SOURCE: Adams, M. Ray. “George Dyer and English Radicalism.” In Studies in the Literary Backgrounds of English Radicalism, pp. 227-66. Lancaster, Pa.: Franklin and Marshall College Studies, no. 5, 1947.

[In the following excerpt, Adams corrects the image of Dyer as a lovable fool by investigating his religious and political ideals in relation to his contemporaries.]

To see the gentle George Dyer placed among even the milder radicals will surprise those acquainted with him only as the friend of Charles Lamb (and there are few who know him otherwise); for Lamb has immortalized him by dwelling almost exclusively upon the unconscious comedy of his outer life. The oddities of his character have likewise been the engrossing topic of his other friends and of those of our own time who have written about him.¹ The only recognition of George Dyer's extensive contribution to the liberal thought of his time which I have been able to find in all that has been written about him, is contained in a single sentence of the obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine for May 1841: “His kind heart most warmly sympathized at all times with the cause of civil and religious liberty, which he uniformly espoused by his writings, more especially by his work on The Theory and Practice of Benevolence and a treatise entitled Complaints of the Poor.”But this gives little idea of the range of his thinking. Lamb has explored his heart for us, but has left no adequate intellectual estimate of him. In fact, by his minute chronicling of Dyer's harmless foibles he has spoiled the perspective upon his work. There is not a line of appreciation in Lamb about his political and religious philosophy. To Lamb, George Dyer was primarily a queer specimen in the laboratory of human nature. And yet he undoubtedly loved him; he wrote that he never spoke of him “except con amore.” Lamb's respect and even reverence for Dyer, it is true, have been often discounted because he so frequently made his friend the object of raillery, but his playfulness was always at the expense of the accidents, not of the essence, of Dyer's character. He was a convenient butt for good-natured ridicule and the tolerant object of some of the most delightful humour that has ever graced the English tongue. So perhaps more literature has been made about Dyer than he made himself. His many eccentricities are sauce to the bare facts of his uneventful life: his unassailable innocence, his amazing credulity, his bookishness, his absentmindedness, his slovenliness, his economy pushed to the point of denying himself proper nourishment, were sources of endless amusement to his friends and provided Lamb especially a constant temptation.

Lamb said that a biography of Dyer would be as interesting as any novel, and that he planned to put him in a novel if he outlived him. Strange to say, the biography has never been written. Even his autobiography, which in the blindness of his old age he dictated during the last seven years of his life, has been unfortunately lost, though there is an extract from it in the obituary sketch of the Gentleman's Magazine. So the records of his always laborious and generous-hearted and sometimes distinguished endeavors lie scattered in the lumber-rooms of literature. It is the hope of the author of this study, though he has had to accept the handicap of writing soberly about a man whose lack of humour was said to “amount to a positive endowment,” to show that George Dyer was a respectable force in the progressive thought of his time and that, though he shines now in the reflected light of the genius of greater men who were his friends, the light of his own genius kept him, while living, from being obscured in contact with them.

Dyer's political and religious philosophy was steadied by the ballast of his great classical learning, in which, like his radical friend, Gilbert Wakefield, he was a marvel of industry. His works all have the air of serious scholarship. Lamb pays tribute to his “fine erudition.” The simplicity upon which so many have remarked involved no lack of knowledge but was limited to his personal relations, though his scholarship was multifarious rather than profound. Leigh Hunt calls him “an angel of the dusty bookstalls and of the British Museum.” Hazlitt has left us an engaging portrait of him as an unworldly bibliophile:

He hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters, or is like the dust upon the outside of knowledge, which should not be too rudely brushed aside. He follows learning as its shadow, but as such he is respectable. He browzes on the husks and leaves of books. … The legend of good women is to him no fiction. When he steals from the twilight of his cell, the scene breaks upon him like an illuminated missal, and all the people he sees are but so many figures in a camera obscura. … His mind cannot take the impression of vice; but the gentleness of his nature turns gall to milk. … He draws the picture of mankind from the guileless simplicity of his own heart.²

Much of what Dyer wrote is buried under anonymity in the mere projects of booksellers or in such magazines as the Analytical Review, the Critical Review, the Gentleman's Magazine, and the Monthly Magazine. Circumstances condemned him to much hard literary labour without inspiration and left the blight of dullness upon much of his literary output. However, when dealing with subjects in which his convictions were enlisted, like most of the great public questions of the early period of the French Revolution, he wrote with vigour and perspicuity and often with grace. And he never reached the borders of rant. Upon matters of political and religious controversy he seemed to feel, like Godwin, what Wordsworth has called “the central calm subsisting at the heart of endless agitation.” In fact, few men have delivered themselves of radical ideas with more soberness. As a writer in the Monthly Review notes, his use of obsolete phrases gives his prose “the air of an old sermon of the seventeenth century.” But there is in his pages little of the unconsciously mirth-provoking qualities that sauced his conversation, and Lamb praised some of his prose.

Dyer's poetry naturally suffers more than his prose from the pervasive soberness of his nature. E. V. Lucas writes that it is “just so many sober words in metre.” The epigram of Crabb Robinson's friend Reid was considered just by many:

The world all say, my gentle Dyer,
Thy odes do very much want fire.
Repair the fault, my gentle Dyer,
And throw thy odes into the fire.(3)

Lamb's ridicule of Dyer's critical pretensions and of his poetical discrimination has led to the complete neglect of his poetry and even to an imperfect knowledge of its extent.⁴ But Lamb's opinions themselves are to be discounted to some degree from the very fact that he himself was incapable of soberness and that he always so warmed to his subject when he spoke of “G. D.” that what went into him fact did not always come out truth. The denial to Dyer of a cultivated taste is not so well justified as the denial to him of imaginative vigour. Pegasus, it is true, generally “runs restive” with our poet. There can be little imaginative glow in poems full of borrowed sentiments conscientiously acknowledged in ubiquitous footnotes. But a careful reading of his essays published in Poems, 1802, on “representative,” lyric, and elegiac poetry, indicates poverty neither of knowledge nor of discrimination. Unlike the average of his early contemporaries, he was no abject follower of Pope. He sometimes achieves the unaffected simplicity of Wordsworth's blank verse, and he is full of the humanitarian fervour of the early romantic poets.⁵

We now turn to pertinent facts about George Dyer's career, especially those of his association with the leaders of liberal thought.

