If anything characterised Christopher Hill’s long
career, he believed that to understand any historical change one had to believe
in the dialectical connection between economics and politics and that the
materialist base determines the superstructure of social, intellectual, and
political developments. Maintaining this belief was not always easy. He came
under fierce attack both inside the Communist Party (he left in 1956) and out.
This idea still permeates Verso’s new edition of his biography of John Bunyan.
When this book was originally published, Hill was
accused of renouncing his Marxist interpretation of the English Revolution.
Later, in life Hill attempted to answer this charge during a talk he gave
celebrating the centenary of the publication of Marx’s “Das Kapital”.
He recounted that Marx had accidentally overheard
some former comrades from the 1848 revolution. To a man, they had become rich
and decided to reflect on old times and asked Marx if he was becoming less
radical as he aged. “Do you?” said Marx, “Well, I do not”.
Bunyan’s
Work
It is not an overstatement to say that John Bunyan’s
work has recognised the world over, especially The Pilgrim’s Progress. It is
certainly one of the most influential books written in the English language. It has been translated into more than 200 languages
and was wildly popular in America. The great Russian writer Pushkin admired it.
And was the first English literary work to be translated into Polish. Today, while it is more likely to read by children,
it is safe to say that many households in Britain have a copy. Bunyan wrote
from a "class-conscious piety," as one writer puts it “ contempt for
the rich and a passionate defence of the poor, that helps to explain why those
writings exert an appeal that transcends the circumstances of Bunyan's own
age”.
It is true to say that we are still grappling with
the great questions posed by the revolution in England in the 17th century.
That issues of social inequality, religious freedom, democracy and even communism
are still topics of discussion today bear testimony to the importance of
studying this period. Hill was correct when he said we are still beginning to
catch up with the 17th century. Hill’s examination of the life John Bunyan was done
so in recognition of the rupture of class antagonisms that brought about the
English revolution. Books like the Pilgrim’s Progress were an attempt to
understand these events and in Bunyan’s case offer a critique as well as a
solution.
Hill’s excellent biography A Turbulent, Seditious,
and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628-1688 2017, traced a
multitude of connections between The Pilgrim’s Progress and radical political
movements. Both from the 17th century and later political movements. While reading the book, it should not take the reader
long to figure out that this is not just a children’s book. The book has a
deeper political meaning and greater social significance. Hill’s book helps us
appreciate the political implications of Bunyan's allegory.
The beauty of Hill’s book is that he carefully places
Bunyan’s ideas firmly within the context of the religious and political
conflicts that shaped the English revolution. As Hill states, he was "the
creative artist of dissent." Bunyan was not on the same level of political
maturity as John Lilburne and certainly not as open in his use of politics to
gain power. However leading members of the gentry still saw him as a
threat and acted accordingly. Bunyan was to serve large swathes of his adult
life in jail. Hill argued that ‘Bunyan is the most class-conscious
writer in English literature”. He took a class stand in the sense of he was
always on the side of the poor. It is not an accident that “most of Christian’s
opponents in The Pilgrim’s Progress are Lords or gentry”.
Hill believed that Bunyan understood his
working-class position and wrote accordingly. But why use the allegorical style
of writing. It would not be too much of a stretch of the imagination that
someone as intelligent as Bunyan would be blind to the growth of science and
philosophy or that Newton, Boyle, Locke, and others had started to put
mankind’s understanding of the world on a more rational and materialist basis,
so why the allegorical style of writing.
Hill believed that despite tremendous advances in
science and philosophy it was still a dangerous time politically for anyone to
attack the ruling elite. As Richard Ashcraft writes “Bunyan quite deliberately
used allegorical style, heavy-laden with metaphors and flights of fancy to
avoid jail. In part, of course, the decision was a tactical one; ridicule is a
powerful political weapon, and figurative language provides a rhetorical shield
against the sword of the magistrate. But Bunyan was writing primarily for an
audience of self-taught literate artisans like himself, and he knew that
"words easy to be understood do often hit the mark when high and learned
ones do only pierce the air." Bunyan understood the creative power of
popular prose, and "The Pilgrim's Progress" was "written by a
man of the people for the people."[1]
Having said that even the most stupid member of the
elite could not have failed to understand Bunyan’s use of these names which
mirror tiered social structure of 17th century England. Lord Hate-good, Mr
Lyar, Sir Having Greedy, Lord Carnal Delight, Mr By-ends, Mr Money-love of the
town of Coveting. “The pilgrim’s psyche is thus rooted in social and material
life”.[2]
Biography
Bunyan was a teenager when he went into the
Parliamentary army. He was to receive a very quick education both militarily
but more importantly, this sensitive young man would have been exposed to the
political cauldron that was brewing in the army and in wider society.
