The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (9 page)

Still, Richard Locke was a man of vast ambitions, personal as well as communal, and what he avowed about printing did not necessarily obtain for other business matters. At eighteen he made his first purchase of land, a twenty-acre farm owned in absentia by the Lord Mayor of London, and for the rest of his life he accumulated parcels in small, steady increments;
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by the time of his grandson’s birth in 1800 he owned 146 acres, making him one of Burnham’s wealthiest landowners, and he lived in the manor house of Highbridge, a small seaside village within Burnham.

This illustrious Locke lived to the age of sixty-nine (he outlived all three of his wives), leaving behind him four children, two books and innumerable shorter writings, and a permanently altered landscape. (At least one contemporary historian has cited him as “perhaps Burnham’s most distinguished native inhabitant.”) He had appointed his son Richard as his ex-ecutor, and to him he left the bulk of his estate. Otherwise, not much is known of the younger Richard. The only written mention of him comes in a letter in a 1792 issue of
Gentleman’s Magazine,
a passing reference to “the ingenious Mr. Richard Locke, of Magdalen-hall, Oxford,” the Locke family having now risen into the educational elite of British society. At Oxford he studied theology, though rather than become a minister he followed his father into the surveying business. He also lived in a house that had been left to him by his father, called Mill Batch Farm, in the nearby village of East Brent. In all ways, it seems, he followed the course his father had set, none more striking than in his choice of wife: Anne Adams, the daughter of his father’s third wife—his stepsister.

Richard and Anne Locke had two sons, the elder of whom carried both of his parents’ names: Richard Adams Locke. He was the third of the Locke children, following Anne and Mary, and preceding the twins Emma and Jane, Christopher (who died in infancy), and Cecilia. Richard Adams Locke was born at the opening of the nineteenth century, but the landscape of his childhood might well have been recognizable to a resident born in the Middle Ages: lush fields dotted with long, low farmhouses built of stone dug from the nearby hills; cider houses with cool, dark cellars full of apples; graceful stone windmills standing atop the hillsides, their black canvas sails turning the intricate machinery that ground wheat into flour and beans into meal, operated by millers who dressed as they always had, in long white smocks, with red kerchiefs tied around their necks. East Brent was a modest farming village, just a narrow outcropping of thatch and stone with a few shops, towering above them the high, square white steeple of the Anglican church. There the days passed slowly, the essential rhythms still more attuned to the sun than the clock. For the children of East Brent there were games of leapfrog and prisoner’s base, or hopscotch on a court drawn into the dirt with sticks, just six successive
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rectangles with the word
London
scrawled at the end, an ancient tradition that had surely lost its original meaning, the city as the endpoint of Roman armies on the Great North Road, now replaced with the vague notion of London as a far-off, desirable destination. English weather being what it is, though, more often the play was confined to the house, with spinning tops and cups and balls, games of draughts and dominoes, and for a bookish boy like Richard, hours on end spent reading, mostly tales of moral instruction but, when he could find them, exciting stories of voyages to distant lands, like
Robinson Crusoe
or
Gulliver’s Travels
— fantastical tales, though all of them related as absolutely true. When he grew a bit older he could have made the steep climb to the top of Brent Knoll, the highest hill in the area, a good place to sit and read poetry or just gaze down at the countryside, that neat green patchwork of fields and hedges: a landscape attractive and familiar to him, but surely, even then, feeling uncomfortably small, like a hand-me-down garment worn too long.

Looking around from the top of the knoll, Richard Adams Locke would have seen no fewer than seven windmills at work, including one windmill to the north that belonged to his own family. That windmill had been in operation at Mill Batch Farm for well over a century; it was likely worked by a tenant miller living in one of the farm’s outbuildings, who paid rent to the Locke family. This would have been just one of Richard Locke’s sources of income; there were enough of these to enable him to be called, in the phrase of the day, a man of independent means. By this time he had become a surveyor, after the example of his father, although how much actual surveying he did is not clear. Nor do we know much about the relationship between father and son, although the son’s later political activities might help illuminate that, as, perhaps, does another detail from the self-told story of Richard Adams Locke. In his introduction to
The
Celebrated “Moon Story,” Its Origins and Incidents,
William Griggs men-tions that Richard Locke “served in Canada in the Corps of Royal Engineers and subsequently in other regiments throughout the Peninsular war, until the battle of Waterloo,” surely information that he got from Richard Adams Locke himself. Though no specific dates are provided, the term of military service would have been fairly lengthy, starting sometime before 1808, when Britain entered the Peninsular War, and lasting at least until 1815, the year of the battle of Waterloo. It also means that Richard Locke would have been trained as an officer, as the Corps of Royal Engineers
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was an officer-only rank until 1856. Yet a search conducted by the National Archives of the United Kingdom, examining all available indexes of army officers, found no record of a Richard Locke serving in the Royal Engineers at any time from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, in Canada or anywhere else; nor is there a record of his having served as an officer in any other regiment. So this would seem to be a story of Richard Adams Locke’s own concoction—one in which, during a substantial portion of his childhood, his father was not present at all.

Richard Adams Locke’s early schooling was conducted by his mother, as was typical among the landed families of that time and place, but by the time he was ten his father had hired him a private tutor; even at that age he had a powerfully descriptive writing style, and with his keen intelligence and seemingly bottomless capacity for knowledge he was already showing signs of becoming a genuine scholar. (Around the village it was often said that he had inherited his grandfather’s genius.) The logical next step would have been for Richard Adams Locke to continue his education at one of England’s citadels of higher learning, either Oxford or Cambridge. According to the conventional Locke story, he chose Cambridge; it is a detail that is repeated again and again in the historical citations of Richard Adams Locke, from the briefest entries in dictionaries of American writers to the more substantial accounts in Frank O’Brien’s history of the
Sun
and William Griggs’s introduction to the “
Moon Story
” volume.