The association of the name of Dyer with Lamb begins with their attendance at Christ's Hospital, which was the early intellectual nurse also of their friends Coleridge and Leigh Hunt. Through the kindness of “some charitable dissenting ladies” Dyer was sent to the famous charity school at nine. He stayed there twelve years and was for some time at the head with the rank of Grecian. But he had left long before Lamb entered in 1782, and had graduated in 1778 at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.⁶ Upon taking his degree he submitted to subscription, though with misgivings sufficient, it is thought, to have caused him to be denied a fellowship. Soon afterward he was sent by the Baptist Fund in London as a pupil to the Rev. Robert Robinson in Cambridge, presumably to be trained for the dissenting ministry. Robinson, a brilliant man with whom Dyer had first become acquainted while an undergraduate and whose life he was later to write, was destined to run the whole gamut of dissent. Through Robinson's influence Dyer was led to Unitarianism and, it seems, to political free-thinking as well. Robinson was an admirer of Voltaire and Rousseau. About 1780 he founded the Cambridge branch of the Society for Constitutional Information, a society for political reform which was later very sympathetic toward French revolutionary principles. In this society Robinson preached civil and religious liberty, at the same time carrying his message to “a little society of dissenters at Oxford.” Dyer, though he did not join the society, undoubtedly approved of its purpose. His political interest was probably stimulated about this time too through his acquaintanceship with the doughty political reformer, “Citizen” Earl Stanhope, in whose home he was for a while⁷ a tutor and who, upon his death in 1816, made Dyer, with Fox and others, one of his executors and left him a handsome legacy.

In 1781 Dyer tried preaching, serving a dissenting congregation at Oxford, probably the “little society” to which his friend Robinson had preached the gospel of liberty the year before. But he soon returned again to Cambridge, where he took residence among the fellows; attracted the attention of Priestley, Wakefield, and Mrs. Barbauld; and for the next ten years was one of that influential group of Cambridge Dissenters which for more than thirty years made a valiant fight for the removal of political and religious disabilities. Besides Robert Robinson, this group included at various times Robert Tyrwhitt, John Jebb, William Frend, Robert Hall, and Benjamin Flower.⁸ During the preceding twenty-five years the Dissenters had not without patience won a certain amount of respect at Cambridge.⁹ However, while the atmosphere of Cambridge was in the 1780's more conducive to freedom of thought than that of Oxford (Oxford required subscription for entrance; Cambridge, for graduation), even there Dissenters were looked upon with suspicion and dislike. But Dyer was hopeful. He wrote of the period in 1793:

From the temper of the studies pursued at Cambridge as well as from the great degree of liberality possessed by many of its members, there were not wanting those who hoped a disposition might prevail there to rectify some of its more glaring impositions begotten originally by tyranny and nursed by weakness.¹⁰

Accordingly, in 1789 he threw himself into the then much accelerated agitation against all the disabilities of Dissenters with his Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles. Robinson and Capel Lofft drew up the plan of a college for Dissenters at Cambridge in which it was their desire that Dyer should become a tutor, but Robinson died in 1790 before it was realized.

After a short period of teaching at Southampton with the father of Charles Cowden Clark in 1791, Dyer, apparently seeking a wider field of intellectual endeavor,¹¹ went to London in the next year and in 1795 settled at Clifford's Inn, where, as Lamb puts it, “like a dove in an asp's nest” he lived “in calm and sinless peace” for the remaining forty-six years of his life.

The main part of the record of these forty-six years will be found in his books. It has to do almost exclusively with adventures of the mind. His outward activity was practically narrowed to exertions on behalf of his friends, nearly all of whom were at one time or another closely identified with the forward-looking movements of the age. He became a member of the Chapter House Coffee Club, to which belonged many of the celebrities of the day. Before the campaign for the suppression of the revolutionary societies became so violent in 1792, he attended several of them and “almost constantly attended one of their committees formed by delegates from various societies.”¹² In 1790 Gilbert Wakefield, his contemporary at Cambridge, came to teach in the dissenting college at Hackney, from which he loosed the tumult of his soul upon the government. They indulged together “some kindred likings and some kindred scorns” and when Wakefield's fanaticism brought the ire of officialdom down upon his head and sent him to prison in 1799, Dyer defended his friend's principles. After his expulsion from Cambridge in 1793, the reformer William Frend joined Dyer in London and continued to his death, only a few days before Dyer's, the close association begun at the university. As we shall see, Dyer's sympathy for men persecuted for opinion's sake in 1793 and 1794—Winterbotham, Muir, Palmer, Walker, Gerrald, Hodgson, Hardy, Tooke, Thelwall, Holcroft, Joyce—was openly expressed. …

We pass now to an analysis and estimate of that large part of Dyer's writings which links him with the revolutionary tradition.

An Inquiry into the Nature of Subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles was the first of Dyer's publications. It was originally issued in pamphlet form in 1789, but was not advertised for sale and was circulated only among a few friends. In the first edition he did not even allude to affairs in France, since they were then “suspended on the edge of contingencies.” The second edition, “corrected, altered and much enlarged,” came from the press of the radical bookseller Joseph Johnson in 1792. It is a book of 439 pages which, in the words of a reviewer in the Monthly Review,¹³ “exposes, perhaps more fully than any former publication has done, the apprehended absurdities and mischiefs attending religious tests.” It was, in fact, the culmination of the arguments in support of the proposal for the repeal of the obnoxious Corporation and Test Acts, the long fight against which had been given an extraordinary impetus during the early period of the French Revolution. He tells us in the preface that he had planned to make further “copious remarks” on the part of Burke's Reflections connected with his subject, but that he had desisted, “recollecting … that as he had been sufficiently confuted on the subject of French politics by Mr. Paine and since by Mr. Christie and Mr. Mackintosh, he had also been ably replied to on those matters which took my attention by Dr. Priestley and others.”¹⁴ So he dismisses Burke as “a writer whose flashy rather than correct style has gained him some admirers, but whose principles are approved by few who have no interest in being deceived.”¹⁵ The book, however, is multifarious enough in its range of subject-matter. All the political and religious ramifications of subscription are traced. Its style is marked by diffuse eloquence rather than by close logic. But the weight of Dyer's learning is carried with more grace and spirit than he usually shows.

