I was reading Barnaby Rudge on the bus on the way to the Putney Debates 2017 earlier in the year. So when I sat in St Mary's Church, Putney, listening to the speakers and thinking about the state of the nation, I started to realise that Charles Dickens was whispering in my ear about something of relevance today. It is already well known that the meaningless signifier 'Brexit' can easily be used to direct hatred, but I hadn't been thinking very much about the way that Catholicism offers such a readymade dimension of 'otherness' that may account for some of the hostility against Polish people in the UK since the referendum. I wrote this short piece for The Lacanian Review Online, which is a regular round robin of news items from English-speaking colleagues around the world. It was circulated on 24 Feb 2017. (The LRO website is currently being updated.)
As it happens, I’m reading Barnaby Rudge, a historical novel by
Charles Dickens.[1] Halfway
through the book the characters are swept up in the Gordon Riots. Gordon Riots?
I’d never heard of them, but, as Freud famously said, when something is not
remembered, it is destined to be repeated. In a nutshell, the Gordon Riots were
a series of anti-Catholic riots that took place in London over ten days in June
1780. I don’t think it’s on the national educational curriculum. Hundreds of
people were killed,[2]
property looted and buildings ripped up and razed to the ground. The riots were
provoked by a petition presented to Parliament by Lord George Gordon (1751-93),
who is characterised by Dickens as a hollow man whose vanity led him to oppose all
the other MPs, who were about to sign a bill to relax restrictions on Roman
Catholics.[3]
Lord Gordon has a few characteristics that make him a ready reference point for
some current key figures in modern politics. Rather privileged, he went to an excellent
school, but he turned out to be essentially aimless and sensitive to perceived
criticism. He got himself elected to parliament in 1774 and became known for
his biting but eccentric speeches. Gordon, standing up in Parliament, incarnated
a single chantable master signifier – “No Popery” – and in this way he served
as the lightning conductor for a mass movement with no particular aim. When the
mob gathered, all that was left for it was to target the Catholics and their
property, thus quickly achieving a rearrangement of the social relationships
and a redistribution of wealth – at least temporarily! Eventually the king (George
III) summoned 12,000 troops to quash the mob. Dickens describes the scene of
the subsequent hangings in a way that echoes the circumstances of the mob’s
beginnings. Instead of a hollow man standing in Parliament, incarnating the
master signifier, there were the gallows, standing tall, surrounded by the disciplined
machinery of the state: soldiers, gaolers, hangmen. And rippling out from this
grim centre came new opportunities for property owners to make money as people
competed for vantage points in the surrounding houses from which to watch the
spectacle. All that remained was to feed
the bodies of the miscreants into the machinery of capital punishment to
re-establish the social order and pacify the people. Lord George Gordon was
tried and acquitted for high treason; it was ‘the people’ in their various
guises (paupers, cripples and orphans[4])
who provided the grist for the mill.
Janet Haney
[1] Penguin English Library, 2012.
[2] “In a word, the
crowd was utterly routed. Upwards of two hundred had been shot dead in the
streets. Two hundred and fifty more were lying, badly wounded in the hospitals;
of whom seventy or eight died within a short time afterwards. A hundred were
already in custody, and more were taken every hour. How many perished in the
conflagrations, or by their own excesses, is unknown; but that numbers found a
terrible grave in the hot ashes of the flames they had kindled, or crept into
vaults and cellars to drink in secret or to nurse their sores, and never saw
the light again, is certain. When the embers of the fires had been black and
cold for many weeks, the labourers’ spades proved this beyond a doubt.” Ch. 73,
Penguin English Library.
[3] Oxford English
Reference Dictionary, J. Pearsall & B. Trumble (eds), OUP, Oxford, 1995.
[4] “It was a sad sight – all that show, and strength, and
glitter, assembled round [the] helpless creature[s]… Two cripples – both mere
boys – one with a leg of wood, one who dragged his twisted limbs along by the
help of a crutch, were hanged in this same Bloomsbury Square. […] Another boy
was hanged in Bow Street’ other young lads in various quarters of the town.
Four wretched women, too, were put to death. In a word, those who suffered as
rioters were for the most part the weakest, meanest, and most miserable among
them. It was an exquisite satire…” Ch. 77.
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