An unfortunate man

It was when I was undertaking some family history research, twenty-five or more years ago, when many genealogical resources first began to appear online, that I came across Thomas Pooley. There were rumours in the family of an ancestor who had been imprisoned for blasphemy, sometime in the nineteenth century, but it felt like a legend or a slightly embarrassing joke. Who was this person, if they had ever existed, and what was the truth of the matter? Gradually I uncovered a remarkable, even tragic story. Recently my interest in the man was re-triggered when someone researching his life got in touch. I ended up writing a Wikipedia page on him, which became an awkward business through problems with definitions. More of that anon. First, let us tell the tale.

Thomas Pooley (1806-1876) was a Cornish well-sinker. He lived in Liskeard in Cornwall, barely scraping a living digging wells, street-cleaning and putting up bill posters. He had a wife, Mary, and four children: John, Mary, Thomas and William. It was the death of his son Thomas in 1852, aged eleven, that may have helped trigger what was to follow. The local Anglican and Methodist churches refused to bury Thomas, for reasons not given but possibly on account of Pooley Snr’s troublesome reputation. The boy was found a burial place by the Quakers. Pooley’s anger against the established church certainly increased from around this time, an anger which expressed itself in anti-religious statements which Pooley placed on walls and gates around the Liskeard area, and on the end papers of some Bibles.

The exact wording of these statements is uncertain, but in one case it is recorded that he wrote on the gate of the Reverend Paul Bush, the new rector of nearby Duloe, the words “Duloe Stinks of the Monster Christ’s Bible – Blasphemy – T. Pooley”. This was not conventional behaviour for mid-Victorian Cornwall. The statement had been reported, along with other such examples, following a call for evidence issued by the church about a man who had been writing ‘blasphemous’ statements (no name given at this stage, though they knew their target well enough). It was published on 25 April 1857, in the Cornish Times newspaper:

BLASPHEMY- Any person who has seen a man writing blasphemous sentences on gates or other places in the neighbourhood of Liskeard, is requested to communicate immediately with Messrs PEDLER and GRYLLS, Liskeard, or with the Rev. R HOBHOUSE, St Ive Rectory.

With the witness evidence submitted, Pooley was arrested and brought before magistrates. He protested in a violent manner, uttering the words “If it had not been for the blackguard Jesus Christ, when he stole the donkey, police would not be wanted … he was the forerunner of all theft and whoredom”. These words were not to help his case.

Pooley was duly put on trial at Bodmin Assizes on 30 July 1857. The charge made against him was a follows:

Having unlawfully and willfully composed, wrote and published a certain scandalous, impious, blasphemous and profane libel of and concerning the Holy Scriptures and the Christian Religion, and for having blasphemously spoken against God and profanely scoffed at the Holy Scriptures and the Christian religion, and exposed it to ridicule and contempt, and also for having spoken against Christianity and the established religion.

The trial was something of a farce, certainly a disgrace. The judge was John Taylor Coleridge (nephew of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge); the prosecuting counsel was his son, John Duke Coleridge, later to be the 1st Baron Coleridge. There never was a more absurd example of the establishment crushing the weak to maintain the certainty of established beliefs. Certainly neither Coleridge had time or sympathy for this dishevelled, disagreeable labouring man, nor was there any thought given as to Pooley’s mental state.

Whether Pooley was of unsound mind is a matter of debate. He was opinionated, untutored, expressed himself strangely, behaved eccentically at times, but at root he was an original thinker. The secularist campaigner George Holyoake, who was soon to take up Pooley’s case, listed in his newspaper The Reasoner, five ‘delusions’ that made up Pooley’s beliefs:

1. His grand idea is that the earth is alive – that it is a living animal. And he is afraid sometimes in digging a well, lest he should dig too deep, and so perforate the skin of the earth, and wound the vital parts. The tides appear to him a proof of the earth’s consciousness. If the earth died they would cease to flow.

2. The next idea is that the world is all going wrong, and he lies awake at night trying to set it right. The poor fellow who takes upon his soul the sorrows of the world, takes misery enough upon himself, and deserves rather to be pitied than imprisoned.

3. He believes that if all the Bibles of the world were burnt, and their ashes spread over fields, the potato rot and other current defects of vegetable nature would cease. This is no irreverence, but a fact.