Rank and file soldiers such as himself were exposed
to radical ideas about religion, democracy, social inequality, and early
communist ideas. As Hill brings out in his book, this would have led him to
believe that another world was possible.
Bunyan's radicalization did not take an overtly
political form. His writings took the form of an organised but allegorical
attack on the religion of the day. To do this, it was necessary to in the words
of one writer “adopt a distinctive political position in the context of
17th-Century English society”.
While Bunyan had been a soldier during the Revolution
as he grew into adulthood, he would have witnessed the ebb of the revolution
and felt at first hand the years of reaction. He would have been alarmed at the rate that the
revolution was being expunged from memory. It led him to write the book Mansoul
(in the Holy War) to cognize and oppose what was going on. It is true is that Bunyan had many years to think
about these issues. Having spent 12 years in prison. But like John Lilburne,
the Leveller leader, it seemed only to make him stronger politically.
Revisionism.
Even as I write this review of Hill’s book, I know
that the first line of attack will be that Hill’s work is outdated and should
be studied only as period pieces. Unlike Mark Kishlansky who once wrote “It is becoming
difficult to remember how influential Christopher Hill once was when E.P.
Thompson dedicated Whigs and Hunters to ‘Christopher Hill, I do not believe
that Hill is outdated. A more objective review of his work is long overdue.
Also, it is quite scandalous that no major biography of him has appeared.
When Kishlansky reviewed the book, he believed that
Hill was “about to enter the most productive years of his career. Two not
altogether unconnected impulses characterised them. The first was to champion
groups and individuals who placed personal freedom above political necessity;
this resulted in his masterpiece, The World Turned Upside Down (1972). The
second was the flowering of his interest in the great literary figures of the
age, which yielded Milton and the English Revolution (1977) and A Turbulent,
Seditious and Factious People (1988), his book on Bunyan. Hill now turned
violently against the mainstream of the Revolution he had spent decades
illuminating and towards the radical fringe groups and iconoclastic individuals
who posed extreme challenges to the social order and religious discipline that
successive revolutionary governments attempted to maintain. Cromwell and Ireton
at Putney became as oppressive a power structure as Laud and Strafford had been
at Whitehall. Hill called this history variously, ‘history from below’, ‘total
history’, or the ‘history of the dispossessed’, though few of his subjects
derived their social origins from within even the bottom half of 17th-century
society and most were so self-consciously unconventional as to defy
generalizations based on their behaviour.[3]
“This work became part of a larger project in which
Hill sought to represent the dispossessed throughout history. He identified
himself with such ‘radicals’, once instructing a group of US scholars to turn
their attention to the study of Native Americans, and in a spirit of cleansing
self-criticism proclaimed: ‘One of the things I am most ashamed of is that for
decades I proudly illustrated the spread of democratic ideas in 17th-century
England by quoting the ringing Leveller declaration, “the poorest he that is in
England hath a life to live as the greatest he” ... Every he? Every man? What
about the other 50 percent of the population?’ Here he may be anticipating the
movement for children’s rights, as even the Levellers were advocating only an
adult franchise and adults comprised only about 55 percent of the Early Modern
population”.[4]
He went on to call Hill a Rolodex historian who was
“immune to criticism”. The attack on Hill was wrong and was driven by political
considerations. I am not against healthy debate, but Kishlansky’s almost
vendetta like attacks were “clumsy and resentful”.
