Travels in Revolutionary France and a Journey Across America: George Cadogan Morgan and Richard Price Morgan
272
Travels in Revolutionary France and a Journey Across America: George Cadogan Morgan and Richard Price Morgan
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783165438 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2012 |
| Series: | Wales and the French Revolution |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Paul Frame is a self-employed geological consultant and researcher in Enlightenment and Welsh Enlightenment history. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth.
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Travels in Revolutionary France & A Journey Across America
By George Cadogan Morgan, Richard Price Morgan, Mary-Ann Constantine, Paul Frame
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2012 Mary-Ann Constantine and Paul FrameAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-543-8
CHAPTER 1
George Cadogan Morgan Travels in Revolutionary France
Introduction: 'A World of New Ideas'
Early in July 1789 four men set out from Dover on a nine-week European tour that would take them down through France to Marseilles, Nice and the Italian and Swiss Alps, and back through Alsace and the Low Countries. Like hundreds of British tourists before and since, they went with the expectation of enjoying new landscapes, encountering new cultures, trying different kinds of food, and visiting notable monuments. More open-minded than many, they also took a keen interest in how these Continental societies organized matters such as agriculture, education and care of the sick. They had planned ahead, bringing letters of introduction to local mayors and merchants, as well as to various British and American expatriates. Their connections at home made them well aware of the rapidly evolving political situation in France, of the convocation of the Estates-General in May that year, and of the birth of the National Assembly a mere week or two before they set out. Yet, like the Calais innkeeper who confidently assured them that they would find Paris 'perfectly free from disturbance', they could never have predicted that their arrival in the French capital in the second week of July would coincide with the eruption of popular unrest, the storming of the Bastille, and other extraordinary events of the French Revolution.
All four travellers must have recorded their experiences in letters home to their families, and, by huge good fortune, the accounts of three of them have survived. The letters of the Norwich doctor Edward Rigby were published in 1880 by his daughter, Lady Eastlake, and her edition has often been cited by historians of the French Revolution. The unedited manuscripts of these, discussed below, are in fact a more reliable source, since Eastlake did not hesitate to rewrite as she thought fit. The letters of Samuel Boddington, the son of a prominent London merchant, have already been used to good effect by Jeremy Black in his studies of the Grand Tour. Those of Ollyett Woodhouse either do not survive or have yet to be tracked down. The letters of the Glamorgan-born Dissenting minister and scientist George Cadogan Morgan have until now only been known partially, from quotations cited in other works. They are here published for the first time in their entirety, together with a political pamphlet written by Morgan three years later at a critical moment in the Revolution. A lively autobiographical account by his son, Richard Price Morgan, reveals what happened to the next generation of this radical Dissenting family as, after their father's early death, they tried to make their lives in America.
Both men's accounts are striking testimonies of places and events that shaped the modern world: they are the responses of individuals caught up in the flow of history. The force of that flow is exhilarating and frightening, and like all travellers and adventurers, however well prepared, they cannot always control the pace and direction of the journey. Both narratives involve vivid descriptions of river journeys, and if George Cadogan Morgan is doing no more than other tourists have done before him when he takes a ferry down the Rhône, he is still awed by the strength of the forces at work: 'indeed, the velocity when the river is flooded is so great as to take away from the boatman all the power of his helm.' His son, precariously navigating timber rafts down the Mississippi, notes in his more matter-of-fact way that it 'required much care ... to avoid being carried precipitously by a four mile an hour current against various dangerous obstacles, that are continually presenting themselves'.
Revolutionary France and early nineteenth-century America are, for these British travellers, terra incognita, and both are in their way dangerous. But the father and the son share a fundamental resilience, and an optimism about human nature that makes them ideal travellers, willing to negotiate obstacles and risk the loss of 'power at the helm'. Their gain is that of all those who travel with open minds. As George Cadogan puts it at the end of his account, still dizzy with delight at his experiences in the Swiss Alps: 'It has cost me a deal of trouble, but it has rewarded me with a world of new ideas.'
George Cadogan Morgan: a life
George Cadogan Morgan was born in Bridgend in 1754, the son of a doctor, William Morgan, and of Sarah Price, sister of the political philosopher Richard Price. He was educated at Cowbridge School, where he became Head Boy and showed a talent for the classics. He then spent a year in Oxford, at Jesus College, before moving, after his father's death, to complete his education at the Dissenting academy in Hoxton, where he was taught by his uncle Richard Price as well as by Andrew Kippis, Samuel Morton Savage and Abraham Rees. Financial reasons seem to have played a part in this decision, but there is no doubt that his religious convictions shifted decisively at this period: he is said to have once declared Oxford and Cambridge to be 'full of debaucheries and luxuries'. In 1776, aged only twenty-two, he was invited to preach at the Unitarian Octagon Chapel in Norwich. In 1783 he married Anne (Nancy) Hurry, from a prominent Dissenting family in Great Yarmouth: they would, in fifteen years together, have nine children, a daughter and eight sons, and she would prove an extraordinarily resilient mother after her husband's early death. In Norwich, Morgan pursued scientific studies, writing a paper on electricity and combustion which was published by the Royal Society. He seems at this point in his life to have been liberally inclined (he supported, for example, the work of the Society for Constitutional Information), but not yet radical: a speech made in 1784 shows him to be an advocate of parliamentary reform for wider representation, but has none of the fire of his writing and opinions in the 1790s. A certain taste for conflict is nevertheless revealed in a long, ill-tempered pamphlet of 1782 attacking the Revd F. J. Brand, who, he claims, has insulted his 'literary and moral character' and, unforgivably, criticized the writings of Richard Price. It seems likely, too, that his time in Norwich brought him into contact with Edward Rigby, a doctor of gynaecology and future mayor of the city, also with radical sympathies.
