Reading The Detectives: Escapism or Social Criticism?

What have detective novels got to do with class struggle and revolution? Isn’t reading and writing a distraction from the “real” issues? Does it matter what we read when we sit down and relax after a hard day on the barricades? Aren’t all detective novels just another form of bourgeois escapism, with macho heroes defending the political status quo and capitalist property relations?

Of course reading novels can be just another form of escapism and we all need to escape from the pervasiveness of capitalism as it seeps into every aspect of our live, but there can be more to the detective novel than the blood and guts of commercial sensationalism.

In spite of the commercial success oo the detective novel in the twentieth century its origins lie in social criticism. The first detective novel, Caleb Williams, published in 1794, was written by the anarchist writer William Godwin. Godwin used the account of a murder and its detection by Caleb Williams, a clerk who is the book’s hero, to present a radical critique of a despotic society in which the law functioned as just another weapon in the arsenal of the ruling class.

Caleb, is a clerk in the service of Falkland, an aristocrat, when he accidentally discovers that Falkland has committed a murder for which an innocent man was executed. Although Caleb does not intend to reveal his master’s crime Falkland has him imprisoned on false charges. Caleb escapes but Falkland relentlessly tracks him down. Eventually, as an act of self-preservation, Caleb tells the truth and Falkland is forced to confess. Even after Falkland’s death Caleb Williams is filled with self-reproach and remorse for his own actions, arguing that Falkland had been the product of a corrupt social system, and regretting his own role in the death of the aristocrat.

Caleb Williams contains all the classic elements of the modern detective novel but it is underpinned by a serious indictment of social injustice and a corrupt legal system. The murder and the criminal are both products of the system.


Commodity

Through the means of commodity production, capitalism absorbs and controls what the state cannot ban and repress. Drawing on the new for its novelty value and on the radical for its popularity, capitalism drains ideas of their revolutionary content by transforming them into commodities. As commodities they become subordinated to the rules of capital produced by those with money and control over the means of production.

It was in just this way that the new, socially critical novel was subverted by capitalism and drained of its radical content. The detective novel became a vehicle for maintaining the status quo with the central characters solving the mystery in order to preserve the social order. While Caleb Williams exposed the social system by unmasking the criminal, after Edgar Allen Poe, the solution to the mystery ensured that the survival of that system.

The Sherlock Holmes short stories are classic examples. Whereas Godwin used the detective novel to explain how society functioned and economic, political and legal systems operate under the surface (Caleb Williams was originally called "Things as They Are"), Conan Doyle provides readers with a mystery as an intellectual puzzle.

Sherlock

Doyle established the modern characteristics of the detective story in keeping with the mood of scientific enquiry of his time, but Sherlock Holmes, the detective enigma, was a man alone and outside normal society, a Nietzschean superman whose abilities enabled him to solve the mystery when the forces of law and order had failed. Holmes was the “expert” par excellence, a harbinger of the experts who control our lives now - since Holmes existed to safeguard the ruling class, not to destroy it.

Agatha Christie’s whodunits provide a further subtle twist towards defending the social order. Whereas Holmes protected individual members of the ruling class, Christie’s novels and detectives defend a whole way of life - that of upper class Britain. The threat comes from outsiders, especially the “lower orders”, and the murderer is frequently someone who does not know their place, or resents it. Christie’s real innovation was to make an ordinary “little old lady”, Miss Marple, the person who solves the crime, not the experts.


Kafka

During this period when the reactionary form of the detective novel held sway, there was one revolutionary attempt to transform the detective story into a vehicle for social criticism. This was Franz Kafka’s novel The Trial (which is not normally recognised as belonging to the detective genre at all).

Kafka’s main character ‘K’ is accused by a mysterious legal authority of an unnamed crime of which he knows nothing. The novel deals with K’s fruitless attempts to obtain justice from an arbitrary and absolute authority with which he cannot even communicate effectively, and culminates in his utter frustration, his complete loss of human dignity and his death like a dog.

Kafka fuses detective and accused into a single character - and demonstrates that power, bureaucracy and authority exist for their own sake. K has not committed any crime - indeed the crime of which he was accused is never specified. Kafka’s central concern is with the arbitrary nature of authority and its irrationality. The Trial is a devastating indictment of power - unsurprising given Kafka’s involvement with the Czech anarchist movement during his short adult life. Kafka’s attempt to radicalise the detective story was isolated in a Europe divided by war and revolution and by his early death from TB.


Perry Mason

The next major attempt to bring the detective novel back to its function of social criticism was made by a group of writers based around the American crime magazine Black Mask.

The most prolific of these was Erle Stanley Gardner, who became one of the most successful writers of crime detection in the history of U.S. literature, creating the unforgettable lawyer, Perry Mason. Gardner pared down the detective story to a few essential elements - dialogue, action and plot - so successfully that some aspects of his plots were subsequently copied by Raymond Chandler for Farewell My Lovely, which was loosely based on Gardner’s Case of the Dangerous Dowager.

The early Perry Mason novels have a radical edge, with Mason defending the underdog against injustice and a frequently corrupt police force, just as Gardner had as a young lawyer.

One of Gardner’s contemporaries on Black Mask was Dashiell Hammett. Hammett was at one time an employee of the Pinkerton detective agency which created the prototype for the private detective in the 1850s. Pinkerton’s agency was notorious for its earlier strike-breaking activities which included shooting workers. Hammett’s experience at Pinkerton’s gave him an insight into the true nature of society and transformed him into a communist. Drawing on his background in the Agency, Hammett wrote a series of detective novels culminating in the famous Red Harvest, which is a thinly veiled allegory of capitalist corruption and the ultimate social revolution. This novel is less well known than his later books , The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, in which Hammett created a whole new sub-genre of the “hard-boiled” detective.


