Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, the works of Dickens—the Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist—Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Shelley, and many more beside. And the merits or otherwise of this literature was thoroughly discussed. The Bible, that good book, was prodded and poked for any evidence that the stories within the Old and New Testament were based upon truth and not just tales of someone’s making.
While Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man had each of those working-men present, English and negro, declaring themselves to be fouly wronged by this modern life; for why were there no tax cuts for the poor or subsidies upon education? And in an essay that was applauded by all, Thomas Kinsman wrote how the philosopher, John Locke, stated that there are many things we cannot know, things about which we can only have belief—yet free-thinkers must build their belief upon fact, scientific inquiry and logical principles; so how might a free-thinker prove that when, say, looking upon a tree out of a window that the tree still stands outside the window when the free-thinker’s back is turned and he can no longer see it? An essay of complete nonsense, as you will agree, reader, and yet Thomas Kinsman will wish you to know that it was awarded a shilling prize!
By the time Thomas Kinsman was twenty-one—his hair sprouted, his voice a deep bass tone and his shoulders mightily broad—he wrote to James Kinsman, eager to declare that he was no more bound to Linus Gray as an apprentice, but employed by him as a journeyman printer. And, he added as no more than an addendum, that he was now also of the deistic belief.
James Kinsman sent in reply, a twenty-page letter in which the words heathen, idolater, savage and ingrate played very large part within the message. While the word atheist was repeated so many times that Thomas, in a long reply, explained that although he was no longer of the Baptist faith, he was not a non-believer, not an atheist, but just one who believed in natural religion and a creator God. James Kinsman sent back, in answer, just one page, with the word ‘blasphemer’ written large upon it.
And now we have reached the point within Thomas Kinsman’s story where you will detect some sadness within his eye—but look closer when he tells you that, alas, Susan Gray did pass away, for it may be fancy feigning. Susan Gray died at the age of forty, blaming the Hottentot residing under her roof for blighting her marriage to childlessness and for the invasion of consumption that wasted her away until she weighed little more than a bird. As she lay dead, Linus Gray sobbed at her side with the hysterical abandon of a child; he stopped only to snarl upon her attending priest to keep his cant and humbug to the minimum and then get out.
Indeed, Linus Gray grieved so sorely for his wife that he was never to be the same man again. So crushed was he by her death that he kept himself insensible to the sorrow of it with drink. Not just night upon night, but mornings and afternoons, Thomas Kinsman was required to hunt through the dark lanes and narrow streets in an area between the west Strand and St Paul’s in search of Linus. Sometimes, in the tiny rooms of the Cheshire Cheese tavern, Thomas would find Linus lit by a small spur of gas, seated before a hot baked sheep’s head or clutching a beer while clumsily toasting a small loaf upon a fork in the fire. He would greet Thomas, earnestly placing his arm about his shoulder to beg him not to think ill of Susan for her actions to him. Or with words that slurred into one another like a fishseller’s, he would seek to persuade Thomas that, despite how she treated her negro lodger, despite always wielding that broom upon him, that Susan Gray was a good woman.
At other times Thomas would find Linus, wet and sodden and trembling like a palsied tramp, slumped in an alley within the jumble of narrow courts, snivelling over and over on how he had so disappointed his wife.
Meanwhile within the printing office of Messrs Gray and Co., it was Thomas Kinsman who did now receive the papers, reports and accounts from the porters from Parliament—who did glance at them, collate and folio them, before deciding upon their worth. And it was Thomas who commanded the compositors to mount their frames to prepare for copy,