In 1785 Morgan moved to Great Yarmouth, where he began to take paying pupils at home in addition to his preaching duties. Two years later he was invited to take up a ministry in Hackney. Here, besides preaching alongside his increasingly frail uncle at the Gravel Pit Meeting House, he taught courses in the classics, mathematics and science at the recently established New College at Hackney – where William Godwin was among his students – and continued to tutor several of his own pupils at home. Some of the scientific lectures from this period would appear as Lectures on Electricity in 1794. For reasons apparently connected with the somewhat volatile nature of the college at this time (it was riven with factionalism and financially unstable) he did not take up Price's ministry upon the latter's retirement, and in 1791 – the year Price died – he moved his family and pupils to Southgate in Middlesex, where he lived close to his brother William Morgan, the actuary, and to the Boddington family, with whom he had close ties. Throughout the 1790s his home was a busy hub of progressive education and increasingly radical Dissent. Gatherings of like-minded friends met, according to his son, 'every Saturday afternoon, to discuss the political condition of the world, and the interesting events daily occurring on the continent'. A flavour of these meetings is captured in an entry from William Godwin's diary for September 1794, which reads: 'Dine at Morgan's, w. Battie, Boddington & Amelia; adv. Ives Hurry & Walters; talk of God & Burke. Sleep at Southgate.' If Richard Price Morgan's memories of early childhood are to be trusted, they did more than talk:
some of my first recollections were the patriotic songs of the period. For while trotted on the knee, I was frequently entertained with the 'Marseilles Hymn', 'Ca ira' and a variety of lively French national tunes.
Morgan's social circles were, as far as we can tell, primarily defined by the overlapping spheres of religious Dissent and radical politics. The sources are frustratingly sparse, but one gets little sense here of 'Welshness' as a cohesive factor. His mother spoke Welsh, and his brother William could apparently 'turn a Welsh song into elegant English on the spur of the moment', but we know nothing about George Cadogan's knowledge or use of the Welsh language, though it seems entirely likely that he spoke it as a child. His name does not appear in the lists of the Gwyneddigion or the Cymmrodorion, the two main London-Welsh societies of the period, and nothing in his surviving works shows any particular antiquarian or linguistic interest in matters to do with Wales. Yet, scattered as they were across London and East Anglia, the different branches of the Morgan family remained very much in touch with their South Walian roots. As George Cadogan's son Richard would later remember, a network of cousins, aunts and uncles preserved Glamorgan as a place of renewal and of family sociability for many generations. Caroline Williams records nice vignettes of George swimming energetically in the sea ('the person of Mr Morgan,' noted his obituary, 'was about the middle size, tending to corpulency but athletic and powerful in an uncommon degree'); or, with his brother William and their respective elder daughters – 'the two Sarahs' – visiting an aged aunt. Glamorgan ties apart, however, there is little evidence for a consciously Welsh identity, and almost none at all in the letters from France. Just once, travelling near Marseilles, he seems implicitly to acknowledge his Welshness when he teases Rigby for being 'loud and boisterous' over 'two stupendous mountains': 'I affected great indifference at the sight, and intreated Rigby to be less troublesome when he next saw what was astonishing only to the Marshland Eyes of a Norfolk Man'. Elsewhere, however, he is happy enough to describe himself as 'one of John Bull's calves'.
The 'interesting events' abroad moved Morgan, in the critical summer of 1792, to pen an anonymous Address to the Jacobine Societies, urging the French to seize their opportunity to obliterate the institution of monarchy – 'the most destroying Pestilence that ever desolated the Universe'. The powerful language of this essay, discussed further below, doubtless echoes what his son calls the 'bold political eloquence with which he electrified his hearers'. That his sympathies were not muted by events in the difficult years that followed is suggested by the comments of Amelia Alderson (later Opie) in 1794, on the publication of the names of the jury for the upcoming trial of Horne Tooke:
My usual spirits have been lowered this morning by hearing Mr Boddington and Mr Morgan mark the printed list of the jury. Every one almost is marked by them as unfit to be trusted; for almost every man is a rascal, and a contractor, and in the pay of government some way or another. What hope is there then for these objects of ministerial rancour?