Marlowe

Hammett assembled the elements that marked a fundamental shift in the modern detective novel, which were perfected by Raymond Chandler. chandler refined the use of language that Hammett had developed (and which both borrowed from Scott Fitzgerald). Dislocating words and images from their normal context provided them with a razor sharpness, they created a style and language admired by both Sartre and Camus - and which (as Ken Worpole has demonstrated in an underrated but important book Dockers and Detectives) influenced a whole generation of working class writers in Britain, including James Hanley and the less well-known anarchist writer Jim Phelan.

The background to Hammett and Chandler’s writing was prohibition. Prohibition had transformed crime in the U.S. blurring the distinctions between different types of crime, and altering its scale and transforming the petty corruption within the police and the judiciary into an institutionalised corruption.

It was the shallow ineffectiveness fo the traditional detective novel in the face of criminal capitalism that Chandler attacked in his celebrated essay “The Simple Art of Murder” . Chandler’s hero, Philip Marlow, is a catalyst for exposing this institutionalised corruption. His patrons are the rich and the powerful, but they are as corrupt as the criminals they frequently employ or socialise with.

Chandler’s methods were taken further by Canadian born Ross MacDonald, who succeeded in writing detective novels that are a powerful indictment of modern capitalism. There are conscious echoes of Hammett, Chandler and Fitzgerald’s use of language (acknowledged in Macdonald’s autobiography Ceaselessly Into the Past, which takes its title in a line from Fitzgerald), but what makes them effective as social criticism is the way an individual character’s behaviour is linked to social causes and shaped by them.

MacDonald frequently links the social and psychological damage done by war to criminal events which take place much later on, illustrating the effects of militarism through succeeding generations. Young people are frequently portrayed as on a knife-edge between honesty and crime, hope and despair, illuminating the young generation on which MacDonald placed hope for social change. MacDonald often links this social alienation to environmental destruction so that his novels work on several levels at once. The Underground Man does this effectively - throughout the book a forest fire threatens Los Angeles’ suburbs, and MacDonald’s hero, Lew Archer, investigates a murder and disappearance against its background. Ecological disaster threatens from without while the emptiness and alienation of the rich corrode society within. MacDonald connects the two with the revelation that the fire had been started by the murder which triggered his investigation. The central message of Macdonald’s work is that the way we treat people and the environment has consequences.


Warszawski

Since MacDonald the “hard-boiled” style has become almost a cult, although this often owes more to the firm noir portrayal of Chandler’s work and its imitations. It has in turn become a vehicle for writings that reflect the emergence of new social movements. Women novelists like Sarah Paretsky have translated the “hard-boiled” style to create strong independent female detectives like P.I. Warszawski. Paretsky’s characterisation is ultimately unsatisfying in that her heroine owes just as much to the Cosmopolitan school of liberation, and her work bears little comparison to the more incisive political background of Gillian Slovo’s novels with their sax-playing female detective.

One of the most overtly political crime novels of recent years has come from France - Murder in Memoriam by the libertarian socialist Didier Daeninckx. Like MacDonald Daeninckx links individual crimes to social crimes. A murder which is committed during a Paris demonstration in 1961 during which hundreds of Algerians are killed by police is followed twenty years later by the murder of the victim’s son. The solution to the murder links the police massacre of Algerians to the wartime deportation of jews to German death camps and the murders inended to ensure the cover-up of the connections.

Detective novels are not just escapism, but a mirror of society. Just as the detective reveals social, political and economic causes of crimes, so the radical seeks to reveal the social, economic and criminal nature of the political system. Reading won’t change the world, but it can strengthen us in the struggle for a better future.

Martyn Everett

This essay first appeared in issue 28 of Organise! and was reprinted in the first issue of the Alternative Press Review, Fall 1993. It is reproduced here with some minor changes

Review of George McKay: Circular Breathing: the Cultural Politics of Jazz in Britain
Duke University Press, 2005. Paperback £14.95

In Circular Breathing, George McKay explores the emergence of Jazz in Britain and its frequent identification with political protest since the 1940s. In doing so he examines not just the more obvious connections with protest organisations such as the Committee of 100 and CND, but reveals the way complex issues such as race, gender and changing imperial identities were all explored by successive generations of jazz musicians.

McKay’s analysis is enriched by the extensive interviews he has conducted with activists, musicians and fans, giving the book an immediacy and interest that reliance on documentary sources alone can never achieve. A useful and thoughtful action on McKay’s part is to place the interview transcripts and a large body of the letters generated by his research online at www.uclan.ac.uk/amatas.

A distinctive feature of politicised counter-cultures is the way that they often identify with the cultural forms originating in other countries. Rastafarianism is one example, and a second was described by Ken Worpole in his ground-breaking book Dockers and Detectives, in which he analysed the appeal of “hardboiled” US crime novels of the 1930s to an industrial working class that failed to identify with the tamed domesticity of the home counties. The British counter- cultural identification with Jazz provides a number of additional characteristics explored by McKay as the British imitation crosses boundaries of race, colour, sexuality, and adds a far more explicit identification with a wide variety of political issues.

It would be wrong to see the political engagement of British Jazz as straight-forward and McKay explores the nuances of the musical forms and the subtleties of political involvement with care, identifying not just the overt political allegiances but also the the previously overlooked influence of anti-statist currents within British socialism.