Hill was defended by his friend fellow former
Communist Party Member E. P Thomson who wrote “The testimony of Baxter, Bunyan,
Muggleton, George Fox and all Quakers, is disallowed because this served the
polemical purposes of marking out the permissible boundaries of sectarian
doctrine. This (which was McGregor’s old thesis) may indeed be true, but it by
no means disproves the reality of a Ranter ‘moment’. It is notorious that in
sectarian history (whether religious or secular) some of the fiercest polemics
are between groups which draw upon a common inheritance and share certain
premises. In its earliest years, Quakerism was involved in unseemly polemics
with the Muggletonians, in which each side accused the other of having gathered
up former Ranters among their adherents. I cannot see any reason this may not
have been true of both since both originated in the Ranter ‘moment’ and both
defined their doctrines and practices in part as a rejection of Ranter excess.[5]
Hill’s insistence that Bunyan ‘moved in Ranter
circles in his youth’ – was backed up by 14 references to Bunyan’s Works in his
book the World Turned Upside Down, despite this he was attacked by J C Davis
for saying that the Ranters were a separate and coherent group (see J. C.
Davis, Fear, Myth, and History: The Ranters and the Historians (Cambridge
University Press, 1986, pp. 224)
Further
Criticisms
Tom Shipley writes “Yet in other respects, and having
admitted Hill’s immense reservoir of knowledge, it can seem that there is too
much in his book of reading backwards from now. One warning sign is the
prevalence of phrases like ‘must have been’. Bunyan was in the army of
Parliament for several years, and in what appears to have been a particularly
‘bolshie’ unit (the adjective is peculiarly appropriate). It is true that
Bunyan hardly ever mentions this, but it ‘must have been an overwhelming
experience’; in this milieu, radical ideas circulated so much that the young
conscript ‘cannot but have been affected by them’. Maybe not. And quite likely
reminiscing about the Civil War would have been ‘contra-indicated’ after 1660.
But people can be stubbornly resistant to mere proximity. However, much
scholars like to forge connections. It is striking to note, for instance – to
take an example from Anne Hudson’s book – that Margery Kempe, about whose
orthodoxy there was at least considerable doubt, had as her parish priest
William Sawtry, the first man to be burnt to death for Lollardy. If the
authorities who interrogated her had known that, they might have felt that this
was prima facie proof of contagion. Yet as far as one can tell, Sawtry had no influence
on Margery Kempe at all: on all disputed points of doctrine, she was
rock-solid. Maybe the teenage Bunyan was as imperceptive. At least the evidence
for his revolutionary radicalism must be stretched a bit.[6]
Although not a historian Shipley makes the case that
Hill cannot be sure that moving in radical circles inside the army Bunyan
became radicalised or that he was influenced to some extent. Again, this kind of argument is petty. Because no one
hears a tree fall in the forest does not mean that the tree did not fall.
Shipley attack on Hill’s historical materialist outlook has been the stock and
trade of every revisionist historian of the 20th and 21 centuries. When Hill was attacked by Kishlansky for being
“immune to criticism” he was in some regards playing him a backhanded
compliment given the ferocity of the attacks like the one from Hugh
Trevor-Roper he would have needed to very thick skinned. Trevor-Roper
complained of that Hill’s ‘scholarship is transformed into advocacy’. It is
true that Hill was a partisan historian and was proud of it.
As Ann Talbot wrote “As a historian, he stands far
above his detractors and his books deserve to be read and reread, and if, with
a critical eye, it should always be with the knowledge that his limitations and
faults as much as his great historical insights and innovations are the product
of his time. He may be bettered, but never dismissed, and only bettered by
those who have studied him closely.[7] The radical publisher Verso has done a great service
in bringing out this new edition of Hill’s biography of John Bunyan. It is
hoped that this is only the start of a revival of interest in the work of the
great historian.
[1]http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-22/books/bk-1211_1_john-bunyan
[2]
://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/articles/to-be-a-pilgrim-by-peter-linebaugh
[4]
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v18/n21/mark-kishlansky/rolodex-man
[5]
On the Rant-E.P. Thompson-
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v09/n13/ep-thompson/on-the-rant
[6]Danger-Men-Tom
Shippey- https://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n03/tom-shippey/danger-men
[7]
Danger-Men-Tom Shippey- https://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n03/tom-shippey/danger-men
