Col 49, M&D and current events

[Charles Albert]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n08/clare-bucknell/you-can-t-prove-i-meant-x

I hope the link works.....

If not, it is in the April 4th issue of London Review of Books...


*But not all mobs were hostile, and the spectacle of the pillory could be
used for the purposes of resistance as well as punishment. At the
pillorying of John Williams, prosecuted for reprinting Wilkes’s seditious
attack on George III in the 45th number of the North Briton in 1765, a vast
crowd cheered Williams, passed him flowers and orchestrated a public
‘execution’ of clothing intended to symbolise the hated former prime
minister Lord Bute. For the arch-Tory John Shebbeare, whose Sixth Letter to
the People of England (1757) despaired of the ‘Sloth, Pusillanimity and
Dishonour’ into which England had sunk and blamed it on ‘insatiate Germans’
and ‘H – – – n [Hanoverian] Harpies’, being pilloried was a rather
comfortable experience. A sympathetic under-sheriff permitted him to stand
behind the frame rather than being imprisoned in it; he could ‘occasionally
lounge forward to rest at ease on the lower board’ while his footman
protected him from the rain with an umbrella. *



love,

cfa