Enlivened by photographs from the jazz photographer Val Wilmer, Circular Breathing provides a wealth of closely indexed detail in its 350 pages, from the importance of the Beaulieu Jazz Festivals from 1956-61 to the almost forgotten Jazz Sociological Society. The book’s academic format does result in the loss of some of the spontaneity and exuberance that characterises the music under scrutiny – and the author should consider re-working some of the material in a pared-down populist edition.

George McKay, is a professor of cultural studies at the University of Salford in England and editor of the Journal of Social, Cultural, and Political Protest. he has written widely about the cultural politics of protest, including Senseless Acts of Beauty: Cultures of Resistance since the Sixties, Glastonbury: A Very English Fair . He has also edited DIY Culture: Party and Protest In Nineties Britain.

Martyn Everett

(Originally published in New Humanist Update no: 67 28 June 2006)

Black Mountain College: An Experiment in Alternative
Education

“BMC was a crazy and magical place, and the
electricity of all the people seemed to make for a
wonderfully charged atmosphere, so that one woke up in
the mornings excited and a little anxious, as though a
thunderstorm were sweeping in.”
- Lyle Bonge, Student 1947-48.


Founded in the remote mountains of North Carolina in
1933 against a background of global economic
depression, Black Mountain College was a practical
experiment in alternative education. It pioneered an
arts-centred approach that encouraged students to
learn by experiment, rather than through formal
teaching and it combined communal living with
informality in the classroom.

During the subsequent 24 years the College attracted a
remarkable roll-call of ‘teachers” and students. It
was there that Buckminster Fuller developed his
geodesic dome as a solution to the global housing
crisis, and the composer John Cage and the dancer
Merce Cunningham created the first “happening’ and
transformed modern music and dance.

Avant-garde poets (subsequently known as the Black
Mountain Poets) were drawn to the school - nearly all
of them linked to anarchism and anti-war activism,
most notably Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, and
Robert Creeley. The College also attracted artists
and architects fleeing from fascism in Europe
including Josef & Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, and
Lyonel Feiniger, as well as rebellious US artists such
as Ben Shahn and Robert Motherwell.

Although the student body never reached more than 100
at any one time (and was often less than 50) nearly
1,200 students attended the College during its
lifetime, becoming involved in an exciting,
high-pressure educational experience,that profoundly
changed their lives. There were few rules and
regulations, no required courses, no set schedule of
examinations, no formal grades. Faculty members were
relatively free to choose the courses they would
teach, and at the beginning of each term, students
could sit in on classes to decide which they wished to
take.

The College work programme was a central element in
the college experience and all students took part.
Influenced by educator John Dewey's belief in
"learning by doing" this was similar to the anarchist
concept of “integral” education which believed
intellectual skills should be grounded in practical
tasks.

The college strived to be as self-sufficient as
possible so students contributed to its operation
through a work programme. Work was shared equally by
male and female students - many did farm work, while
others helped in the kitchen and dining room or with
building maintenance. In 1941-42 staff and students
constructed a new Studies Building on the College’s
Lake Eden campus, requiring a massive amount of
labour by College faculty and students, most of whom
had never built anything! With little funding
available, their combined efforts were crucial to
creating the intense feeling of community that
characterised Black mountain College until its closure
in 1956.

Martyn Everett

(Originally published in Freedom, 29 July 2006)

Practical Anarchism: U3A, the Unlikely Bakuninists


Asked to give examples of how anarchist ideas work in
practice most anarchists would probably suggest the
collectivisation of industry during the Spanish
Revolution. If pressed to give more recent examples
then some of the surviving small-scale worker
co-operatives set up since the late 1960s, or free
schools such as Summerhill might be suggested. Yet
there is one successful organisation that few people
would think about, and that is the University of the
Third Age (U3A) which was established as as a way of
providing further education to the over 45s.

Deliberately set up in the early 1980s as an
independent community-based “Mutual Aid University”,
it now has a network of 574 local groups covering
most of the major towns and cities in the UK, and
members in many small rural communities. Although the
numbers of elderly people studying in state-controlled
further education has spiralled downwards, total
membership of the U3A currently stands at over 153,00
(February 2006), and increases yearly.

The U3A adopted a healthy anti-authoritarian approach
right from the outset, so that the formal role of the
tutor was challenged and usually abandoned altogether.
As Eric Midwinter wrote in an early account of the
U3A: “Those who teach will be encouraged also to learn
and those who learn shall also teach, or in other ways
assist in the functioning of the institution – e.g.
through counselling other members, offering tuition
and help to the housebound, bedridden and
hospitalised, by assisting in research projects, by
helping to provide intellectual stimulus for the mass
of the elderly in Britain.”

The deliberate decision to abandon formal tutoring
whenever possible was a social rather than an economic
decision, based on the “assemblage of experience and
skills which is the automatic gift of the third age.
By dint of living, working and travelling, enjoying
hobbies and holidays, fighting wars, raising children
“a veritable treasury of knowledge is spontaneously
available and it is the task of the U3A to mobilise
and channel the resource which otherwise would … be
pitifully wasted.”

This is how one member of Ealing U3A describes their
organisation: “Interest Groups are the heart of the
U3A movement. Groups meet mainly in each other's
homes. Someone with particular expertise and
knowledge takes on the role of teacher, leading each
session. Alternatively, a member acts as secretary and
helper with group members taking it in turn to lead a
meeting. Groups generally meet fortnightly or monthly
and everyone pays 20 pence a meeting to cover tea and
coffee.”

