable notions on the reconstruction of society.
Excited by their curiosity, he was induced to publish,
in 1808, a book as a prospectus of his scheme, to be
developed in eight volumes but the poor book did not
find above a dozen purchasers. Six years elapsed, when
by chance a copy of the neglected work fell into the
hands of M. Just Muiron, a gentleman of Besancon,
who
read it with delight, entered into correspondence with
Fourier, and avowed himself his disciple. He urged
Fourier to fulfill his programme, and offered to bear
a great part of the cost of publication.
The result was, that Fourier
gave up business, and retired into the country, and
between the years 1816 and 1821 produced the bulk of
his writings. He printed two large volumes at Besancon,
and at the end of 1822 carried them to market in
Paris; but no one would buy or even read them. The
reviewers dismissed them as voluminous and abstruse.
To meet this objection he produced an abridgment, but
it fared no better. Worn out with waiting, and unable
to bear the expense of a Parisian residence, he was
compelled to return to Lyons in 1825, and take a
situation as cashier at �50 a year. Meanwhile his work
found receptive readers here and there throughout
France, who encouraged him to go on writing.
Madame
Clarissa Vigoureux became a most elective ally,
devoting her fortune and a skilful pen to the
propagation of his views. In 1829, he made his abode
permanently in Paris. The Revolution of 1830 brought
the St. Simonian sect of socialists into notoriety,
and Fourier sent copies of his books to its leaders,
but they paid them no attention. He tried the Owenites
of England in the same way, and met with the same
neglect. Irritated by their indifference, he attacked
them in a sarcastic pamphlet, The Fallacy and
Charlatanry of the St. Simonians and the Owenites,
which created a great sensation, and put an end to his
weary years of obscurity. Several of the cleverest St.
Simonians became his adherents, and in June 1832 they
started a weekly paper, The Phalanstery, which Fourier
edited. Some disciples, anxious to realize the
paradisiacal life of The Phalanstery, set up a
joint-stock society, with a nominal capital of
�20,000, at Rambouillet, but it turned out an utter
failure. Fourier protested against the experiment, as
entered into with wild haste, and without the
completion of the conditions essential to success.
Whilst waiting in the confident expectation that some
great capitalist would knock at his door, and give him
power to transform into fact the dream of his life,
Fourier died on the 10th of October 1837, in his
sixty-sixth year. He was never married.
Fourier was a thin, nervous
man, of about five feet seven inches. His head, which
was not large, was high in front, depressed behind
(what phrenologists call the bankrupt form of head, as
indicating an over-generous and too little selfish
nature), and very full on each side. His hair was
light brown, his eyes blue, his nose aquiline, his
chin large, and his lips thin and closely compressed.
In manner he was dignified, yet simple and earnest;
and in his later years there was a sphere of sadness,
if not bitterness, around him from long travail and
hope deferred. His income was scarcely ever more than, �50 a year, but his wants
were few; he was a good
economist, and at his death �40 was found in his
cash-box. Music and flowers were his perpetual
delights.
Fourier's writings extend over
eight thick volumes, and about an equal quantity
remains in manuscript. They deal with a wide variety
of subjects, and a well-read Fourierite is seldom at a
loss for a quotation from his master on any matter
under discussion. In many points there is a close
resemblance between Fourier and Swedenborg: both were
equally ready to evolve the unknown from their
internal consciousness, and to deliver it with all the
assurance of certainty. Fourier's grand aim was to
assort mankind according to their characters, powers,
and propensities; to band them together in such a way,
that friendship, work, and pleasure should coincide.
He was never tired of asserting that the Newtonian law
of attraction was equally applicable to the world of
mind as the world of matter; and that all the disorder
and misery of society springs from the infraction and
resistance of its benign operation.