4. He holds that the dead child reappears at the next birth in the family.

5. And most melancholy of all, he believes himself born to bring these truths to light.

Pooley’s beliefs were broadly pantheistic in nature, as Holyoake noted. To modern eyes, however, there is a strong affinity with James Lovelock’s Gaian theory, which postulates that the earth and its biological systems form a single, self-regulating entity. Lacking in any scientific education, and with only the experience of the small world about him, which included his profession as one who dug into the earth, Pooley strove as best he could to imagine a different order of things. It was an astonishing feat of imagination, and the greatest shame that no one paid it more attention. There are strong echoes of the famous case of Menocchio, the 16th-century Italian miller who devised his own astonishingly imaginative cosmology, and was burned at the stake by the Roman Inquisition. His story is recounted in one of the great history books, Carlo Ginsburg’s The Cheese and the Worms. The difference between the two is that Menocchio was persecuted for his beliefs (which nevertheless fascinated his persecutors) while Pooley’s beliefs were ignored – his real crime was to offend propriety.

Certainly the church and the Coleridges were not interested in original thought. They needed to punish that which they found offensive, despite Pooley being patently not guilty of the primary charge of having “blasphemously spoken against God”. He was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison – a twelve-month sentence as recommended by the jury, with an extra nine months added by the judge for the “blackguard Jesus Christ” words Pooley had uttered at the magistrate’s court. Pooley had shown some black humour when he commented early on in the proceedings that “he hoped he hoped the jury were not Christians”, and responded to his sentence with some dark satire, saying that the judge might as well “put on the black cap and finish the matter at once” (judges would put on black caps when about to pronounce a death sentence). This was a man of spirit.

Pooley was taken to Bodmin Jail. Asking that he might shake hands with his daughter Mary as he left the court, a request that was denied, Pooley showed his fury and determination by dragging the policeman and three other prisoners to whom he was handcuffed across the dock so that he could shake hands with her.

That fierceness continued to be displayed when Pooley entered the jail. As punishment for his behaviour in court, he was put in solitary confinement in a dark cell with a bread-and-water diet for three days. Continuing to act wildly, refusing prison uniform and then prison food, Pooley was subjected to force feeding. It took up to six prison officers to try and feed him or dress him, only for him to tear off his clothes and sit naked in his cell. He was forbidden to write, a grievous punishment for so urgent a communicator as Pooley, and they even tried to cut off his long, straggly beard, without success.

There is an irony to all this that was missed by those involved. Pooley’s sufferings were Christ-like. Ralph Rochester, who has undertaken the most recent research on Pooley, writes:

To Sir John Coleridge, bewigged and gowned, the very thought that the pathetic, ragged blasphemer Thomas Pooley whom he had seen only briefly in court, dirty and dishevelled and in a highly excitable state, should be in any way compared to his blessed Friend and Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, would have seemed to be a shocking blasphemy in itself. And yet Tom, now sentenced to serve twenty-one months in prison, handcuffed and escorted by policemen and no whit less defiant of authority, was being sent down to his punishment and any sensitive person familiar with the Christian story might have fleetingly made the comparison. The courtroom scene that was enacted in Bodmin Town Hall where a righteous judge sent away a poor blasphemer to meet his punishment parodies an image of Christ before the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate. Certainly, this judgement was for Sir John a ‘What is truth?’ moment but his faith was tried and true and, unlike Pilate, he could answer that question without any doubt whatsoever and get on with his job.

The prison authorities decided that Pooley’s wild behaviour was proof that he was mad and within a fortnight of his being put in prison he had been transferred to the nearby Bodmin Asylum, on 13 August 1857. From here, where he behaved more calmly, he wrote a letter to his wife that reveals much about his state of mind, his beliefs, and his love of language:

… Mary, I am out out of one dungeon, and yesterday I was removed to the Asylum. But I hope you will not desert me, for I have only done that work which I was born to do. There is but one Great and Grand and Wise Almighty, that brought all things into being. That Being will not desert me, and I will not desert him. There is but one law that rules and reigns with the human family – that is death and life, or life and death. O grave, O grave! thou art like the tides, never at rest. O death, O death! they sting is bitter to a tyrant breast. There is something wrong with the human family, and it is time for man to awake, and ask what is divine and what is not divine … Mary, I hope you will keep all my writings. They day will come when the truth will be looked for …

It was around this time that Pooley’s case came to the attention of George Holyoake (1817-1906). Holyoake was one of the great figures of Victorian Britain, though little-known now. He was a secularist (a term that he coined), editor (he edited and wrote practically every word of the secularist newspaper The Reasoner), a key figure behind the Co-operative movement, and a tireless campaigner for free thought. In particularly he lobbied against the blasphemy laws, being imprisoned for six months in 1842 under those very laws for words uttered during a public lecture.