“The movement is a self-help organisation. Most of the
teaching and tuition comes from the ranks of its own
members. It is a unique educational self-help
co-operative. While each U3A is an autonomous unit
responsible for organising its programme, the Third
Age Trust - of which all local U3As are members -
provides local U3As with administrative and
educational resources and support to help in running
their groups. It organises "subject networks" of
individuals who are willing to assist others in their
particular field of study, e.g. languages, history,
geology etc.”

“As leadership comes from the members themselves, a
U3A member may be a student in one group one day and
the leader or tutor the next. It is not always
necessary to have an expert as a leader. In some
subjects, members learn from each other and the role
of the leader is to encourage everyone to take part.
Interest groups are often quite small with meetings or
classes taking place in members' homes. Not only does
this save on accommodation costs, it makes for
friendly contact among members.”

In Norwich the U3A has over 700 members and more than
40 active groups studying computing, science
environmental sciences, seven different languages,
arts, crafts, literature, poetry, theatre, and nearly
20 leisure subjects, including music appreciation,
bowls, philosophy and vegetarian cooking. While
state-sponsored adult education now only runs courses
that result in certificated qualifications, the U3A
does not mark or grade educational activity, and the
rigid boundaries between education and leisure have
been dropped.

In the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Peter Kropotkin
defined anarchism as a society without government,
explaining that social harmony in anarchist society
would not be achieved by “by obedience to any
authority, but by free agreements concluded between
the various groups, territorial and professional,
freely constituted for the sake of production and
consumption, as also for the satisfaction of the
infinite variety of needs and aspirations of a
civilised being.”

He went on to describe how this might be realised: “In
a society developed on these lines, the voluntary
associations which already now begin to cover all the
fields of human activity would take a still greater
extension so as to substitute themselves for the State
in all its functions. They would represent an
interwoven network, composed of an infinite variety of
groups and federations of all sizes and degrees,
local, regional, national and international -
temporary or more or less permanent - for all possible
purposes: production, consumption and exchange,
communications, sanitary arrangements, education,
mutual protection, defence of the territory, and so
on; and, on the other side, for the satisfaction of an
ever increasing number of scientific, artistic,
literary and sociable needs."
( Peter Kropotkin, “Anarchism”, Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 11th edition, 1905.)

The U3A provides a living example of how people can
organise effectively to bypass and replace the state,
demonstrating a method that can be adapted to other
forms of social activity. Of course there are limits
to what has been achieved, and no doubt in some groups
informal hierarchy may still exist. But if member’s
personal experience of non-hierarchical organisation
can be extended into other activities such as credit
unions, housing co-ops, communal allotments, then the
social basis for informal hierarchy will diminish.

The experience of the U3A demonstrates that in their
daily lives people organise in ways which are both
autonomous and anti-authoritarian because they provide
effective solutions to social problems, even if as
individuals they do not advocate anarchism as a
political philosophy. Our role as anarchists is to
argue that the central principles of anarchism –
autonomy, mutual aid, self-help and direct action –
are important as forms of social organisation that
provide a practical social basis for the
reconstruction of society. The members of the U3A
have quietly established one of the largest movements
for libertarian education in Europe, and in doing so
have demonstrated that the state is redundant.


Martyn Everett

First published in Freedom (29 July 2006)


Textbox:

“They will be schools no longer; they will be popular
academies, in which neither pupils nor masters will be
known, where the people will come freely to get if
they need it, free instructions, and in which, rich in
their own experience, they will teach in their turn
many things to the professors who shall bring them
knowledge which they lack. This then will be a mutual
instruction, an act of intellectual fraternity”.
Bakunin (God and the State)

The Prints of Henry Winstanley

Henry Winstanley of Littlebury is best remembered for building the Eddystone Lighthouse in which he lost his life in 1703, during what has been described as the most violent storm in English history. His local legacy, however, survives in the form of 24 detailed intaglio prints of Audley End House, published in 1686 when the House was a “Royall Pallace”. A set of these prints was recently donated to the Town Library in Saffron Walden.

Born in Saffron Walden in 1644, Winstanley’s father (also named Henry Winstanley) was land steward to the Earl of Suffolk during the years 1652-1656. The young Henry Winstanley was also employed at Audley End House, initially as a porter and then as a secretary to the Earl. When the House was sold to Charles II in 1666 he continued to work there under Clerk of the Works, John Bennett, and following Bennett’s death, Winstanley was appointed Clerk of the Works at Audley End in 1679 - a post he held until 1701. He subsequently obtained some “notoriety” for the house he built for himself in Littlebury that he filled with bizarre gadgets and amusing mechanical contrivances. This preoccupation with unusual mechanical and hydraulic devices caused him to design and build a sensational ‘Mathematical Water Theatre’, also known as 'Winstanley's Water Workes' in London’s Piccadilly at the end of the 17th Century.

Between 1669 and 1674 he went on a grand tour of Europe, visiting France, Italy, and Germany, where he was inspired by the architecture of the grand houses and the use of engraving to portray them. He started work on the engravings of Audley End in 1676, two years after his return, using newly acquired skills of engraving and etching in combination. The task appears to have taken him ten years to complete, and was dedicated to James II. In addition to this folio edition, Winstanley engraved a set of ten prints in quarto size, and sold both sets of prints from what Richard Gough described as his “gimcrack” house at Littlebury.

