Intrusions

John Barrell’s title comes from the Rev. Vicesimus Knox’s 1795 pamphlet inveighing against the corruption of late eighteenth-century Britain. Knox articulated a charge of insolence and ‘oriental’ manners among the aristocracy in their attitudes towards the middling ranks and poor in society, and further complained that the government, in the wake of the French Revolution, had become increasingly cavalier in its attitudes to traditional liberties, with interference in the press, the spreading of false alarms, the increasing influence of the crown, a resurgence of Jacobitism among Tories promoting demands for loyalty directly to the king, a growing contempt for abstract political thought, the spread of an army of spies for the government, an uncompromising attitude to any measure of political reform however mild and a growing influence of lawyers in parliament exercised in favour of the government that threatened the separation of legislature and judiciary. The sense of a ‘spirit of despotism’ owes much to Montesquieu’s account of the governmental form and its associated ‘principe’, fear.

Under a despotic government, to steal through life unobserved, to creep, with timid caution, through the vale of obscurity, is the first wisdom; and to be suffered to die in old age, without the prison, the chain, the dagger, or the poisoned bowl, the highest pitch in human felicity.¹

For Knox, the perversions of power are corrupting the British state and its people. As its influence spreads throughout the land, one of the key boundaries it crosses is that between the public and the private, with spies making capital of remarks passed in private company under the influence of wine, in a manner reminiscent of ancient Rome in the reign of Tiberius.²

This anxiety about the division between public and private is a running concern in Knox, and one closely followed by Barrell. It is not an easy distinction to negotiate in the 1790s. On the one hand the incursions of the state and the system of spying into the private activities of members of the public, and the bringing of charges for sedition on the basis of conversations in private, or utterances in domains regarded as traditionally private (such as the coffee houses on which Barrell’s second chapter focuses), indicate the despotic character of the government’s monitoring and prosecution of the speech of men. On the other hand, a similar issue about the appropriate distinction between public and private arises in the attitudes taken by reformers of the middling orders to the lives of the aristocracy. Barrell quotes ‘Hampden’, a pseudonymous correspondent writing to denounce the Duke of Portland for his defection from his former principles:

It is, indeed, a common folly to compound political with domestic life . . . On private character, therefore, I will not touch. Our Ministers may constantly be carried to bed in a state of complete intoxication without being reproved by me, while they do not reel and flutter in the Senate; they may every night drown their intellects in a sea of spirits and water at White’s, if they attend to the national business in the morning; they may ruin themselves at play, if they faithfully administer the laws; they may be mean and parsimonious, if they do not defraud the public, and seize on pensions and sinecures beyond all bounds of decency or justice; or they may betray and calumniate private friends, if they do not renounce and vilify public principles.³

But Hamden’s view, in keeping with his sympathies for the Whigs, is coming under increasing pressure from the reformation of manners movement and the work of men and women like Knox, Godwin or Wollstonecraft, who are insistent in denying this split. Private vices are, on this view, seen as necessarily linked to public vices. In 1792, and then in 1793, when first Frost and then Hodgson were tried for sedition, one reason for the difficulty that Erskine had in defending their imprudent utterances was that he had to appeal to...