London Corresponding Society, Alarm'd. . .

This print shows a highly caricatured group of mostly tradesmen attending a secret, literally underground meeting of the London Corresponding Society. The tankard on the table belonging to "Tom Treason" suggests that this meeting is taking place in the "Hell Fire Cellar" in "Chick Lane" an area notorious for prostitutes, pickpockets, and now, apparently disreputable political activity. On the wall behind the tradesmen are pictures of Thomas Paine and John Horne Tooke, both of whom had been prosecuted by the Pitt government under new and increasingly repressive laws in the wake of the French revolution. Paine had been tried and convicted (in absentia) for seditious libel in December 1792 for the publication of the second part of The Rights of Man. Tooke was tried (and acquitted) in 1794 for high treason in a series of famously unsuccessful prosecutions of English radicals that included Thomas Hardy, one of the founding members of the London Corresponding Society.

London Corresponding Society Alarm'd. . .

London Corresponding Society Alarm'd. . . [April 18,1798]
© Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

According to the open book of "Proceedings" on the far right of Gillray's print, the delegates attending this meeting include a blacksmith, a barber, a butcher, a fishmonger, a tailor, and a dissenter. Their "alarm" stems from the fact that five Irishmen, several of whom had links to the London Corresponding Society, had been indicted on April 10 on charges of high treason just days before the publication of this print. They included Arthur O'Connor, his servant Jeremiah Leary, John Binns, Father James O'Coigley (aka Quigley), and John Allen. The five had been arrested in Margate on their way to France to enlist the aid of the French in the upcoming Irish rebellion.

Three of the five names can be seen on the list of "State Arrests" being read out by the chairman of this motley group with his revolutionary bonnet rouge. The name "Evans" was likely a late substitution by Gillray for John Allen. Thomas Evans, secretary of the London Corresponding Society, was arrested separately from the others on the evening of April 18th while meeting with other radical groups also planning revolution. Gillray did not have time to include any of the other information from that arrest, but the addition of Evans name made the print just that much more topical and relevant.

Like the Society of United Irishmen, the London Corresponding Society began innocently enough with the goal of Parliamentary reform. Aimed at the working classes of society—shoemakers, weavers, tailors, and the like—the Society was intent on stimulating political awareness and activity among working class men and women by organizing petitions to Parliament and making political text like Thomas Paine's, The Rights of Man available in cheap editions. But the successive prosecutions of the members of radical societies certainly helped to drive them underground and to even more radical positions.

Through the extensive use of aquatint, Gillray emphasizes the darkly subterranean nature of this meeting. But his portrayal of the worried participants huddled around a small table with a single candle and not enough stools and barrels to sit on also suggests that this pathetic group of activists may not really pose much of a threat.

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