The larger set of prints also included separate dedications to the Earl of Suffolk and to Sir Christopher Wren. The first of these explains Winstanley’s motivation:

"Although it might be the Subject of a learned Pen to describe the Architecture Symmmitry and Scituation of it I have performed the best of my Endeavours in Delineating of the same according to the Rules of Perspective, and having seen the most renowned Palaces of France, Germany, and Italy, especially from whence Architecture is brought over, and those making so great Noise as to encourage many to make Journeys to observe them, and this lying obscure and not took notice of, I thought it injustice to the Founder that he had left such a Monument to Posterity [yet] had not the same advantage as to have his work exposed to the view of the World"
(quoted in H.W. Lewer. "Henry Winstanley, Engraver", Essex Review, Vol. 27 (Oct 1918) 161-171)

According to his biographer, Alison Barnes, Winstanley learnt the techniques of etching and engraving from Wenceslaus Hollar. Hollar worked in England from 1635 onwards and was for a time drawing teacher to Prince Charles, later King Charles II. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, was able to detect Hollar’s influence on Winstanley, writing dismissively in 1901 that he was "no landscape painter; his efforts to represent clouds ended in lamentable failure, while the undulating park-like country, dotted with little trees, and the distant view of the town of Saffron Walden in the concluding 'General Prospect' savours more of the map-maker than of the artist", but concluding "The influence of Hollar is apparent in the technique".

In fact Campbell Dodgson misses the point, as Winstanley’s prints were not intended as works of art but as an architectural survey, and are important for the accuracy with which the buildings at Audley End were delineated. As archaeologist Peter Drury has noted, they provide “probably the earliest full pictorial record of any English Country House” and include a plan of the house and the immediately adjacent grounds, including the cherry garden, the Mount garden, the cellar garden, the brewhouse garden and yard, and the bowling green. The quality of the prints and the level of detail recorded in them varies considerably. The engravings of the Stables are plainly delineated, lacking in detail and unsigned, whereas those of the House provide a detailed architectural record of the building at its largest extent.

In particular, the massive Great Court, subsequently demolished, is faithfully reproduced with its ornate main entrance, curious wedge-shaped windows and slender chimneys. The prints are even detailed enough to make out the unusual feature John Evelyn noted in a diary entry made in 1654: “instead of railings and balusters, there is a bordure of capital letters, as were lately also on Suffolke House”.

Winstanley includes human figures in is work to give an impression of the sheer size of the building, sometimes as devices to indicate the imposing scale, but occasionally to illustrate aspects of life at the house. One print depicts a solitary servant carrying brushwood from large stacks of wood in the woodyard, dwarfed by the massive building.

During his visit to the continent Winstanley had been impressed with the use of engraving to depict the great houses of the wealthy, and in enthusiastic imitation invited subscriptions for a book of the “prospects of the principal houses of England”, printing an “advertisment” of his own house in Littlebury with lengthy inscriptions setting out the terms:

“All noble men and gentlemen that please to have their mansion houses design’d on copper plates, to be printed for composing a volume of the prospects of the principall houses of England, may have them done by Mr Hen. Winstanley by way of subscription, that is to say, subscribing to pay five pounds at the delivering of a fair coppy of their respective houses as large as this plate; or ten pounds for one as large as royall paper will contain. He likewise obligeing himselfe to furnish as many prints of all sorts, at 4d and 6d a print as any that subscribe may require.”

There were few takers, and this ambitious project was never completed, although in his advertisement Winstanley claimed to have made “some progress in this worke allready”. “This worke” may refer to prints of Ricott in Oxfordshire and Tythrop in Buckinghamshire copies of which are included in the Town Library set in addition to the Audley End engravings.

After Winstanley’s death most of the original copper plates were acquired by the publishers Groenwegen and Prevost who re-used them to reproduce the majority of the Audley End engravings in a special supplement to the Nouveau Theatre de la Grande Bretagne published in 1728. The plates subsequently passed to the descendants of the Earls of Suffolk, who sold them “for old copper, and the prints are become extremely scarce.”

Later in his life, Winstanley engraved another, larger, version of the “general prospect” of the “Royall Pallace of Audley End” that was sold at his “Water Workes” in London. It consisted of six sheets, which when joined together, formed a plate of five feet two inches long by three feet deep. In the background is a view of Saffron Walden. This massive print, believed to be contemporary with a lost engraving of the Water Theatre and the familiar engraving of the Eddystone Lighthouse still survives, displayed on the first quarter-landing of the south stairs at Audley End, although it has been damaged by prolonged exposure to light.

The Town Library set is not quite complete as it lacks plates 4 and 17. It was sold as a set, but contains prints from both the folio and the quarto editions described above, as well as some prints from the supplement to the Nouveau Theatre. It also lacks the dedications to King James II, the Earl of Suffolk and to Sir Christopher Wren, who was Surveyor General to the King. It does, however, include an unattributed print of the Innermost Court similar to those engraved by Winstanley, and a smaller general prospect of “Audley End with the Courts and Cuntry adjatient [sic]”that bears his name.

Virginia and Bobby Chapman, who donated the prints to the Library, moved from their London house near Holland Park to Debden Manor in l974. Bobby continued to work in London, commuting from Newport to his architectural practice, Chapman Taylor Partners in Kensington. The firm designed flats, offices and housing projects and specialised latterly in shopping centres such as Lakeside. They now have offices all over the world, including Russia.

One day Bobby, who has always had a great interest in pictures and books, was fascinated by a large display of magnificent prints of Audley End in the window of a bookshop-cum-printseller, Southerans in Sackville Street. Living close to Audley End he found their appeal irresistible. Because of their size the prints lived in a stout portfolio under the Chapman’s sideboard for many years until hearing that the Town Library did not possess a set, Virginia and Bobby decided that this would provide a better home for the prints. They were presented to the Library last November at a reception organised by the Town Library Society.