In the four parts of the Inquiry he condemns subscription as inconsistent with natural rights, with the free exercise of the intellectual powers, with the principles of the British constitution, and with the doctrines of Christianity, respectively. We are here primarily concerned with the first two.

Dyer's conception of natural rights is little related to Rousseau's. Dyer defines them as “claims arising out of our present situation, our mutual relation, and our common equality.” He thus confuses Rousseau's natural and civil rights.¹⁶ With Rousseau, natural rights do not arise from a civilized social condition or mutual relations but are anterior to the social state. According to Dyer, government protects civil rights and at the same time helps to preserve the true equality of the state of nature. Rousseau would not have subscribed to such a statement as this: “As the wants of mankind are the foundation of society and as society gives birth to government, government is dictated by nature.” Natural rights, Dyer tells his readers, are determined, not by a blanket fiat of our Creator, but by “the soil where ye received your origin.” The natural rights of the enlightened Englishman will, then, admit him to higher privileges than those of an American Indian or of a Chinese, though the rights of the Englishman are not more real.

Among these natural rights which religious tests deny are the right to occupy offices of public trust, the right to educate children on any national endowment, the right to publish opinion, and the right to the free use of reason especially in regard to religion. Such rights have a priority over systems of law and religion: “As there is a primitive reason from whence proceed those relations which constitute law, there are also rights prior to any form of religion which are the foundation of liberty.”¹⁷ Therefore, any scheme of religion which deprives men of them is to be condemned.

Considering the education of youth as a natural right, Dyer launches into an attack upon the aristocratic element and intolerance in the universities. His respect for man is stronger than his regard for the society of scholars. He hopefully looks forward to the establishment of national education, which will follow the revolution in the principles of education introduced by “the spirit of modern politics.” He hails the establishment of the dissenting college at Hackney as a move toward this liberation of education. The comprehensive scheme of his educational toleration takes in even the Jews, whose admission to the universities he advocates. The statutes of the medieval founders of the universities, where they involve intolerance toward the Dissenters, must “submit to an interpretation which the age can bear.”

To the objection that the state must have “a just and permanent security,” Dyer replies that government provides its own security by guarding the social compact and that mutual consent establishes the principles according to which just government is regulated. Like all revolutionary thinkers, he pitches his plea against subscription above the level of little groups of opinionative men upon the immovable basis of first principles:

These reasonings which plead the cause of mankind are not the partial arguments of a dissenter against a churchman …, but the unsophisticating and, I think, the unanswerable plea of human nature against every domineering influence. For I am very much mistaken if there be not a secret corner in the human heart, where sophistry cannot enter, into which, would we condescend to look, … subscription … will appear abhorrent from the first principles of natural justice and of common benevolence.¹⁸

In his examination of the inconsistency between subscription and the powers of the human mind, he accepts the Hartleian refinement of Locke's sensationalism, though, as we shall see, he seems to baulk at the system of materialism towards which it leads. One corollary of sensationalism which he fully accepts is disbelief in mysteries. We can have no ideas about things concealed from us. To ask one to believe such incomprehensible mysteries as consubstantiation and transubstantiation, or even original sin, the trinity, and grace, by laying aside the reason, is like asking one to see without eyesight. Faith can result only from evidence. Moreover, mystery itself is too often the cloak of knavery. As the path to political salvation is less complicated than lawyers make it seem, so the path to heaven is plainer than theologians make it appear. Again, following the sensationalists, Dyer does not admit free-will “in the philosophical sense.” Accepting the idea that “the mind is the effect of the organization of matter,” he believes that “the will follows irresistibly and necessarily the most powerful impressions.” But the darker implications of the ideas of predestination and election yield to those of infinite benevolence. He thinks that “the grace of God will at length prevail over all, it being impossible that infinite benevolence should be defeated of its own gracious intentions.”¹⁹ Hence all will eventually be “made happy in God.” All are predestined to salvation: how could universal benevolence decree otherwise?

So much for Dyer's theory of the operations of the mind and the control of destiny. What about the relations between subscription and intellectual integrity? It is impossible for the average man to subscribe with integrity to the truth of thirty-nine propositions, involving metaphysical distinctions, all the leading church doctrines held since the establishment of Christianity, and all the multifarious matters of church ceremony and faith on which the church has legislated. “Such articles,” he declares moreover, “will become standards to which we shall appeal as oracles of truth rather than guides to help us in our inquiries after it.”²⁰ The variety of the human understanding, which becomes more and more evident with intellectual improvement, is irreconcilable with the uniformity of faith imposed by subscription.

Of the primacy of reason Dyer is an uncompromising advocate. He is convinced that all propositions to which people are asked to subscribe should be pursued to “self-evident truths or the principles of common sense,” and that otherwise they are not binding. If revelation counteracts the principles of reason, he can hardly be convinced that it is divine. “If our establishments or even Christianity itself throw impediments in the way of the human understanding, … I shall not scruple to give them all up.” True intellectual freedom and a reverence for the understanding, then, will not endure any kind of subscription.

Subscription to any articles cannot be justified on any principle of reason; whatever be their number and wherever they be fabricated, … all alike tend to enslave the understanding and to retard the progress of truth.²¹

On historical grounds Dyer denies that the clergy are represented in Parliament as an ecclesiastical body and that the church is an essential part of the English constitution. Parliamentary assemblies of the clergy have their origin in the accumulation of large temporal possessions by the bishops and clergy from the people in payment for spiritual services. Under William the Conqueror the tenures of the clergy underwent the same changes as the tenures of the nobles; that is, they have been held since “by barony,” not “in free alms.” Hence the bishops sit in the House of Lords as barons rather than as representatives of the clergy, and the clergy as an organized ecclesiastical body are not only no estate in Parliament but are not represented except in common with the laity, who are freeholders. This reasoning denies the bishops the presumption that they have the power to speak or legislate for the rank and file of the church. The church is no primary part of the English constitution; for the fundamental maxims of the English government are antecedent to the establishment just as the natural rights of mankind, which the fundamental maxims of the English government express, are “antecedent to any particular regimen of religion.” There is nothing in the constitution, therefore, to render the union of church and state indissoluble.