Holyoake published news of Pooley’s trial in The Reasoner, then went down to Liskeard to investigate matters for himself. He found that the working people thought Pooley as having been treated disgracefully, while the ‘gentle’ and middle-class folk thought the sentence just. He noted that “the awe of clergymen and magistrates is excessive among the people. If the magistrates choose to be harsh, there is no one to check them”. He gathered all the evidence he could and interviewed members of Pooley’s family, though he was advised by the asylum medical officer not to meet with Pooley, in case this over-excited him. He therefore only saw him from a distance. From speaking to Pooley’s wife Mary, who did not follow and said she did not understand her husband’s beliefs, he recorded this telling exchange:

The wife of a clergyman called on Mrs. Pooley, and had the indelicacy to tell the poor woman that ‘she was glad her husband was being punished.’ Mrs. Pooley was constrained to say – ‘Well, my husband never did me any harm, and Christianity has. It has taken him away from me, and I am left to support my youngest child and myself unaided.

From Holyoake’s correspondence with the family, a letter from Pooley’s redoubtable daughter Mary, who Holyoake greatly admired, tells us what kind of man Pooley was when not raging against injustice:

Sir, there is no one that I know of can say any hurt of my father, or that he drinks, or swears, or that he is idle; and a kinder husband never lived. I, when a child, went to the church school for twelve years. He would never try to stop me. He never stopped one of us from reading the Bible.

Holyoake wrote two articles for The Reasoner on 23 and 30 September 1857. They made a considerable impact, among free-thinking circles and beyond, with demand being so heavy that the articles were published separately as a booklet, The Case of Thomas Pooley, the Cornish Well Sinker. The story did not die down, and outrage over Pooley’s treatment grew. Holyoake eventually found a sympathetic Liberal MP, William Coningham, who successfully presented a case for pardon to the Home Secretary Sir George Grey. Pooley was released from the asylum with a free pardon in December 1857.

Pooley was triumphant. He was lionised by the freethinkers and secularists and invited to London to meet those who had championed his cause. Pooley was no free-thinker, however, and was not so much shocked to be among atheists as incapable of imagining that any person could be so. But having served his purpose, and proving to be be something of a nuisance with his incessant often incoherent letters, he was gradually dropped by the Holyoake crowd, and returned to obscurity.

But the Thomas Pooley story was not over. The case did not succeed in changing the blasphemy laws, but it did a great deal to bring them into disrepute. In particular the behaviour of the Coleridges came in for much criticism, notably by the historian Henry Thomas Buckle, who focussed on the injustice of imprisoning a man who was of unsound mind. Buckle wrote his comments in a review of John Stuart Mill‘s On Liberty (1859), one of the great statements of political thought. Mill’s few words in On Liberty on Thomas Pooley have formed his monument (and provided the title for this post):

It will be said, that we do not now put to death the introducers of new opinions: we are not like our fathers who slew the prophets, we even build sepulchres to them. It is true we no longer put heretics to death; and the amount of penal infliction which modern feeling would probably tolerate, even against the most obnoxious opinions, is not sufficient to extirpate them. But let us not flatter ourselves that we are yet free from the stain even of legal persecution. Penalties for opinion, or at least for its expression, still exist by law; and their enforcement is not, even in these times, so unexampled as to make it at all incredible that they may some day be revived in full force. In the year 1857, at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate man, said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all relations of life, was sentenced to twenty-one months imprisonment, for uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning Christianity.

The last person in Britain to be imprisoned for blasphemy was John William Gott in 1921; the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel were abolished in England and Wales in 2008 and in Scotland in 2024. They remain in force in Northern Ireland.