Martyn Everett.




Select Bibliography

Barnes, Alison, Henry Winstanley: Artist, Inventor and Lighthouse-Builder, 1644-1703. Saffron Walden: Saffron Walden Museum, 2003.

Braybrooke, Richard, (Lord). The History of Audley End, London: Samuel Bentley, 1836

Drury, P.J. & Gow, I.R., Audley End, Essex. London, HMSO, 1984.
Griffiths, Anthony, The Print in Stuart Britain 1603-1689. London, British Museum Press, 1998

Gough, Richard, 1735 -1809 British topography : Or, an historical account of what has been done for illustrating the topographical antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland. London, printed for T. Payne and Son, and J. Nichols, 1780 2 vols.

Lewer, H.W., "Henry Winstanley, Engraver", Essex Review, Vol. 27 (Oct 1918) 161-171.

Supplément du Nouveau Théâtre de la Grande Bretagne, etc. (Thomas Badeslade delin. Henry Winstanley ... fecit. J. Harris sculpt. J. Kip sculp) Publisher: Londres : J. Groenwegen & N. Prevost, 1728

(Originally published in Newport News, May 2006)

Whisper "Louise"
Review of Douglas Oliver: Whisper ‘Louise’: A double historical memoir and meditation, with photographs by Steve Hayes and Jacques Lebar. Reality Street Editions, 2005. £15

Poet and one-time Cambridge journalist Douglas Oliver has written a remarkable book, interweaving recollections of his own life with accounts of episodes from the life of the legendary anarchist Louise Michel. But it is far, far more than a simple exercise in biography, as Oliver uses the coincidences and disonances of the two lives as a way of exploring memory and meaning, the construction of self, and the nature of revolutionary action.

A school-teacher who ran her own schools, Louise Michel played an active part in the Paris Commune – fighting on the barricades and falling in love with fellow communard Theophile Ferré. After the fall of the Commune Ferré was shot by firing squad, and although Louise challenged the Judges at her own trial to shoot her as well, she was sent the prison colony on the island of New Caledonia. On the voyage over she was introduced to anarchism in conversation with other women prisoners. While a prisoner on the island she learnt the language of the indigenous Kanaks, and actively supported them during their insurrection against the French. She also devoted much of her time to studying the natural history of the island, and its folklore.

Returned to France after 10 years, she organised demonstrations by the poor, and was imprisoned for taking bread from bakers’ shops and giving it to the hungry. On one occasion when she was shot by a royalist sympathiser, she refused to testify against her attacker and instead gave evidence for the defence. In order to avoid further imprisonment she moved to London and briefly ran a school for the children of anarchist refugees in London’s Fitzroy Street. The school closed within two years, after a key member of the staff was exposed as a spy in the pay of the police. When she died in 1905 more than one hundred thousand people followed her body through the streets of Paris to the grave.

Louise Michel’s life was rich enough for several biographies, but in her own writings she frequently mythologized significant events, and was silent about others, including her relationship with Victor Hugo. Like Oliver she was a poet, although her poetic sensibilities are best experienced through her prose. Often over-romanticised, occasionally declamatory and florid, the core of her poetry can resonate with emotion and meaning.

Douglas Oliver died in the year 2000, shortly after completing the manuscript for Whisper ‘Louise’. He was a clerk in the RAF during his national service, and on completion he became a newspaper reporter in Coventry then in Cambridge, before moving to Paris to work as a translator for Agence France-Presse. He returned to England in 1972 and read literature at the University of Essex, eventually teaching there for five years. In 1979 he published The Diagram Poems. Based on news reports of the activities of Uruguay’s Robin Hood-styled urban guerillas, the Tupamaros, the poems sympathetically explored the nature of revolutionary violence and the counter-revolutionary barbarism of the state, a subject taken up again in Whisper ‘Louise’.

His best known work is Penniless Politics (1991) originally published in an edition of 150 photostated copies by Iain Sinclair, that Howard Brenton compared to The Wasteland in terms of the impact that it made: “Penniless Politics sets the literary agenda for the next twenty years”. During the last few years of his life Douglas lived in Paris again with his partner Alice Notley, teaching English language and literature at the British Institute. Inspired by the diversity of life in Paris he began work on Arrondissements “a series of books or long sequences in poetry and prose, designed to reflect the world at large through the prism of Paris.” Whisper ‘Louise’ forms part of this project.

Although Oliver identifies with Michel: “Both Louise and I myself have a silliness in us, a wish to end political complications by imposing our naïve compassion on them. Perhaps that’s another reason why I can match memoirs with her” Whisper ‘Louise’ is also critical of the paradoxical flaw in her character – a personal compassion that compelled her to give away everything she had to those in greater need than she was herself, while retaining an unrelenting belief in revolutionary violence as the only effective means of social transformation. Yet at the end of the book it is this character trait which he picks out for final praise.

This is an intensely personal book that raises important questions about ethics, commitment and social action. The death of his son Tom, who was born with Down’s Syndrome and died before he was two years old, haunts Oliver’s work. Less than three years after Tom’s death he worked and slept in Derbyshire’s “Suicide Cave”, an abandoned lead mine. The cave’s dark isolation took him closer to his dead son, and helped him write In the Cave of Suicession (1974). His thoughts about Tom form a counterpoint to the reflections on revolutionary action in The Diagram Poems, and make a similar appearance in Whisper ‘Louise’. Not so much that the “personal is political” as rather the personal is the litmus test against which political action must always be judged.