But more revealing of the real nature of Dyer's thinking in the Inquiry than such scholarly historical arguments are the frequently startling revolutionary sentiments which light up the sober colouring of his dispassionate pages and which he shares with the more outright contemporary radicals and agitators.

In his private convictions he went along quite a distance with his more explosive friend Wakefield. He professed the same personal aversion to public worship and believed that it gave a bias to religious inquiry. However, he does not go the length of Wakefield in contending that social worship is incompatible with the Christian religion. He commends Wakefield's and Geddes's translations of the New Testament as liberal yet accurate versions, which, unlike the King James version, do not “give countenance to the claims of high church authority” or “follow the expectations of a system.”

His speculative ideas on the lineage of absolute government and on the sovereignty of the people show the influence of the bold mind and trenchant pen of Thomas Paine. “All monarchies, properly so called,” Dyer declares, “originated in violence or corruption and their continuance depends upon the same principles which gave them their existence.”²² The sovereignty of the people makes the monarch “a public functionary only,” and the divinity which hedges kings builds a sconce not only against the wall of heaven but against the very palladium of public liberty.

When Europeans speak of a sovereign lord, of a sacred majesty, of a defender of the faith, and the Lord's anointed, mankind are misled. The former term savours of conquest; the next of theological claims, the third of superstition, if not something worse; the last is the incense of priests to the pride of kings.²³

Here the sober temper of the inquirer gives way to the spleen of the agitator. In his ideas on hereditary legislators and the system of aristocracy, he alludes with approval to the Rights of Man, but they have more of the temperance of statement which makes it possible to reason with him than Paine's. He also cites Paine's and Joel Barlow's teachings about prelates and privileged orders; and he sees their ideas provoked by the inattention to distress, the tendency toward persecution, and the opposition to claims of conscience among the ruling classes. He sets up a hypothetical radical reformer behind whose downrightness he thinly conceals his own convictions. These words, for example, purport to be typical of the agitators, but the thoughts none the less are George Dyer's:

Prelates are by office enemies to liberty and obstacles to the progress of truth. … Prelacy is founded in error and perpetuated by worldly policy. … “Admit only the original unadulterated truth that all men are equal in their rights, and the foundation of everything is laid. To build the superstructure requires no effort but that of natural deduction.”²⁴

The most open instance of his alignment with the radicals then being suspected or hunted down by the government is his appending with approval in a long note the declaration of the revolutionary Society of United Irishmen at Dublin, signed by its notorious secretary Tandy. This declaration, Dyer writes, “presents a model worthy of imitation in England.” In the same connexion he advocates the distribution of radical political pamphlets among “the lower ranks of people,” including “cheap editions of Mr. Paine's Rights of Man.” He also recommends to parents Locke's Treatise on Education and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In the latter he hails the advent of the rational woman. Finally, the revolutionary radical's contempt for the past and his belief in the perfectibility which enfranchised man will achieve in the future, when “reason has supplanted enthusiasm,” are expressed with the true Godwinian temper:

Politics are capable of unknown degrees of improvement. Political wisdom is not wont to show itself in imitation, but … in rescuing truth from the rubbish of Gothic antiquity and political knavery. … The object in her eye is Man. … As present times come forward to her survey …, she sees liberty in the train while antiquity retires from her eye and vanishes in a point. Too well instructed to admire defects for their antiquity or to overlook improvement because incomplete, she advances with prudence yet with intrepidity, with humility yet with perseverance, with modesty yet with success. Happy to admit mistakes as well as to pursue discoveries, she yields without meanness and conquers without insolence; and thus never rests till she gains perfection. This, this is political wisdom.²⁵

Dyer's first volume of poems came from Johnson's press the same year as the revised and enlarged edition of the Inquiry. It was a thin volume in pamphlet form, dedicated to William Frend to express his respect for him “as a man of letters and, what I value more, as a man of virtue and a friend to liberty.” “Ode on Peace, written in Jesus College Garden” contains tributes to Tyrwhitt, Frend, and Wakefield—the Cambridge reformers, who as “steady friends of man” formed various generous plans for broadening liberty. An extensive portion of the “Ode on Liberty” is dedicated to such defenders of the French Revolution as John Jebb, Richard Price, Samuel Parr, John Aikin, Thomas Paine, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, and Mary Wollstonecraft; and there are added long notes explaining in more detail their connexions with the cause of liberty. The stanza on Paine, written at the time when the Rights of Man was being acclaimed and condemned in such wholesale fashion, brought down upon the author the displeasure of the Critical Review.²⁶

The following year (1793) brought the publication of Dyer's Complaints of the Poor People of England. The spirit and purpose of this production had been anticipated in the preface to the Inquiry, where he describes himself as more interested in and better fitted for humanizing the order of society by the peaceful penetration of political knowledge among “the outcasts of political society, the common people” than for more boldly “abashing venal statesmen and startling unfeeling oppressors.” Again his title does not indicate the comprehensiveness of his book, which touches upon practically every matter of political agitation then stirring the country. Still, in a special way, it is a document instinct with humanitarian sentiment, a deep solicitude for the rights of the poor, and a sincere desire to lead them into a more abundant life. It is no speculative or doctrinaire performance, but a record of the observations and convictions of a man who has become as one of the poor to learn their problems and to appreciate their hardships. In spirit it is the most modern of all his productions.

