Gordon Riots

This short paper--a guest post on the digital journal, Age of Revolutions, explores some of the interconnections between the 1780 Gordon Riots in London and the American Revolution. Examining the connections between the two events illustrates the true severity of Britain's imperial crisis.

This essay revisits a time when both Punk and Situationism flourished in the UK. When a whole generation of radically different artists emerged as outsiders, amateurs, and the lower classes found cultural empowerment as an agent for social change. Their varied practices critiqued the societies they lived in, questioning the authority and authenticity of established politics, language, history, music, and film.

The phrase 'anyone can do it' was widely used within the punk underground and decades since. This simple philosophy reached a mass of individuals and groups who no longer accepted the given order of the day. They found solidarity and established tools to claim cultural territory, creativity, and social context on their terms.

It takes us back to the violent beginning as part of the Gordon Riots in 1780. The emergence of King Mob and similarly motivated riots in the late 20th century, linking them with the British faction of Situationists in the 60s and 70s and Malcolm McLaren and Punk.

It also asks what is a failure in terms of individuals and groups actively struggling to build agency in a world ruled by the privileged, and what can we learn from these passionate, dedicated, very creative people pathing the way for us now to build our own independent and grounded intentions today?

The Limits of a Catholic Spirit fills the gap that is John Wesley and Catholicism. No other book has provided such an in-depth study of the perils Wesley faced when he encountered Catholicism. With the use of primary sources that tell of anti-Methodist riots in Ireland to Wesley's preachers getting kidnapped and forced to serve in the army, this study will provide you with historical information you've never encountered. It will explore questions that have held Wesley scholars captive for decades.
Was John Wesley responsible for sparking the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of 1780 in London? Yates searched eighteenth-century documents in the National Archives of the United Kingdom to find out.
Was John Wesley aligned with the Jesuits?
Was John Wesley, a Jacobite, an enemy of the British Crown?
Did John Wesley require Irish Catholics to denounce Catholicism to join Methodist societies?
By the end of The Limits of a Catholic Spirit, you'll find answers to all these questions and more.

Excessive compartmentalising of literary and political texts projects anachronistic, artificial boundaries in place which, once entrenched, are difficult to shake, both within the academy and beyond. Categories such as ‘eighteenth-century’, ‘nineteenth-century’, ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’ can be misleading, implying far less fluidity and interactivity. Similarly artificial is separation of different written genres, such as those which equate eighteenth-century texts with post-Enlightenment political philosophy, Romantic texts almost exclusively with pastoral poetry, and Victorian writing with the social problem novel. Before the gradual separation of scholarship into specialised disciplines in the later nineteenth century, polymathy combined painting, exploration, writing poetry, fiction, essays (scientific, political, theoretical and artistic) and journalism. While many academics have long engaged in cross-period, cross- and inter-disciplinary studies, this newer approach has yet to permeate to many undergraduate syllabi. The disparity may be seen in publications, with many monographs deconstructing divides, while teaching anthologies reinforce them. [...]

The temporally and spatially unstable collections of persons and actions that made up what came to be known as the ‘Gordon Riots’ present a particular problem for representation. The several and disparate actions of those six days in June were constructed into a single event through trials, newspaper accounts, periodical literature, and finally in novels. Fictional representations have been important for shaping popular and even scholarly reception, yet they are impacted by British reactions to other events, particularly the French Revolution.

If in 1780, the Gordon Riots were understandable in terms of a longer history of popular demonstrations and disturbances, our access to them now is necessarily filtered and rewritten through the revolutionary worldview that solidified in the 1790s and 1800s. The 1780 riots become a kind of fulcrum, pointing back on the one hand to traditions of carnivalesque popular revolt, and with the other pointing forward toward a more contemporary concept of mass protest and revolutionary action by the proletariat.

A few days after their conclusion, the autodidact shoemaker’s son, Thomas Holcroft (1745-1809), authored a key account, the pseudonymous A Plain And Succinct Narrative Of The Late Riot And Disturbances In The Cities Of London And Westminster And The Borough Of Southwark. Holcroft’s account weaves together multiple accounts to produce a single city-wide overview of what was experienced mostly through newspaper accounts, rumour, or local incident. The Narrative is situated at a midpoint between the immediacy of eye-witness and daily news and the mediated versions created after the fact by the trials and later fictional or historical recastings. Holcroft’s account blends fictionalizing tropes with representations of the riotous events to offer a complex counterpoint to the better known novels or eye-witness representations.