Like many radicals in the 1790s, however, Morgan learned to curb both his tongue and his pen: 'I hoped,' he wrote to his mother, 'to have published my uncle's life ... but I am sadly frightened by poor Johnstone's conviction.' The bookseller and radical sympathizer Joseph Johnson, founder and publisher of the liberal Analytical Review, was convicted in July 1798 for his part in the publication of Tom Paine's Rights of Man (1791/2). George Cadogan Morgan's biography of Richard Price did not, therefore, see the light of day in the 1790s – it is possible that the reception history of Price's work would have been quite different if it had – but was completed by his brother William after his death, and published as Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Richard Price in 1815.
During the summer of 1798, which would be his last, he kept a close eye on events in Ireland, and lamented to his mother that 'the state of things in that country can admit of no change for the worse', adding many graphic details of 'roads covered in putrid bodies. In every direction burnt or burning houses. The villages changed into barracks and in many places daily executions. Some flogged, some half hanged and the horrid spear spikes elevated with the bleeding heads of the rebels fixed on them.' The level of detail here is intriguing, and one would give a great deal to know more about the 'good authority' that supplied such disturbing information – and, indeed, about the general awareness of the conflict amongst the British public as a whole. And there is not, it must be said, quite enough context in the extracts of letters quoted by Caroline Williams to be certain exactly what, beyond horror at the carnage and deep concern for the ordinary people involved, Morgan's political response to the Irish rebellion may have been.
The Southgate house was full of children, the Morgans' own and five more from two other families, without counting the young men who came as pupils, and house guests like Amelia Alderson who came for lengthy visits. Richard Price Morgan, writing in old age, is not always correct in his dates and his facts, but his evocation of those early years filled with companions and shaped by the progressive educational ideals of his father is engaging. His description of his father's study – 'strikingly characteristic of the great mind that furnished it' – has the glamorous awe of childhood about it, and is testimony to the centrality of education in the Morgan household:
His schoolroom was his study, an immence apartment, not less than sixty feet in length, and twenty-five feet wide, and proportionably high, with book shelves requiring a step ladder to get access to all the valuable works in his extensive library. Considerable space was appropriated to his philosophical apparatus, specimens for the study of natural history, anatomy and mineralogy, occupied the shelves of large glass cases, while a broad table supported electrical machines, jars and other experimental models, as well as globes and a grand telescope, manufactured by Dolland, which had been a legacy from Dr. Price.
Morgan's scientific curiosity may have led to his unexpected death on 17 November 1798, aged only forty-four; his published obituary described an 'affection of the chest' leading to 'pulmonary fever', but the family account claims that he 'inhaled some poison, which carried him off after a short fever'. He left Anne with eight children, and pregnant with another. Her story and those of her children are recalled in the memoir that forms the last part of this volume.
George Cadogan Morgan lies buried in Southgate. One of many people from this period whose lives were busy with the pursuit of knowledge and the progress of humankind, he has left relatively little mark on the historical record. A poem (under the pen name 'Ignotus', but possibly by his wife or daughter) in The Monthly Magazine the following spring lamented that he was 'cropt like a May-day flower in all its bloom', and it is frustrating to think what he might have accomplished had he lived longer. His letters from France reveal him to have been an affectionate husband and father and an observant traveller, possessed of a robust faith in human nature that allowed him, like many others at this critical moment, to believe that the whole of European society was on the verge of changing for the better.
Letters from France, summer 1789
In 1789 George Cadogan Morgan was thirty-five. In late June of that year he and his family moved from Clapton into a house in Hackney owned by the merchant Benjamin Boddington and leased by him for £90 per annum. A mere fortnight later Morgan, Boddington's twenty-three-year-old son Samuel and another young man, Ollyett Woodhouse, set off for Dover on their own version of the Grand Tour; they were joined from Norwich by Edward Rigby, then in his early forties, who proved a popular addition to the group: 'Mr Rigby,' wrote Samuel to his stepmother on the first evening of their journey, 'fully answers the description Mr Morgan gave of him he is indeed a very pleasant man.'
The connections between the four men are worth exploring as they give some idea of the motivation for the journey and the dynamics of the group. Samuel Boddington (1766–1843), though already working in the family business at Mark Lane, seems to have been tutored by Morgan in 1787; his younger brother Thomas was certainly receiving 'preparatory education for New College Hackney' from him between 1787 and 1789, and doubtless his schooling was one of the many commitments that made Morgan reluctant to allow the tour, tightly scheduled for July and August, to extend much into September, revolutionary delays notwithstanding. The Boddingtons were a prominent Dissenting family, actively involved in parliamentary and religious reform, and close to the Morgans over two generations. It is likely that Ollyett Woodhouse, from another Norwich Dissenting family, was also a pupil of Morgan's. A cousin of Amelia Alderson Opie, who was distantly related to George Cadogan through his wife's family, Woodhouse could have been one of several 'young men of liberal families', who came via family contacts in Norfolk. Given Morgan's semi-defined role as mentor, it is not impossible that the Boddingtons and/or the Woodhouses at least subsidized the costs of the tour.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures,Preface,
Acknowledgements,
List of abbreviations,
George Cadogan Morgan, Travels in Revolutionary France,
George Cadogan Morgan, Address to the Jacobine Societies (1792),
Richard Price Morgan, A Journey Across America,
Select Bibliography,