The main defect of the English government from the point of view of the poor is the imperfect representation which denies them any share in the making of laws. Only about 12,000 people of a population of approximately 8,000,000 were eligible to vote for members of the House of Commons. The basis of representation had not been changed materially for more than a hundred years. The new growing industrial centres where the poor were concentrated were practically without representation, while the borough of Midhurst in Sussex, for example, though it had not then a single house, sent two members to parliament. Dyer fully outlines the consequences to the poor in tyranny and injustice. Responsibility for their ignorance is laid upon the government. Again he advocates a plan for national education, but calls it “a romantic idea.” That the children of the rich and the poor should be taught in the same schools was a bold opinion in 1793. As Barlow had already pointed out in his Advice to the Privileged Orders, Dyer shows that the poor people are kept in ignorance of the laws largely by the fact that they are printed in the old German character, which few can read, and sold at such a price that few can afford to buy. The tyranny of the game and penal laws, the extravagance of crown and church expenditure, and the ignoring of the rights of the poor in the administration of the army and navy, are dwelt upon—sometimes with high-spirited scorn, sometimes with deep indignation. To give to the poor the independence to which their rights as men entitle them, Dyer advocates the turning over of waste land to them and the establishment of life annuities according to a plan of Dr. Price. The abolition of certain oppressive feudal rights, such as primogeniture, which have survived into an age whose enlightened spirit they constantly violate, will also contribute to the reduction of poverty.

“An Address to the Friends of Liberty,” the title which Dyer gives to the fourth part of his book, is a bold protest against the government's policy of suppression and a vigorous defence of the aims of the revolutionary societies. He declares his willingness to obey the laws in making which the majority have no share, but his inability to respect such a government. He asserts that the proclamations used to hamper the meeting of such organizations as the Constitutional and Corresponding societies are not laws, since they have not been ratified by Parliament. He denies that the societies have any designs on property, commending Major Cartwright and Lord Daer for their solicitude, in forming some of the societies, about the security of property. But he defends the suspected correspondence carried on by some of them with the French revolutionary bodies, since it was in response to the invitation of the National Assembly to give their advice about the new French constitution. He ends the book with a reaffirmation of his faith in the French Revolution:

Yes, with few exceptions I approved and still approve the doctrines of the Rights of Man; and the French Revolution I contemplated and still contemplate as the most important era in the history of nations.²⁷

A Dissertation on the Theory and Practice of Benevolence, published in 1795, was intended as a sequel to the Complaints of the Poor. It is not in part, as the title might imply, a metaphysical examination of the origin of our moral feelings. It is primarily an attempt “unconnected with the science of casuistry” to stimulate the spirit of benevolence by presenting objects for which it may be exercised: charity schools, workhouses, and various relief societies. Surely George Dyer comes nearer than any of the thinkers of the day to personifying that “universal benevolence” of which the revolutionary philosophers so glibly talked.²⁸ At the same time he is careful not to suggest any radical interference with the system of property. In fact, he thinks benevolence must be relied upon to correct the inequalities and imperfections inseparable from the social state. Among the objects of benevolence proposed are the defendants in the state trials of 1794. Without their solicitation, he gives particular accounts of these sufferers in the cause of freedom. He is careful, however, to stress, not the political, but the moral point of view—“moral, not in regard to the justice or injustice of putting these persons on their trials nor to the principles or characters of the accusers, matters upon which he had his private opinions, but in regard to the inconveniences and losses sustained by the defendants.”²⁹ Even the ordinarily unsympathetic Critical Review was moved by admiration of Dyer's “humane and sensible strictures” of the treatment of the men who had lately been indicted for treason and sedition.

Dyer's liberality of mind made him peculiarly fit to write the life of Robert Robinson, whose spirit of eager inquiry early led his disciple to venture into the field of rational religion. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Robert Robinson was published in 1796. Dr. Parr and Wordsworth thought it one of the best biographies in English. It also had the distinction of being translated into German. The book is examined here primarily for its reflection of Dyer's more liberal ideas: there are many independent reflections on the spirit of the age and on ecclesiastical and political affairs.

In the preface there is one of the most outright avowals of revolutionary ideas to be found in the whole range of Dyer's writings. The occasion, which seems rather incommensurate with the fervour of the philosophical comment which it engenders, is his decision not to use titles with the names of people in the Memoirs.

The language of equality is adopted in this volume; it is the language of truth and soberness. … In my intercourse with society I conform to its language; but in publications, at least for such as I am responsible, I will abide by the language of equality. In the latter case I bear a testimony to liberty: in the former I leave the reader to smile at my inconsistency. But, to speak the truth, these titles present a caricature of man, while every inch of ground he treads on, … every propensity of the human heart, whether virtuous or vicious, proves the deception and mocks our pride. … France has emancipated mankind from these attempts at false greatness. By bursting the bars which imprison truth, she has aggrandized her species.³⁰

The plainness of his style in the book is largely explained by the fact that he is willing to appear “among writers as a native of Botany Bay.”

Dyer's sympathy with Robinson's various political and religious heresies is implicit when not expressed. He writes with evident satisfaction of Robinson's Rousseauistic belief in the pristine purity of human nature and of his general approbation of the French Revolution. The little respect Dyer shows for the arcana of political science would have pleased the subject of his biography also. Like Paine, Dyer thinks that government has been made a matter of mystery by designing men who have used religion to bolster tyranny and have thus obscured the plain path of public happiness by a “wilderness of turnpike gates.” His usual philosophic composure deserts him completely on this subject, and he writes as if he had just risen from a perusal of Paine:

There exists a class of lofty politicians by whom government is treated as priests treat religion, like a science too profound to be fathomed by common intellects or like a fabric too elegant and too sacred to be touched by the unclean, the unhallowed hands of the vulgar. The comprehension of political science, the arrangement and establishment of political institutions, are, according to these men appointed by a divine invisible agent and transferred to the administration of a transcendent personage, his vice-gerent in this lower world. To augment the splendour of this august character, inferior dignities are called in, enclosed with the bright emblazonry of hereditary greatness, and decorated with the exterior pomp of official magnificence. These sagacious speculatists, like the ancient Epicureans who maintained that the liberty of the will flows from a right line out of a curve, reverse the interests and claims of a community, and become advocates of the crooked manoeuverings of a few lucky spirits, fortunate by birth or blessed with affluence. In comparison with these politicians, how mere a novice was Aristotle! This philosopher did but resign the reins of government to such as nature had endowed with talents corresponding to the character of a governor. The other men possessed the holy oil by which even fools were made Solomons. The doctrine of Jus Divinum established tyranny and slavery by a commission from heaven.³¹

With little short of an implication of approval he quotes Paine's description of government as “an evil that the wickedness of mankind renders necessary” and seems to agree with Godwin in doubting its positive blessing.