His socialism had thus a
spiritual side; and many who would have been repelled
from the dead level of a material communion, were
fascinated with his glorious pictures of harmonious
hierarchies of workers, where each man should do what
he loved to do, and could do best, in fellowship with
those whose tastes and feelings were kindred to his
own. Fourier's language is graphic and striking, but
seldom elegant, and often incorrect. His wealth of
imagination and his logical power, as remarkable in
construction as in destruction, amaze, while they
excite regret that such genius should have been
squandered so fruitlessly. Had he tried to govern a
single village or workshop, he might have discovered
the vanity of drawing out schemes of society on paper,
the folly of legislating for men as though they were
bricks and mortar, and the hopelessness of doing them
good in any way save through the consent of their
erratic, perverse, and incalculable wills.
Fourierism found many
adherents in France and the United States, and various
abortive attempts were made to institute associations
after his model. The Revolution of 1848 brought a
flush of promise to the Parisian Fourierites, but the
reaction which followed blighted all. Fourier's
doctrines are far too complicated to enter into
popular politics, and the day is probably not distant
when they will altogether lapse out of any faith into
the condition of literary and psychological
curiosities.
LOVE AND MADNESS
On the evening of the 7th of
April 1779, a handsome, well-dressed lady was stepping
out of Covent Garden Theatre, to take her coach, when
a young man in the dress of a clergyman moved abruptly
towards her, and firing a pistol into her head, killed
her in a moment. Immediately he fired another at
himself, but without fatal effect, and then began to
beat his head with its butt, as if eager in any way to
deprive himself of life. He was, however, secured, and
carried, all bespattered with his own blood and that
of his victim, to a magistrate. The dead body was
taken to a neighbouring tavern to await a coroner's
inquest.
No more romantic story broke
the dull tenor of English aristocratic life in the
eighteenth century. The lady was Miss Reay, well known
as the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, an elderly
statesman of great ability, who conducted the whole of
the naval affairs of England during the war with the
American colonies. Miss Reay was of humble origin, but
possessed beauty, intelligence, and an amiable
character. She had borne four children to the Earl,
who treated her with the greatest tenderness and
affection. Rather more than three years before the
above date, a young military officer named Hackman, in
quarters at Huntingdon, was, in the course of an
ordinary hospitality, invited by Lord Sandwich to
Hitchinbroke, his lordship's country residence. Though
the time is so near our own, it was different in some
of the essentials of good taste, if not of morals; and
we learn with some little surprise that this
distinguished statesman had Miss Reay established as
the mistress of his house, for the reception of such
society as visited him.
The young man, who was of an
enthusiastic temperament, fell violently in love with
Miss Reay, and sought to win her affections with a
view to matrimony. The poor girl, who had the grace to
wish she were not what she was, opened her heart to
his addresses. They corresponded, they met; the young
man was permitted to believe that the most cherished
hope of his heart would be realized. To fit himself
the better to maintain her as his wife, he studied for
the church, took orders, and actually entered upon a
curacy (Wiverton, in Norfolk).
Miss Reay's situation
became always more and more embarrassing, as the
number of her children increased. Well disposed to
Hackman, she was yet bound by strong ties of gratitude
to Lord Sandwich. In short, she could not summon
sufficient moral courage to break through her bondage.
She seems to have striven to temper the violent
transports of her lover; but his was not a
constitution to bear with such a disappointment. His
letters, afterwards published, fully shew how his love
for this unfortunate woman gradually fixed itself as a
morbid idea in his mind. For some weeks before the
fatal day, he dwells in his letters on suicides, and
cases of madmen who murdered the objects of their
affections.
The story of Chatterton seems to have had
a fascination for him. He tells a friend on the 20th
of March, that he did not believe he could exist
without Miss Reay. He then, and for some time further,
appears to have only contemplated his own death, as
the inevitable consequence of his blighted passion. On
the morning of the 7th of April he was employed in
reading Blair's Sermons; but afterwards having traced
Miss Reay to the theatre, he went back to his lodgings
for a brace of pistols, which he employed in the
manner which has been described.