The rich and colourful accounts of Michel’s life, reflections on episodes from his own life, the tragedy of Tom’s death, descriptions of Paris, discourses on contemporary politics and the implications of revolutionary action frequently impart a sense of breathless urgency to the text. With some reason as while he was working on the last chapters he became aware of the seriousness of his cancer. Within months of finalising the manuscript Douglas Oliver was dead, leaving Whisper ‘Louise’ as a final testament to a rich poetic sensibility, a carefully honed technical ability, and his own underlying humanity.

Martyn Everett.

Reviewed in: CCCP 16 (Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry) April 2006

Alternative and Activist Media
Review of: Mitzi Waltz, Alternative and Activist Media. Edinburgh University Press, 2005.
Reviewed in Freedom 25 February 2006

In an age when communication is dominated by giant international corporations exercising an "all-pervasive mass-media monopoly", Mitzi Waltz examines the ways in which alternative and activist media have opened "cracks in the mass-media monolith through which strange flowers grow."
Although published by an academic press, and intended for use on journalism, sociology and media studies courses, her book is written in a lively and accessible style (apart from the occasional sprinkling of terms like "counter-hegemonic") that makes it a useful tool for community-based activists.
The first chapter looks at the reasons for the existence of alternative and activist media, and the part they play. Chapter two provides a short history touching on earlier forms of media monopoly, and the role played by technological change in opening up opportunities for alternatives to develop. Chapter three examines the ways in which mass media are consumed, and there are five chapters that focus on the different formats favoured by alternative and activist media, including radio, video, film, print and digital media.
Many of the examples of activist media in action are inspiring, such as the precise summary of the way in which the Undercurrents video collective started and has continued to grow, in spite of having thousands of pounds worth of video equipment smashed by the police in Genoa. Particularly useful features of this chapter are the details of free online courses, and an emphasis on the importance of effective distribution.
Mitzi provides an interesting account of activist cyberculture, and its successes, such as the creation of the non-hierarchical computer networks that enabled activists to expose the dangers of the Chernobyl melt-down. There are also examples of the pitfalls encountered by successful ventures, such as the online alternative community De Digital Stadt, which by the year 2000 had 160,000 subscribers. Unfortunately, because of a flawed internal structure this project was eventually transformed into a consultancy business by a small group of members.
The weakest chapter is the section on radio, which suffers from over-emphasis on US examples of the use of radio, whereas a summary of the successes and failures of community and pirate radio in Britain would be more relevant. It would also have been useful to compare the US experience with that of Europe, where alternative radio stations, such as Radio Alice (Italy) and the French Anarchist Federation’s Radio Libertaire have successfully linked radio broadcasting to street activism.
There a perceptive account of the problems faced by successful alternative media projects, and what happens to them, as they are absorbed into the mainstream. Unfortunately there is no discussion of several important issues that have underpinned and extended the impact of media activism, such as the free software movement and the development of an information commons.
Predicting the future forms and direction of activist media is a chancy business, but Waltz tackles this partly by anchoring this last speculative chapter in a short but pithy account of the development of Indymedia, and the growing use of new tools like Wikipedia.
This is an important book because it provides a critical overview of alternative and anti-capitalist media in all its variety. The short practical exercises at the end of each chapter are well thought out, and the provision of web addresses, and further reading will help the reader develop the necessary skills to become consciously involved in creating the next wave of media activism.

Hidden Treasure in Saffron Walden


The old Town Library in Saffron Walden is discreetly hidden away on the top floor of the flamboyant Italian-styled building that houses the public library in the Market Place. It was formed in 1832, when the Saffron Walden Literary & Scientific Institution was founded for "the promotion and diffusion of useful scientific knowledge". The original collection reflects the wide-ranging tastes and interests of the Victorians so that the 17,000 volumes in the Library range from a beautifully hand-written medieval psalter produced in about 1350 to several hundred Victorian pot-boilers, many of them by obscure and long-forgotten novelists. There is a small but important collection of original English civil War publications, including rare Leveller and Ranter tracts, as well as key works in topography and early Archaeology. Stepping into the reading room is to walk back in time. A wooden Victorian clock ticks quietly over the mantle-piece, and the walls are lined with original glass-fronted mahogany book cabinets, full of leather-bound volumes. These include the personal botanical collection of George Stacey Gibson, a 19th century Quaker benefactor of the Library, who was the author of the first Flora of Essex published in 1862.

Gibson has been described as a "keen and discriminating bibliophile", and many of the greatest treasures in the collection came from his personal library. These include a first edition of Camden's Britannia, and a set of Cities of the World by Braun and Hogenberg (Cologne, 1574-1616). There are some interesting early Herbals with wood-engraved illustrations and long runs of some of the most important journals from the 18th and 19th century, including the Annual Register and the Gentleman's Magazine. Gibson was keenly interested in the early science of photography and many of the earliest books containing photographic illustrations can also be found on the shelves. In 1960s the Literary Institute was unable to keep going financially, but the members had seen similar libraries forced to break-up and sell their collection, and were determined to avoid a similar fate. In 1967, after negotiations with Essex County Council, the Trusteeship of the Town Library was transferred to the Council. The Town Library is now administered as a charitable trust with the County Council as trustees.