Thomas Pooley died in 1876, aged 69 or 70. His wife Mary died two years later. We know little of his life after 1858, but we know something of his family. His youngest son William went on to become a successful cabinet maker and was able to support his parents in their final years, paying for the family plot in the municipal graveyard at Liskeard. His daughter Mary married a wheelwright, George Rolls. They must have had ambitions for their two sons (a daughter died young), grandly naming them Frederick George De Courcy Rolls and Isadore William Deysart De Vere Rolls. George was killed in an industrial accident in 1872, and Mary brought her children to London. Isadore, known as William, became a prosperous businessman. He ran an art shop on the corner of Bond Street in Ealing for many years – a version of it is there still – and was made president of the Ealing chamber of commerce in 1927. He married, in 1919, Dorothy Davis, my grandfather’s twin sister. The family have kept a copy of the Holyoake pamphlet, The Case of Thomas Pooley the Cornish Well Sinker, to this day.

Pooley’s story has been covered by historians of nineteenth-century religious disputes down the years. Most strikingly, Joss Marsh, in her 1998 book Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England, makes the bold claim that Pooley’s story helped inspire Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure. Hardy very probably knew of Pooley (he had met the younger Coleridge and probably discussed the case with him), and as martyred labourers there is some similarity between Pooley and Jude Fawley. But Jude the Obscure was published in 1895, nearly forty years after the Pooley case. The evidence for any real influence seems slim.

Until February of this year, however, Thomas Pooley did not feature on Wikipedia. With my interest renewed after discussions about his history, I wrote a piece and submitted it to the Wikipedia editors. It was then that the problems started, namely how to describe him. There was already a Thomas Pooley on Wikipedia, a nineteenth-century property developer, so in keeping with Wikipedia’s rules on these things, the second Thomas Pooley needed to be described as Thomas Pooley something for the title of the piece. But what was he? He was pronounced guilty of blasphemy, but that did not make him a blasphemer. He was a criminal, in that he was convicted of what the state considered to be a crime, but a criminal to our eyes he was not. I wanted him simply to be Thomas Pooley, well-sinker, but the objection was made that he was not famous for sinking wells. So what was he?

You can read the whole, prolonged debate on the Talk section of the Thomas Pooley web page, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Thomas_Pooley_blasphemy_case. The suggestions made by the editors, and myself (desperate for some agreement to be reached) were heretic, philosopher, thinker, blasphemer, convict, pantheist, agitator, antireligionist, religious dissenter, religious skeptic, religious critic, well-sinker, well-digger. None of them fitted or was able to satisfy everyone. In the end, and very regrettably to my mind, they settled on Thomas Pooley blasphemy case. So he is a case and not a person. But a person he was, and a powerful one too. A visionary, stubborn to the last, not fitting into anyone’s straitjacket, the whole of the world’s sorrows borne on his shoulders alone, Thomas Pooley was an original.

Thomas Pooley, original. Perhaps Wikipedia could think again.

Links:

• The summary of Thomas Pooley’s beliefs (the five ‘delusions’), the words of the two Mary Pooleys (mother and daughter), and the extract from Pooley’s letter to his wife, all come from George Holyoake’s two articles, ‘The Case of Thomas Pooley, the Cornish Well Sinker’ in The Reasoner, 23 and 30 September 1857, which were republished as a pamphlet under the same title in October 1857
• The best source of information on Thomas Pooley is Ralph Rochester’s website The Altogether Amazing Tom Pooley: All Things Tom Pooley. Although published in blog form, it is in fact an unpublished book manuscript. For those wanting to have just the one thing to read, I strongly recommend the post ‘Tom Pooley’s Fateful Year‘, which is a form of dramatic monologue that gives a real sense of the man (while being a good deal easier to read than most of his actual letters)
• Essays on Pooley that are available online include Ian Hesketh, ‘Weapons of Another Kind: Henry Thomas Buckle and the Case of Thomas Pooley‘, Left History, vol. 15 no. 1 (2010) and Iain Rowe, ‘The Case of Thomas Pooley: A Reinvestigation‘ (2008). Timothy J. Toohey, ‘Blasphemy in Nineteenth-Century England: The Pooley Case and Its Background‘, Victorian Studies, vol. 30 no. 3 (Spring 1987) is available behind an academic paywall
• Pooley’s surviving letters to Holyoake are held by the Co-operative Archive in Manchester as part of its George Holyoake collection
• Joss Marsh’s book Word Crimes is out of print, but second-hand copies can be easily found
• Talking of which, and as unlikely as it may seem, I have another Victorian ancestor with a Hardy connection of sorts, this time to The Mayor of Casterbridge. But that will have to wait for another post at another time …