The wretchedness of the
unhappy man during the few days left to him on earth
was extreme. He woke to a just view of his atrocious
act, but only to condemn himself, and the more eagerly
to long for death. After his condemnation, the
following note reached him:
17 April, '79. To Mr. Hackman,
in Newgate.
'If the murderer of Miss Reay
wishes to live, the man he has most injured will use
all his interest to procure his life.'
His answer was:
'Condemned cell, Newgate,
'17 April, 1779.
'The murderer of her whom he
preferred, far preferred, to life, suspects the hand
from which he has just received such an offer as he
neither desires nor deserves. His wishes are for
death, not for life. One wish he has: could he be
pardoned in this world by the man he has most injured? Oh, my lord, when I
meet her in another world,
enable me to tell her (if departed spirits are not
ignorant of earthly things) that you forgive us both,
that you will be a father to her dear infants!', J H.'
Two days after this date,
Hackman expiated his offence at Tyburn.
The surviving children of Miss
Reay were well educated by their father; and the
fourth, under the name of Basil Montagu, attained
the
rank of Queen's Counsel, and distinguished himself by
a Life of Bacon and
other works.
SALE OF A WIFE
The Annual Register for 1832
gave an account of a singular wife-sale which took
place on the 7th of April in that year.
Joseph
Thomson, a farmer, had been married for three years
without finding his happiness advanced, and he and his
wife at length agreed to separate. It is a prevalent
notion amongst the rude and ignorant in England that a
man, by setting his wife up to public auction, and so
parting with her, legally dissolves the marriage tie,
and escapes from all its obligations.
Thomson, under
this belief, came into Carlisle with his wife, and by
the bellman announced that he was about to sell her.
At twelve o'clock at noon the sale commenced, in the
presence of a large number of persons. Thomson placed
his wife on a large oak chair, with a rope or halter
of straw round her neck. He then spoke as follows:
'Gentlemen, I have to offer to your notice my wife,
Mary Anne Thomson, otherwise Williams, whom I mean to
sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it
is her wish as well as mine to part for ever. She has
been to me only a born serpent. I took her for my
comfort, and the good of my home; but she became my
tormentor, a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a
daily devil. Gentlemen, I speak truth from my heart
when I say�may God deliver us from troublesome wives
and frolicsome women! Avoid them as you would a mad
dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus,
Mount Etna, or any other pestilential thing in nature.
Now I have shewn you the dark side of my wife, and
told you her faults and failings, I will intro-duce
the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her
qualifications and goodness. She can read novels and
milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease
that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty.
Indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the poet
says of women in general:
"Heaven gave to women the
peculiar grace,
To laugh, to weep, to cheat the human race."
She can make butter and scold
the maid; she can sing Moore's melodies, and plait her
frills and caps; she cannot make rum, gin, or whisky,
but she is a good judge of the quality from long
experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her with
all her perfections and imperfections, for the suns of
fifty shillings.'
If this speech is correctly
reported, the man must have been a humorist in
addition to his other qualities. The account concludes
with the statement that, after waiting about an hour,
Thomson knocked down the lot to one
Henry Mears, for twenty
shillings and a Newfoundland dog; they then parted in
perfect good temper�Mears and the woman going one way,
Thomson and the dog another.
Of course an affair of this
kind is simply an outrage upon decency, and has no
legal effect whatever. It can only be considered as a
proof of the besotted ignorance and brutal feelings of
a portion of our rural population. Rather
unfortunately, the occasional instances of wife-sale,
while remarked by ourselves with little beyond a
passing smile, have made a deep impression on our
continental neighbours, who seriously believe that it
is a habit of all classes of our people, and
constantly cite it as an evidence of our low
civilization. It would never occur to us as a proof of
any such thing, for we recognise it as only an
eccentricity; yet it may be well for us to know that
it really does take place now and then,�more
frequently, indeed, than almost any are aware of,�and
is a social feature by no means unworthy of the grave
consideration of educationists.