The year 1797 is marked by two attempts at verse satire. The Poet's Fate, a plea for a more liberal patronage of writers, is a rhymed dialogue between a neglected poet and his friend. Among the writers of radical tendency mentioned as ill repaid by the world for their exertions in its behalf are Parr, Aikin, Geddes, Frend, and Wakefield. The following are two of several alternatives suggested by the despairing Muse:

                              Take poor repast;
For such as needs must learn to fast;
Take moderate exercise and keep upstairs;
When hungry, smoke your pipe or say your prayers;
Or plough in learned pride the Atlantic main,
Join Pantisocracy's harmonious train;
Haste where young Love still spreads his brooding wings,
And freedom digs and ploughs and sings.

In a note to the above Dyer compliments Southey and Coleridge for their “ardent love of liberty” and “the softer feelings of benevolence,” and singles out Wordsworth, Lloyd, and Lamb for poetical distinction. In the same year he published “An English Prologue and Epilogue to the Latin Comedy of Ignoramus with a Preface and Notes relative to modern Times and Manners.”³² In the epilogue there is one of his rare indulgences in personal satire. The lines on the established clergy are biting and offensive enough:

Churchmen you think are sacred—be they so—
Witchcraft was sacred some few years ago …
Should some fools, and fools are often grave,
With solemn cant affect my soul to save;
With cheeks as fat as brawn, as soft as down,
With nothing reverend save the band and gown,
With eyes so full they cannot hold a tear,
And heads that never ached, except with beer;
Whose slender knowledge tells them to obey,
Dull idle souls who only preach and pray; …
Yes, I would claim as I have claimed before,
As fair a right to laugh as you to snore.
Peace on the Reverend head, however dull;
Go, honest man, enjoy your empty skull.

These productions, in general, confirm, however, what might have been concluded otherwise—that George Dyer was constitutionally unfit to be a satirist. There was too much kindness in his nature for him to satirize often with great effectiveness. In its review of The Poet's Fate, the Monthly Review³³ observes:

If it be possible for a satirist to be void of a single particle of ill-will toward any man breathing, or for a complainant against the times to be perfectly satisfied with his own lot, we firmly believe the humble and benevolent George Dyer to be that man.

An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Doctrine of Libels and the Office of Juror is a pamphlet of 120 pages occasioned by the various prosecutions of radicals by the government for public libel but specifically by the charges brought against Gilbert Wakefield and his publisher Johnson in 1799. Its publication, however, was delayed by Dyer's usual lack of promptness until after Wakefield's conviction and so did him no good. While, according to the title, it purports to deal with doctrines of law, its first concern is the persecution of opinion which the government was then carrying on. The most impassioned part is his appeal for a free press. It took courage to write this in 1799:

Some who admit that thought is free are backward to allow that man should be free to publish his thoughts. But who are the men who propagate this doctrine? … They are selfish and narrow divines, artful politicians, corrupt lawyers. … Shackle opinion, restrain the press—and what will you effect? You will give confidence to absurdity and degrade wisdom. The principle goes to throw such philosophers as Bacon and Locke into shade; to silence such moralists as Helvetius, Hume, and Rousseau; it would encourage babes to prattle and triflers to dogmatize.³⁴

But public opinion was by this time too much inflamed against the radicals for many to listen to reason in their defence. Even the Monthly Review³⁵ was seized with concern, criticizing him for choosing the radical philosophers as the moralists to whom mankind is most indebted, especially “at this time and in this country,” though it recommended the Address as “good reading.” But the Gentleman's Magazine in its hostility threw amenities to the winds in this vicious and supercilious thrust:

As friends to this bold and disappointed writer, we see with concern that he is but too well versed in the theory, if not the practice, of libels. … To allow men to say what they please of each other … must finally lead to their doing what they please to each other. … No honest man in this country and in these times would wish to set himself as a rival of Voltaire and a propagator of opinions whose influence has been so severely felt.³⁶

The two volumes of Poems, published in 1802 and including four critical essays, are of a very miscellaneous character in both versification and subject-matter. There are lyrics, elegies, odes, occasional poems, anacreontics, and pieces of a philosophical cast. Some of them show a lively fancy, but it does not always free itself from the trammels of mere learning. His poetry here is more rarely made the vehicle of his liberal sympathies than in the former volumes. “On Visiting the Tomb of David Hume” is one of his many tributes of deep respect to the great sceptic:

                              … sagacious moralist,
Whose lessons shine not only in thy works,
Thy life was moral; and may I condemn
The man of searching mind, who systems weighed
In judgment's nicer scale, and yielded not
His weight of faith, when he durst not believe.

“The Padlocked Lady,” a long poem of thirty-three pages, is written in a happy vein for our poet, but signally fails to affect the reader at the emotional climax. It treats of the restraints put on British liberty during the war with France. The author represents himself as pursuing Freedom through the world under the conventional image of a fair woman, only at last to find her with her eyes bound by a golden bandage, her ears stopped to human cries,

While from her lips, to seal her tongue,
A vile, inglorious padlock hung.

The spirit of the larger patriotism is also breathed through the banalities of “The Citizen of the World.”

By the beginning of the century it appears that practically all of Dyer's ideas which connect him with the revolutionary tradition had been written out. He seems at this time to have entered upon that long era of “calm and sinless peace” about which Lamb writes and during which most of his time was given to various scholarly endeavours, to laborious but generally unimportant projects for the booksellers, to the amenities of a bibliophile, and to the social claims of Lamb's famous literary fraternity. In fact, the ineffectiveness of reform propaganda was so conclusively shown during the early years of the century that few even of the most radical writers persisted.

In 1812 he published his Four Letters on the English Constitution, the last production of consequence as an expression of his political philosophy. In this book he reviews, without abating a jot of his earlier convictions, his previously expressed opinions about the principle of divine right, the sovereignty of the people, the unrepresentative status of bishops in the House of Lords, the priority of the constitution to the establishment, the defects in representation, the evils of the Corporation and Test Acts, and the fundamental simplicity of good government. He commends the suppressed reform societies for their promotion of enlarged views of the representative system and their fight for the liberty of the press. Believing with Godwin that only arbitary government can give permanence to error, Dyer is confident that with the establishment of an impartial administration of justice these societies will be restored to their former influence. He still does not hesitate to align himself openly with revolutionary political thinkers in some matters. For example, he accepts with little modification Paine's definition of a constitution as “a thing antecedent to government and laws,” though he thinks Paine goes to ridiculous lengths in denying the existence of the English constitution altogether. But this is pure Paine:

Those principles which ought to govern societies of men are deducible only from our wants, and appeal to that divine light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world, the primitive reason: they are not difficult to ascertain nor difficult to be understood.

