The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (10 page)

During his time in London Locke wrote for at least two literary journals: a Liverpool publication called the
Bee,
for which he reviewed literature, and the
Imperial Magazine,
founded by the Methodist theologian Samuel Drew, where his chief subjects were biography and Italian history. Still, while Locke would likely have disdained writing for more eminent literary journals such as the
Quarterly Review
and
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
— both of them stoutly Tory in their politics—the
Bee
and the
Imperial
were a long way from the top, not the sort of platform a young writer would most have desired for his work. Though he was intelligent and energetic, and able to write about a wide variety of topics, Locke was having trouble finding his footing in the world of London publishing. London, of course, was a far larger and more bewildering place than the one from which he had come; moreover, he hadn’t made the kinds of friendships, so useful in advancing a career, that were often formed among the students in Britain’s elite public schools and universities. He must have been living with a real sense of frustration and exhaustion when, at the beginning of 1823, he received an unexpected opportunity: Charles McDowall, a printer and bookseller back in Bristol, offered him the job of editor for a new monthly magazine, to be called the
Bristol Cornucopia.
Becoming editor of the
Cornucopia
meant that he would no longer have to depend for his living on the vagaries of the freelance life. It also meant that he would be leaving London and returning to England’s southwest, the land that he knew so well.

In April 1823 McDowall’s presses began turning out the first issue of the
Bristol Cornucopia,
a sepia-colored volume of about octavo size, not much larger than one’s hand, sold for the price of sixpence. The first issue ran to thirty-two pages, and the second one double that, consisting mainly of essays, poems, and reviews, with subject matter ranging from the history of chemistry to geological theory and the etiology of human depravity. While there is something undeniably invigorating about a magazine in which discussions of Milton and Byron sit side by side with “On the State of Water and Aeriform Matter in Cavities Found in Certain Crystals,”

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much of the writing in the
Cornucopia
seems, by today’s standards, almost comically overwrought. “It is generally conceded,” begins a review of Milton’s poetry, “that even the muse of Homer scarcely wound might-ier wings of flame than that which, with solemn and persevering aspiration, bore the genius of Milton above this low diurnal sphere, and made him familiar with regions of glory, of which the Grecian muse never viewed the lightness, nor drank the inspiration.”

William Griggs claimed that Locke himself wrote most of the material for the
Cornucopia,
and much of the nonscientific prose does share an overly earnest, self-consciously aesthetic style that can be ascribed to the exuberance of a young writer testing the limits of his own powers. As was common at the time, most of the material is unsigned; the two pieces bearing the initials
R. L.
are the metaphysical essays that lead each of the issues, entitled “Space” and “On the Origin, Nature, and Moral Appliance of Human Knowledge.” The essays are recondite, not easily entered; they propose an immanent God, one who inhabits the world everywhere, “as perfect in the centre of a mass of steel or block of marble, as in the ‘heaven of heavens.’” The more substantial of the essays, “Space,” culminates with the almost Blakean exclamation, “He is in our blood, and in our bones, and in our spirits!” They are two heartfelt reflections on the nature of God and his works that glorify the Divine Being without ever referring to Christ, the Bible, or indeed any Christian teachings.

Perhaps that was what proved to be the problem: perhaps Charles McDowall came to believe that Richard Adams Locke was not hewing closely enough to the “reverence” and “moderation,” the celebration of

“the grand Doctrines of the Gospel” that McDowall had promised in the prospectus for the
Cornucopia.
If so, McDowell’s reaction was the first instance of a lifelong pattern for Locke, of losing editorial jobs after conflicts with publishers. Or maybe the issue was simply financial, as there turned out to be not as many intellectuals in Bristol as McDowall had supposed. In either case, the
Bristol Cornucopia
lasted only two issues.

Charles McDowall turned his attentions again to his books and his printing presses, and Richard Adams Locke found himself out of work. It was his first editorial failure, though it was by no means his last; another was to come shortly, just across the county line, back home in Somerset.