In 1815, a man held a regular
auction in the market-place at Pontefract, offering
his wife at a minimum bidding of one shilling, and
'knocking her down' for eleven shillings. In 1820, a
man named Brouchet led his wife, a decent-looking
woman, into the cattle-market at Canterbury, from the
neighbouring village of Broughton; he asked a salesman
to sell her for him; the sales-man replied that his
dealings were with cattle, not with women, and he
refused. The man thereupon hired a pen or stall, for
which he paid the usual tollage of sixpence, and led
his wife into it by a halter; and soon afterwards he
sold her to a young man at Canterbury for five
shillings. In 1834, a man led his wife by a halter, in
precisely a similar way, into the cattle-market at
Birmingham; but the local journals did not report the
sum at which the unfortunate 'lot' was knocked down.
A
case occurred in 1835, in which a woman was sold by
her husband for fifteen pounds; she at once went home
with the buyer; she survived both buyer and seller,
and then married again. Some property came to her in
the course of years from her first husband; for,
notwithstanding claims put forth by other relations,
she was able to maintain in a court of law that the
sale did not and could not vitiate her rights as his
widow. A good deal of surprise was felt in many
villages of ignorant peasantry, in 1837, at the result
of a trial at the West Riding Sessions in Yorkshire,
where a man was committed to a month's imprisonment
and hard labour for selling, or attempting to sell,
his wife: the right to do this being believed in more
extensively than we are apt to imagine.
In 1858, in a
beer-shop at Little Horton, near Bradford, a man named
Hartley Thompson put up his wife, described by
the
local journals as a pretty young woman, for sale; he
even announced the sale beforehand by means of a crier
or bellman; he brought her in with a ribbon round her
neck, by way of halter. These two persons had lived
unhappily together, and both entertained a belief that
by such a process as this they might legally separate
for life. It is difficult, indeed, to credit how such
things can be, unless the wife be more or less a
consenting party; this supposition once made, however,
so cheap a substitute for the Divorce Court becomes
intelligible. Doubtless, in some cases the husband
acts wholly for himself in the matter; as happened in
1859 at Dudley, where a man sold his wife for
sixpence, under the full belief that by so doing she
would have no further legal claim on him for support.
There are not wanting
instances of a belief that the marital tie may be
legally dissolved by a document partaking of the
character of a lease. In the feudal days there was the
famous case of Sir John de Camoys, who regularly
leased his wife to Sir William de Paynel; the
lady
was, however, not a consenting party to the
transaction; and on appealing to the law, the lease
was declared null and void.
In recent times one
particular instance presented a curious variation from
this course of proceeding. The Birmingham Police
Court, in 1853, had to adjudicate on an assault case;
and in the evidence the strange fact came out that a
husband had leased, not his wife, but himself. He had
deserted his wife, and had paid a lawyer thirty-five
shillings to draw up a regular contract between him
and another woman. In proper form the man was
described as a 'carpenter,' and the woman as a 'spinster.' Omitting the names,
the opening sentences
ran thus:
'Wherein the said ----and �
have mutually agreed with each other to live and
reside together, and to mutually assist in supporting
and maintaining each other during the remainder of
their lives, and also to sign the agreement
hereinafter contained to that effect: now, therefore,
it is hereby mutually agreed by and between the said �
and - that they shall live and reside together during
the remainder
of their lives, and that they shall mutually exert
themselves by work and labour, and by following all
their business pursuits, to the best of their
abilities, skill, and understanding, and by advising
and assisting each other, for their mutual benefit and
advantage, and also to pro-vide for themselves and
each other the best support and comforts in life which
their means and income can afford, &c. &c.'
The man had allowed himself,
or had been allowed, to believe that the existence of
this document would be a bar to any claim on the part
of his poor wife. It is no wonder that the magistrate
administered a severe reproof to the lawyer who lent
himself to such a scandal.