(According to Griggs’s account, Locke “graduated for the Established Church, without taking orders,” a story that concisely recapitulates his father’s experience at Oxford.) The sole basis for this claim, however, would seem to be Locke’s own word: there is no record of Richard Adams Locke ever having attended the University of Cambridge.

The
Alumni Cantabrigienses,
Cambridge’s own authoritative, multi-volume register, lists “all known students, graduates and holders of office at the University of Cambridge, from the earliest times to 1900.” Nine Lockes are included in the volume covering the years 1752 to 1900, but Richard Adams Locke is not among them. (His father does appear in the Oxford equivalent,
Alumni Oxonienses.
) The absence is striking; if Locke’s story were true, he would surely be listed there. He would have been included in the
Alumni Cantabrigienses
even if he never earned a degree from Cambridge; indeed, he would be listed even if he had attended a single lecture. To be named in the
Alumni Cantabrigienses
a student had only to matriculate—register for the university. Any student
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who had failed to matriculate would not have been permitted to take classes at Cambridge, much less graduate.

Richard Adams Locke did not, in fact, attend the University of Cambridge. He did not follow his father into a gentleman’s education, before a life spent managing the family estate. The pressure to do so must have been enormous. He was, after all, a Locke of Somerset, a bearer of the falcon crest; even more powerfully, he was a
Richard
Locke, the fourth man in a row to carry that name, and he was his father’s only son. Always there was the memory of his grandfather, who had risen from tradesman to lord of the manor, impressing himself on the landscape as deeply and permanently as the fences that now crisscrossed the hillsides, dividing one man’s land from another’s. Richard Adams Locke surely felt the weight of the generations bearing down on him, and it would not have been much of a surprise if he had finally relented and gone off to university for a time, and then come back home to stay.

But he didn’t. Instead, he broke away, in pursuit of a different life.

Lockes had lived in East Brent for countless generations, but for him it would be only the starting point. Now, as in one of his childhood games of hopscotch, he set out for London.

Richard Adams Locke’s sojourn in London is not well chronicled, but it does offer one intriguing detail, the name of the political journal he is said to have written for: the
Republican.
From that brief and obscure period of his life, it is one of the few shards that have survived; still, it is a highly instructive one because it associates him with the cause of British republicanism, the noble effort to transform Great Britain’s discriminatory political system by such measures as universal manhood suffrage, annual elections, and the secret ballot. Not only does his republicanism comport with much of what is known about Richard Adams Locke, but it also provides insight into the choices he would later make, including writing his moon series for the
Sun.
For that act can be understood only in the light of his radical politics, which, unfortunately, have always been downplayed in the subsequent retellings of the story.

According to William Griggs, Locke’s work for the
Republican
constituted an “unsuccessful effort to indoctrinate the British people with the principles of American democracy.” Frank O’Brien wrote essentially the same thing in his history of the
Sun,
although he chose the phrase

“theories of American democracy.” While these bland readings of Locke’s

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early journalism would have been more palatable to American readers of, respectively, the 1850s and 1920s, they do not convey just how daring, and how dangerous, it was to be a Republican in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century—a time of intense social and political turmoil, when the British government passed an act that prohibited holding a public meeting of more than fifty people without the prior consent of a magistrate, and another that made it a crime to publish material that was seen as encouraging Britons to hate their government.

Many of the British Republicans of the 1820s were, as Griggs and O’Brien indicated, enamored of America; but the new nation served less as a working model than as a source of political inspiration, a symbolic alternative to the existing system, much as the Soviet Union did for many radicals of the following century. Apart from the institution of slavery, strongly condemned by Republicans, America was viewed as a bastion of religious tolerance and civil liberty; perhaps more than anything, it was revered as a society born of rebellion, in which an army of poor farmers had ousted the mighty British Crown, the very government against which the Republicans themselves were struggling. To support greater enfran-chisement in Great Britain—not to mention a more equitable system of taxation, another important Republican cause—was to ally oneself with the working class against the aristocrats whom Republicans regularly denounced as useless and corrupt. Republicanism turned Lockean (that is, John Lockean) political philosophy on its head, arguing that
lack
of property, not possession of it, was the foundation of personal virtue, as it encouraged what Republican writer T. J. Wooler called “courage and firmness” rather than submission to the existing system of inequality.

The Republicans found their expression in cheaply printed newspapers and pamphlets, on placards and broadsheets posted on walls, and even on the walls themselves, in graffiti. (As one unsympathetic observer of the time described London, “Libellous caricatures adorn’d the walls; / And greasy pamphlets lay on dirty stalls.”) They were the rank outsiders of British society, willing to raise the flag not only for political equality but also, just as scandalously, for religious nonconformism. Many Republicans saw the Anglican Church as its own distinct segment of the British landed gentry—a wealthy beneficiary of an unfair tax policy, an apologist for an antiquated social system, and, too often, a purveyor of religious bigotry.

To be a Republican was to challenge the notion of a divinely sanctioned class structure, the right to rule of Britain’s nobility, the ancestral peers

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and country squires, whose sons attended Oxford and Cambridge before coming into their rightful patrimony—precisely the life that Richard Locke of Burnham had worked so hard to achieve, and that Richard Locke of East Brent was now enjoying. For Richard Adams Locke, to be a Republican was not merely to stand against a political system; it was also to stand against his family.