A local newspaper was just then being started in Somerset, to be called the
Bridgwater and Somersetshire Herald,
and an editor was needed. The

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publishers, Thomas Besley of Exeter and Jeffrey Brinning of South Brent, likely offered Richard Adams Locke the position after hearing of his abilities from his neighbors. Though no copies of the
Herald
survive from the 1820s, for an account of Locke’s brief but tumultuous tenure with the paper there are the recollections of a man named James Dare, who had apprenticed for the
Herald
when he was young, and actually set into type many of the editorials written by Richard Adams Locke.

After Locke’s death in 1871, Dare wrote an article in the
Weston Mercury and Somersetshire Herald
(as the paper was now called) entitled “A Lost Somersetshire Worthy,” which extolled the work of this “remarkable individual” and lamented the fact that he was so little remembered even in Somerset. As Dare recalled it, Locke threw himself energetically into the activities of the new paper, and with good reason: after years of disappointing freelance writing and an unsuccessful stint as the editor of a literary journal, he had at last found the job that most suited his talents and interests. He could write about a wide variety of contemporary issues for an interested readership, and his writing, with its earlier tendencies toward grandiloquence, would necessarily be pared and honed by the newspaper’s narrow columns.

As was to be expected for someone who had emerged out of the Republican movement, Locke adopted radical editorial positions for the
Herald,
tactfully characterized by Dare as “much in advance of the general political views of the period.” Locke’s editorials so antagonized the local gentry and clergy that they pressured the publishers of the
Herald
to fire the young editor. Somerset landowners were outraged by his stance against the Corn Laws, which forbade the importation of foreign grain into England unless domestic grain was selling above a fixed price. The local clergy took umbrage at Locke’s editorializing against the Test and Corporation Acts, which barred from civil and military office any Briton unwilling to swear allegiance to the Church of England. Roman Catholics were thus prohibited from holding public office, a ban that included university positions. Although they were not denied the vote on religious grounds, Catholics could not serve in Parliament—a particularly contentious situation in Ireland, where Catholics made up nearly three-quarters of the population. Catholic emancipation had long been the most intense political conflict in all of Great Britain, and Locke championed the cause in the pages of the
Herald,
writing a series of editorials that condemned the English clergy as idle and dissolute and contrasted their lavish lifestyle with
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that of poorly paid Catholic priests in Ireland. These editorials so infuriated the curate of Burnham, a Reverend Trevor, that he initiated a libel action against the newspaper. After a good deal of negotiation Besley and Brinning got the suit dropped on a single condition: that Richard Adams Locke give up his post as editor of the
Herald.

For the twenty-five-year-old Locke, it must have been a bitter defeat—

to have finally found a job he loved, only to be forced from it under threat from political opponents. It was a scenario that would be replayed a decade and a half later, halfway around the world, when he lost his job as editor of the
New Era,
the penny paper he had helped found, after his editorial denunciations of two Democratic power brokers. He was never able to keep a job for long. In his political views he steadfastly resisted the power of authority figures—whether politicians, aristocrats, or clergymen— and so too did he in his own life, at far greater cost, with the publishers who held sway over his future.

Locke continued to write articles for the
Herald
and privately published pamphlets advocating, in William Griggs’s characterization, “the most ultra doctrines of Unitarianism and Universalism, in connection with the most Republican principles.” Though much of his writing championed Catholic emancipation, he was also a fierce opponent of religious control over civic life, and he took a strong stand against the temporal power of the pope—that is, the right of the pope to rule as sovereign over territory, an issue then very much in dispute. For nearly two years, in the pages of the
Herald,
he conducted a weekly debate on the issue with several Catholic clerics. (Even then, Locke seems never to have declined an opportunity to joust with a clergyman.) Another controversy arose from a sermon preached by a local minister, Reverend John Matthews of Kilve, advocating the use of philosophy as an aid in interpreting biblical texts. The sermon was so well liked by Matthews’s congregants that it was issued in pamphlet form under the title
The Necessity of Philosophy to the Divine.
Locke, unsurprisingly, found little in Matthews’s pamphlet to admire; he quickly produced his own pamphlet, called simply
A Review,
in which he derided the sermon as “unconscionably impudent and dogmatical” and argued—in line with Universalist principles of the time—that the Bible itself is sufficient source of religious information. This in turn led to a heated denunciation of Locke by an anonymous pamphleteer (he called himself only “A Defender of the Faith”) who suggested that Locke’s pamphlet “may have
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been better entitled A WRY VIEW OF PHILOSOPHY,” in so doing making cruel sport of Locke’s crossed eyes.