Following a report on the collection by the distinguished historian Professor H J Dyos, it was agreed that the Town Library should form the backbone of a Victorian Studies Centre, and during subsequent years many new volumes have been added reflecting the strengths of the original collection, and dealing with the history and culture of the Victorians. The Victorian Studies Centre provided the Town Library with a practical purpose which was to prove vital in attracting a continuing flow of students and researchers from a wide area. The expansion of Higher Education and distance learning has created an expanding group of students who have been able to benefit from use of the Library. Source material and contemporary research materials including a wide range of academic journals are available for use side-by-side within the same institution. In recent years the Town Library and Victorian Studies Centre have worked closely with Anglia, initially co-operating in a series of day-schools held in Saffron Walden and then through the establishment of the MA in Victorian Studies. Two years ago the Town Library Society co-ordinated a £100,000 appeal to improve the storage and study facilities in the Town Library. The Appeal was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Pilgrim Trust, Essex Heritage Trust and many individuals and organisations, including Anglia Ruskin University, which provided a grant towards making the catalogue of the historic collection available online.

Martyn Everett
First published in: Aspects, Alumni Magazine, Anglia Ruskin University, Autumn 2005

Practical Anarchy - Eleuthera

Elèuthera is an anarchist publishing co-operative
based in the heavily industrialised city of Milan, in
the North of Italy. It is operated by the same group
that organises the Centro Studi Libertari / Archivo
Giuseppe Pinelli, named after the anarchist railway
worker who was thrown from a Milan Police Station
window in 1969.

The co-operative developed from the activities of a
group of anarchist activists who came together in the
1960s. In the 70s they become increasingly convinced
that the political realm was becoming less and less
open to intervention and debate, so decided to
concentrate on the social sphere. The group was both
militant and articulate, and was able to engage with
wider intellectual currents beyond the anarchist
movement.

Elèuthera grew out of a need to promote anarchist
ideas outside the "ghetto" of the anarchist movement
so that anarchist ideas would start to circulate in
the wider culture of Italian society. Its members
were convinced that there was a widespread interest in
anarchism and they wanted to find a way to put these
ideas into circulation for serious debate.

From that starting point they took a calculated
decision that it was necessary get anarchist books
into the general bookstores rather than just see them
circulated within the anarchist milieu. When they
started Elèuthera in the late 80s and early 90s it was
comparatively easy to gain access to commercial
distribution networks, but it has gradually become
more and more difficult as the big publishers have
attempted to squeeze smaller publishers out of
business through their ability to offer larger
discounts and well-financed sales promotion.
Consequently the Elèuthera co-operative has to devote
an increasing amount of time and energy to
distribution. This has limited the level of other
activity at the Pinelli Centre. Nevertheless,
Elèuthera has managed to establish a distinctive
identity within Italian publishing. Their books are
frequently recommended on course reading lists and
attract the interest of the mainstream media.

Years of hard work, determination and effort have paid
off. The two original members of the co-operative
have increased to seven and there are now more than
150 titles in the Elèuthera catalogue including works
by Noam Chomsky, Murray Bookchin, Kirkpatrick Sale,
Colin Ward, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Claud Lefort,
Ursula LeGuin, and Kurt Vonnegut. Recent books
include Italian translations of Tim Jordan's Direct
Action, Sean Sheehan's Anarchism, and Colin Ward's
Water. Other new titles include a book on the
Zapatista rebellion, and Carlos Amorin's The Dirty War
Against Children - the story of Sara Mendez, a young
Uruguayan anarchist living clandestinely in Buenos
Aires, with her young son Simon. Captured by the
military she spent 5 years in prison. When she was
eventually released in 1981 Simon was, like many other
children, officially "disappeared" and forced to live
under a new identity.

The most popular books tends to be on architecture and
urbanism, and the application of anarchist ideas to
social organisation - the kind of topics pioneered by
Colin Ward in Britain - books which are not overtly
anarchist, but look at anarchist ideas in action. One
paradox that they have not been able to resolve is
that whereas big publishers are able to sell books on
anarchism in large quantities, the anarchist movement
finds that its books on anarchism sell in only limited
numbers, usually within the anarchist milieu.
Elèuthera's books that speak to a readership about
applying anarchist ideas to everyday life now and in
the future sell very well. Subjects range from art and
literature to sustainable cities, technology,
surveillance, and from social space to libertarian
education.

Average print runs are often quite small - only 1,500
copies, but their best-selling title, by the French
sociologist Marc Augé, has sold more than 20,000
copies. Augé has identified a space within capitalism
that he defines as "no space" - impersonal, soulless
places such motorways, airports, shopping malls,
around which capitalism is increasingly organised and
within which people loose their identity and their
concept of space. People are only connected to these
spaces in a uniform and bureaucratic manner and
creative social life is not possible within them.

In addition to Elèuthera's publishing activities the
co-operative based around the Pinelli Centre also
produce a popular topical monthly magazine A Revista
Anarchica, which is sold throughout Italy (even in
many commercial newsagents as well as left-wing
bookshops) and Libertaria, a magazine with longer more
reflective, analytical articles. There is also a
regular bulletin, that narrates a "living anarchism",
related to the lives of ordinary anarchists, so that
it features biographies of ordinary activists, rather
than the great names of anarchism. In particular they
have been keen to publicise the activities of the
anarchist resistance to Italian fascism, which has
largely been written-out of the "official" histories.
So far 23 issues of the bulletin have been published,
and full pdf versions are available online.

Elèuthera
www.eleuthera.it/hp.htm

Pinelli Centre
www.centrostudilibertari.it/

A-Rivista Anarchica
www.anarca-bolo.ch/a-rivista/

Libertaria
www.libertaria.it/

First published in Freedom, 10 Dec 2005