He writes with his old indignation of the Reflections, whose author pleaded “for power against liberty, for the usurpations of establishments against the laws of nature.”³⁷

But for all the unadulterated radicalism of many of his ideas, George Dyer was generally very careful not to flout the English government on immediate questions of policy. The shades of speculation were more inviting to him than the platform of propaganda. Though he was intellectually hospitable toward the radical agitators, he shrank from much active participation in reform. He preferred, like Godwin, to manufacture the intellectual artillery for the radicals rather than to command a battery.

This outward caution meets us very frequently in the Inquiry. He does not openly advocate immediate disestablishment; in fact, he sometimes admits the expediency of an establishment. He is wary in letting his readers know just where he parts company with his intemperate friend Wakefield:

Mr. Wakefield's sentiments on the office of the civil magistrate and on the tendency of religious establishments are, I am persuaded, the same as mine; nor do I here mean to drop any reflections on the present ruling powers.³⁸

He is careful not to charge the government with the disorders against Dissenters at Birmingham in 1791, but he writes that he is “far from thinking they were not prompted by men who supposed themselves complying with the wishes of government.”³⁹ At the conclusion of his discussion of the constitutional objections against subscription, he declares: “I am no political reformer, but an inquirer after truth.” He disclaims any resentment against “the persons of our governors.” He makes the admission, without being driven to it, that he has “to take shame that the hand that now writes against subscription has yet subscribed itself.”

In his other writings his circumspection can be clearly traced. Sometimes his outward discretion is in amusing contrast with his inner convictions. In a passage on titles from a communication on the peculiarities of Quakers to the Monthly Magazine, there is a studied and almost ludicrous effort to tread the narrow path between offence to the government and faithfulness to his own convictions:

Blackstone's comparison of a particular form of government to a pyramid with a broad strong base and terminating at length in a point, has been much admired. It is elegant but it is sophistical, though the excellency of his form of government I neither affirm nor deny. The same comparison has been applied to titles, where the sophism is still more transparent. The proper way to expose it in both cases is to appeal to nations the most enlightened, to societies the best regulated, to families the most orderly and harmonious: to inquire into the origin of titles and to trace their effects. Of the French I say nothing.⁴⁰

In the Address on Libels, he is fearful lest he be thought in his defence of Wakefield “to arraign courts of justice” when his aim is “to interest the friend to humanity.” Here also he tells us that, while he approves the purposes of the Constitutional Society, he “never had the honour of belonging to it.” To escape the imputation of being a political undesirable, it appears that he was sometimes willing to thin his political philosophy down to the mildest kind of liberalism, as the following passage from a letter to Rickman in 1801 shows:

How dare you call me a railer at Governments! My opinion is, I think, both modest and generous, viz.: that some govern too much, and too much government, sooner or later, defeats its own purposes and brings on troubles. Rulers therefore … should understand that if their interest and the interest of the people are not the same, they are, so far, not standing on good and solid ground.⁴¹

The growth of his caution during the revolutionary decade is shown in the abridged version of the “Ode on Liberty” included in the Poems of 1802. The glowing passages on Paine and seven other contemporary radicals are omitted, while the tributes to Locke, Milton and Algernon Sidney are retained. In the later version a prayer of the version of 1792 to Liberty to aid the counsels and fight the battles of France is made to refer to England: but the tribute to the Polish patriots under Kosciusko remains. At least, his radicalism was becoming more English and less French. He was, by 1802, learning to moderate it more into conformity with the necessities of a prudential world. In “To an Enthusiast,”⁴² he asks:

What avail, O man, fantastic flights?
Why muse ideal deeds,
Heedless of what is true?

George Dyer did not stand at Armageddon and battle for the radicalism of the revolutionary era, but in his writings he did hold aloft its banner in days when its adherents were without honour in their own country. The residuum of his radicalism, after the tests to which reaction against the French Revolution exposed it, comprised much more than the mere benevolence with which his name has been so exclusively associated. He deserves an honourable place in the traditions of English liberty.

Notes

1. See the following: Mary and Charles Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (New York, 1878), pp. 11-13. Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Boston, 1895), I, 84, 93, 316-17, 363; II, 748-50. Unpublished Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Earl Leslie Griggs (London, 1932), I, 21-2, 32-4, 102, 125. Barry Cornwall, An Autobiographical Fragment (Boston, 1877), pp. 77-80 and Charles Lamb, A Memoir (London, 1866), pp. 69-71. Joseph Cottle, Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey (London, 1847), pp. 155-7. William Hazlitt, On the Look of a Gentleman and On the Conversation of Authors. Leigh Hunt, Autobiography (New York, 1850), I, 70. Letters of Charles and Mary Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas (London, 1921), I, 33, 134-5, 176, 180-3, 186-9, 209-10, 218, 234-40, 309-10, 523-4, 530, 547-8; II, 673-4, 710, 741, 847, 864-5, 925-6, 942, 975. Charles Lamb, Oxford in the Vacation and Amicus Redivivus. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, edited by Thomas Sadler (Boston, 1869), I, 39-40, 239-40; II, 472, 519. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, edited by J. W. Warter (London, 1856), I, 33, 335. T. N. Talfourd, Final Memorials of Charles Lamb (Philadelphia, 1855), pp. 250-2, 261-3. Orlo Williams, Life and Letters of John Rickman (Boston, 1912), pp. 7, 59, 82.

   For modern accounts of Dyer see the following: E. V. Lucas, Life of Charles Lamb (London, 1921), Chapter XIV. Dudley Wright, “Charles Lamb and George Dyer,” English Review, XXXIX, 390-7 (September 1924). G. A. Anderson, “Lamb and the Two G. D.'s,” London Mercury, XI, 371-87 (February 1925). Edmund Blunden, “Elia's G. D.,” London Nation and Athenaeum, XLIII, 138-9 (May 5, 1928). A. Edward Newton, George Dyer (1938), a privately printed brochure.

