Free The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins Page A

Cobbett's generation to a new one of apprentices and journeymen. A third, a fourth, a fifth arrest, and still they came. Even married women stepped up: Mrs. Susannah Wright came into the docket of unrepentant defendants, and was duly imprisoned along with her infant. More ominously to prosecutors, she was promptly followed by a clever twenty-three-year-old warehouse worker named James Watson. He had studied Paine's tactics of argumentation closely, and during his trial he pointedly asked the court to produce tangible evidence for any actual injury his books had caused. They couldn't. . . and sentenced him to a year in prison anyway.
    It had only been a matter of time before this happened; Watson had long prepared for it. He'd already spent the Christmas before his arrest visiting Carlile in jail-"as foretaste," one friend wryly recalled, "of the course of instruction preparing for him in that Liberal University." The Times found these idealistic young martyrs too much to bear; one reporter, passing the Temple of Reason, scoffed at their ragamuffin appearance—"squalid, dirty, and listless"—and inveighed the young man to report to the local soup kitchen. The shop could be guarded in his absence, he archly suggested, by going to Cobbett's house up the street and borrowing Thomas Paine to hang in the doorway as a scarecrow: "Apply to old Cobbett, the resurrection-man, and request the loan of Tom Paine's body. . . It would require nothing short of the hardened courage of another resurrection-man to steal either body or books."
    Actually, by the time Watson took the Temple's counter, the shop's workers had already hit upon an extraordinary innovation to protect themselves. Arresting a bookseller for selling Thomas Paine required an informant to go in, buy a book, and to point out the defendant in a courtroom. What if, Carlile's shop assistants reasoned, you couldn't see your bookseller? Customers entering the Temple soon found themselves confronted by a sort of Automatic Blasphemy Machine: a gigantic clockwork mechanism with nary a human in sight. A dial listed the names of all the store's many illicit publications— The Rights of Man , say, or an issue of Carlile's newspaper The Republican . With the dial set to the right title, and money dropped into a slot, a book or newspaper would come clattering down into a receptacle.
    It is sobering to think that the freedom of the press once depended upon a mechanism now used to vend Mars bars. But the "invisible shopman" wasn't an entirely new concept: during a crackdown on unlicensed gin in 1737, London taxmen found themselves confounded by the disappearance of gin shops, despite the streets being as full of outrageously drunk louts as ever. It took months for taxmen to discover the existence of primitive manned vending machines called the "puss and mew." A customer coming up to one whispered "Puss," whereupon a vendor crammed inside answered "Mew." A hidden drawer popped out to receive coins, withdrew, and then slid back out with a dram of the demon drink.
    Like the puss and mew, the Temple of Reason's vending machine proved only a temporary distraction to authorities, rather like overturning a chair in the path of someone chasing you; soon they stepped around it and rounded up employees from behind the clockwork. But magistrates were starting to wonder about the wisdom of the prosecutions. The Temple of Reason was now a generation's training ground in idealism, their baptism of persecution, and radicals in other towns were emboldened to follow suit. In what one commentator aptly termed the 'War of the Shopmen," an astonishing 150 booksellers were arrested around the country in three years for selling Carrie's wares as he sat in jail. Among those joining the rebellion was a teenaged economics prodigy in Leeds, one John Stuart Mill. Paine had always been secretly circulated, after all—"Carlile ventured to do that openly which had been done surreptitiously," Mill