In 1826, when he was twenty-six, Richard Adams Locke married a local girl named Esther Bowring, eleven years his junior, and the two settled at Mill Batch Farm. He was once again living under the same roof as his siblings and his father; his mother had died nine years earlier, at the age of only thirty-seven. Surely a tension existed between a son returned home after failing to establish himself in the world and a father who did not approve of his son’s politics or profession (he could not have had much to say about his fifteen-year-old daughter-in-law, given that his own wife had been fifteen when he married her) and who had chosen not to provide for him in his will.

His father died the next year, at the age of sixty. Richard Adams Locke was now the oldest man living at Mill Batch—though this state of affairs proved temporary, as in 1829 his sister Ann got married and her new husband, John Kent, came to live at the farm. Almost fifty years old, Kent was an itinerant preacher very popular among the faithful of the surrounding area, where he was known as “the apostle of the hill country.”

Thrown together in that crowded farmhouse were two antipodal brothers-in-law: Kent, a country clergyman of the more exuberant variety, and Locke, who professed a Dissenter theology and had lost his job by antagonizing a local curate.

By that time Richard Adams Locke was cobbling together a living by placing occasional reviews in magazines and writing the sort of anonymous scholarly work, for textbooks and the like, that so often make up the freelancer’s livelihood. In August 1830, Esther gave birth to a daughter, Adelaide. Locke was now on the cusp of thirty, and with distressingly few prospects. The family estate, built up over two generations, had not been passed on to him; and in any event, he had no interest in managing land. He considered himself a newspaperman, but he had been ousted from the local paper and in the process had become notorious as a radical and freethinker, which was one thing in London and quite another in a place like Somerset, where everyone, it seemed, knew everyone else, where the church was the hub of town life and the walls were not smeared with broadsheets and graffiti. Memories ran long in Somerset, and even five years after the fact publishers were not interested in hiring someone who had so alienated the most powerful of his newspaper’s readers. Nor would Locke likely find employ-

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ment again in Bristol. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran high there (in 1829 peti-tions against Catholic emancipation had collected more than 25,000 signa-tures, and mobs shouting “No popery!” had attacked a Catholic church and the homes of several prominent Catholics), and there would not be much sympathy for a man who had championed emancipation.

Even republicanism offered little of cheer. The movement was losing steam now, having evolved through the 1820s into an electorally based campaign for parliamentary reform, which was encountering seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The new Whig prime minister, Earl Grey, had introduced a reform bill into Parliament to grant representation to rapidly growing industrial cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester; though the bill passed the House of Commons, it went down to defeat in the House of Lords. The bill’s defeat sparked riots throughout Great Britain, none worse than in Bristol, where on October 31, 1831, mobs ran wild through the city, looting and setting fire to more than a hundred buildings. In the Mansion House along Queen Square, where the mayor had barricaded himself in an upper room, rioters broke down the doors with beams of timber used as battering rams, then swept through the house smashing furniture, windows, mirrors, and chandeliers. Later the Mansion House would be burned down, as would the Bishop’s Palace, though not before the books in the bishop’s library had been tossed into a bonfire and the wine in his cellars looted and then sold on the green for a penny a bottle. Gangs roamed through prosperous sections of the city, breaking into houses and demanding money under threat of murder; terrified homeown-ers, locked in their bedrooms, flung out handfuls of silver coins to the crowds below. Looters methodically piled goods stolen from warehouses into wagons and trucks, forming streams of vehicles coming and going and returning again for more, as the owners looked on helplessly. Boys holding torches rushed from house to house, leaping through windows and setting fire to furniture. Before long all the buildings along two sides of Queen Square were aflame, the separate blazes running together into a single immense conflagration, bathing everything in its proximity in a ghastly red light. “One seemed to look down upon Dante’s Inferno,” a horrified observer would recall decades later, “and to hear the multitudinous moan and wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro amid that sea of fire.”