2. “On Conversations with Authors,” Collected Works of William Hazlitt, edited by Waller and Glover (London, 1902-6), VII, 43-4.

3. Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, I, 40.

4. Dudley Wright, for example, leaves the impression that he published only two volumes of poetry (op. cit., p. 395). He published four. On George Dyer as a poet and critic, see Letter of Charles and Mary Lamb, edited by E. V. Lucas (New Haven, 1935), I, 141, 201, 205, 211-12, 217, 247; II, 242.

5. Good examples of both these qualities will be found in his poem “To Mr. Arthur Aikin, on taking Leave of him after a Pedestrian Tour” (Monthly Magazine, V, 121-3, February 1798).

6. The mistaken impression was long received that Lamb and Dyer were schoolfellows at Christ's Hospital. It seems to have been originally given by Lamb himself in a letter to Dyer 22 February 1831: “I don't know how it is, but I keep my rank in fancy still since schooldays. I can never forget that I was a deputy Grecian! And writing to you, or to Coleridge, besides affection, I feel a reverential deference as to Grecians still.” Lamb, looking back upon Christ's Hospital forty-three years after, associates his deference as a deputy Grecian for Coleridge, who was a contemporary Grecian (Coleridge became a Grecian in 1788; Lamb left the school in 1789), with that for Dyer, who was a Grecian before Lamb was born. Talfourd confirmed the error by writing that Dyer “had attained the stately rank of Grecian in the venerable school of Christ's Hospital when Charles entered it” (Op. cit., p. 261). Leslie Stephen repeated it after him in his article on Dyer in the Dictionary of National Biography.

7. Just when is uncertain. The obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine states that he engaged in “private tutoring” before he entered the home of Robinson.

8. Dyer has left us interesting observations on the reforming activities of these men in the chapter on “Dissentients” of his History of the University and Colleges of Cambridge, including Notices relating to the Founders and Eminent Men (1814), I, 114-29, and in his Privileges of the University of Cambridge (1824), II, 99, 107.

9. Dyer tells us that in the beginning of Robinson's ministry in 1757 Dissenters were regarded as “degraded characters” at Cambridge. The undergraduates were given to interrupting the meetings of Dissenters about the town so much that one parish prosecuted the offenders. On one occasion about 1769 in St. Andrew's Church “prostitutes paraded the aisles in academic habits” (Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Robert Robinson, p. 72).

10. Complaints of the Poor People of England, p. 94.

11. For the circumstances of the severance of his connexion with the dissenting society at Cambridge, to most of whom his unitarianism and his political views seemed extreme, see appendix to the second edition of the Inquiry.

12. Op. cit., p. 81.

13. X, 77 (January 1793).

14. Thomas Christie's Letters on the French Revolution, James Mackintosh's Vindiciae Gallicae, and Joseph Priestley's Letters to Burke were, next to Paine's Rights of Man, all of which had been published in the early months of 1791, the most vigorous and able of the scores of answers to Burke's Reflections.

15. P. vii of the preface of the second edition. All the quotations from the Inquiry are taken from this edition. To Burke's contemptuous reference to the “intriguing philosophers” and “theological politicians” among the Dissenters Dyer retorts: “If under such a government as that of England, there were not among the Dissenters men of the above description, Dissenters would be contemptible pietists, dreaming monks, spiritless slaves, or unmanly sycophants” (p. 287).

16. Cf. Joel Barlow's idea that “a perfect state of society is a perfect state of nature.”

17. Pp. 16, 13, 14, 19-22, 45. The references to the quotations above are given in the order of the quotations, since they relate to the same general theme. The same is true of the grouped references which follow.

18. Pp. 60-1.

19. P. 330.

20. P. 70.

21. Pp. 127-8, 131.

22. P. 152.

23. P. 263. On the last point he quotes with approval Mrs. Catherine Macaulay, who at the time was pursuing radical ideas with as keen a mind and as irrepressible a vigour as Mary Wollstonecraft: “That the people might learn to kiss the rod of power with devotion and, becoming slaves by principle, learn to reverence the yoke, priests were instructed to teach speculative despotism and graft on religious affections systems of civil tyranny” (p. 438).

24. Pp. 350-4. The last sentence is quoted from Barlow's Address to the Privileged Orders. Dyer accedes also to Barlow's quoted opinion that “the church in all ages … hath aimed to establish spiritualism on the ruins of civil order” (p. 400).

25. P. 254.

26. See second series, VII, 270-2.

27. P. 84.

28. Lamb has left us, in his Oxford in the Vacation, an inimitable tribute to this all-embracing and selfless charity of his friend: “With G. D., to be absent from the body is sometimes (not to speak it profanely) to be present with the Lord. At the very time when personally encountering thee, he passes on with no recognition or, being stopped, starts like a thing surprised—at that moment, reader, he is on Mount Tabor or Parnassus or cosphered with Plato or with Harrington, framing “immortal commonwealths,” devising some plan of amelioration to thy country or thy species—peradventure meditating some individual kindness or courtesy to be done to thee thyself, the returning consciousness of which made him to start at thy obtruded personal presence.”

29. The Pamphleteer, XIV, 75. The quotation is from a later printing of the Dissertation in The Pamphleteer for 1818 and 1819.

30. Pp. VII-IX.

31. Pp. 221-2.

32. The comedy was written by George Ruggles to ridicule the pedantic and barbarous cant of lawyers and was acted for the first time at Cambridge in 1614. Dyer wrote the prologue for delivery at its presentation at Westminster School in 1794.

33. XX, 472 (August 1796).

34. Pp. 114-15.

35. XXIX, 87 (May 1799).

36. LXIX, Part I, 320 (April 1799).

37. Pp. 121, 115. The quotations are taken from the third edition with additions, 1817.

38. Preface of the Inquiry, p. xx.

39. P. 288. The house of Joseph Prestley with the most valuable laboratory in England was burned in these riots.

40. VI, 342 (November 1798).

41. Orlo Williams, Life and Letters of John Rickman, p. 59.

42. Poems, 1802, I, 12.