The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York by Matthew Goodman Page A
Authors: Matthew Goodman
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brothers-in-law: Kent, a country clergyman of the more exuberant variety, and Locke, who professed a Dissenter theology and had lost his job by antagonizing a local curate.
By that time Richard Adams Locke was cobbling together a living by placing occasional reviews in magazines and writing the sort of anonymous scholarly work, for textbooks and the like, that so often make up the freelancer’s livelihood. In August 1830, Esther gave birth to a daughter, Adelaide. Locke was now on the cusp of thirty, and with distressingly few prospects. The family estate, built up over two generations, had not been passed on to him; and in any event, he had no interest in managing land. He considered himself a newspaperman, but he had been ousted from the local paper and in the process had become notorious as a radical and freethinker, which was one thing in London and quite another in a place like Somerset, where everyone, it seemed, knew everyone else, where the church was the hub of town life and the walls were not smeared with broadsheets and graffiti. Memories ran long in Somerset, and even five years after the fact publishers were not interested in hiring someone who had so alienated the most powerful of his newspaper’s readers. Nor would Locke likely find employ-
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Bearer of the Falcon Crest
ment again in Bristol. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran high there (in 1829 peti-tions against Catholic emancipation had collected more than 25,000 signa-tures, and mobs shouting “No popery!” had attacked a Catholic church and the homes of several prominent Catholics), and there would not be much sympathy for a man who had championed emancipation.
Even republicanism offered little of cheer. The movement was losing steam now, having evolved through the 1820s into an electorally based campaign for parliamentary reform, which was encountering seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The new Whig prime minister, Earl Grey, had introduced a reform bill into Parliament to grant representation to rapidly growing industrial cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester; though the bill passed the House of Commons, it went down to defeat in the House of Lords. The bill’s defeat sparked riots throughout Great Britain, none worse than in Bristol, where on October 31, 1831, mobs ran wild through the city, looting and setting fire to more than a hundred buildings. In the Mansion House along Queen Square, where the mayor had barricaded himself in an upper room, rioters broke down the doors with beams of timber used as battering rams, then swept through the house smashing furniture, windows, mirrors, and chandeliers. Later the Mansion House would be burned down, as would the Bishop’s Palace, though not before the books in the bishop’s library had been tossed into a bonfire and the wine in his cellars looted and then sold on the green for a penny a bottle. Gangs roamed through prosperous sections of the city, breaking into houses and demanding money under threat of murder; terrified homeown-ers, locked in their bedrooms, flung out handfuls of silver coins to the crowds below. Looters methodically piled goods stolen from warehouses into wagons and trucks, forming streams of vehicles coming and going and returning again for more, as the owners looked on helplessly. Boys holding torches rushed from house to house, leaping through windows and setting fire to furniture. Before long all the buildings along two sides of Queen Square were aflame, the separate blazes running together into a single immense conflagration, bathing everything in its proximity in a ghastly red light. “One seemed to look down upon Dante’s Inferno,” a horrified observer would recall decades later, “and to hear the multitudinous moan and wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro amid that sea of fire.”
Dawn brought a charge from the assembled dragoons of the 14th Hus-sars, who swarmed throughout the city and bluntly
By that time Richard Adams Locke was cobbling together a living by placing occasional reviews in magazines and writing the sort of anonymous scholarly work, for textbooks and the like, that so often make up the freelancer’s livelihood. In August 1830, Esther gave birth to a daughter, Adelaide. Locke was now on the cusp of thirty, and with distressingly few prospects. The family estate, built up over two generations, had not been passed on to him; and in any event, he had no interest in managing land. He considered himself a newspaperman, but he had been ousted from the local paper and in the process had become notorious as a radical and freethinker, which was one thing in London and quite another in a place like Somerset, where everyone, it seemed, knew everyone else, where the church was the hub of town life and the walls were not smeared with broadsheets and graffiti. Memories ran long in Somerset, and even five years after the fact publishers were not interested in hiring someone who had so alienated the most powerful of his newspaper’s readers. Nor would Locke likely find employ-
– 60 –
0465002573-Goodman.qxd 8/25/08 9:57 AM Page 61
Bearer of the Falcon Crest
ment again in Bristol. Anti-Catholic sentiment ran high there (in 1829 peti-tions against Catholic emancipation had collected more than 25,000 signa-tures, and mobs shouting “No popery!” had attacked a Catholic church and the homes of several prominent Catholics), and there would not be much sympathy for a man who had championed emancipation.
Even republicanism offered little of cheer. The movement was losing steam now, having evolved through the 1820s into an electorally based campaign for parliamentary reform, which was encountering seemingly insurmountable obstacles. The new Whig prime minister, Earl Grey, had introduced a reform bill into Parliament to grant representation to rapidly growing industrial cities such as Birmingham, Leeds, and Manchester; though the bill passed the House of Commons, it went down to defeat in the House of Lords. The bill’s defeat sparked riots throughout Great Britain, none worse than in Bristol, where on October 31, 1831, mobs ran wild through the city, looting and setting fire to more than a hundred buildings. In the Mansion House along Queen Square, where the mayor had barricaded himself in an upper room, rioters broke down the doors with beams of timber used as battering rams, then swept through the house smashing furniture, windows, mirrors, and chandeliers. Later the Mansion House would be burned down, as would the Bishop’s Palace, though not before the books in the bishop’s library had been tossed into a bonfire and the wine in his cellars looted and then sold on the green for a penny a bottle. Gangs roamed through prosperous sections of the city, breaking into houses and demanding money under threat of murder; terrified homeown-ers, locked in their bedrooms, flung out handfuls of silver coins to the crowds below. Looters methodically piled goods stolen from warehouses into wagons and trucks, forming streams of vehicles coming and going and returning again for more, as the owners looked on helplessly. Boys holding torches rushed from house to house, leaping through windows and setting fire to furniture. Before long all the buildings along two sides of Queen Square were aflame, the separate blazes running together into a single immense conflagration, bathing everything in its proximity in a ghastly red light. “One seemed to look down upon Dante’s Inferno,” a horrified observer would recall decades later, “and to hear the multitudinous moan and wail of the lost spirits surging to and fro amid that sea of fire.”
Dawn brought a charge from the assembled dragoons of the 14th Hus-sars, who swarmed throughout the city and bluntly
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