In the mid-1800s, two significant and widely read Chartist poems appeared, both written in prison by Chartist organizers, and both using the epic form to interrogate the present, body forth a utopian future, and rewrite a history conceived both as broadly human and specifically national. These long poems, Thomas Cooper's Purgatory of Suicides (Reference Cooper1845) and Ernest Jones's The New World, first published in 1851 and then republished after 1857 as the Revolt of Hindostan, have much to tell us about how radicals envisioned the history of Britain, its relationship with empire, and the fulfillment of the ends of history. Cooper's poem proceeds in ten books, written in Spenserian stanzas, in which he dreams of visiting a purgatory of suicides: mythical and historical personages who have committed suicide debate the reasons for their condition and the condition of the world.Footnote ¹ Jones's poem was written in couplets, supposedly on the torn pages of a prayer book, in his own blood. The poem surveys the rise and fall of multiple empires, and also surveys recent political history closer to home. The two poems look to the past and the future, to universal history and its end. They thus participate in utopian political discourse, with its emphasis on the end of history, as well as the epic tradition. Both utopian and epic discourse in this period were affiliated with specifically national narratives, and the internationalist and universal elements of the poems sometimes inhabit these genres uneasily. Additionally, both poets attend to the religious tradition of eschatological discourse that underlies the secular notion of the end of history, and work to reconcile it with the political vision they are promoting. These writers use unique combinations of spatial and temporal frames to achieve the reconciliation of their diverse goals with the genres and discourses that they claim and transform.

The writings of Chartists have received a good deal of attention lately, both by historians and literary scholars, who are grateful to Ian Haywood and Peter Scheckner for making several Chartist literary works available in print again. However, despite Eileen Yeo's compelling Past and Present article in 1981, which demonstrated that the Chartist movement was intimately intertwined with various religious debates and institutions, little has been done with religious thought in the movement beyond her important work, Miles Taylor's discussion of Ernest Jones's religious beliefs in his biography of Jones, and, very recently, Roy Vickery's work on the notions of Christian social justice, election and communion in writings by Ernest Jones.Footnote ² One notable exception, Eileen Groth Lyon's superb book-length study, Politicians in the Pulpit, surveys religious thought throughout the movement and the development of a specifically Christian political economy. However, none of these excellent studies examine the relation between Christian eschatology and Chartist historiography, though Yeo notes in passing that Chartism was informed by a radical Christian millennialism (121).Footnote ³ Additionally, these studies tend to deal with the poetic writings as arguments only (if at all) rather than as poetry per se.

The millennial preoccupations of Romantic poetry have been widely discussed; however, outside of the religious tradition, scholars have generally thought of the Victorian era as a period preoccupied with the here and now. But among the Victorian heirs of Romanticism's radicalism were the Chartists, who continued a left-Hegelian tendency to reread millennial texts in secular terms. Cooper's major work and Jones's less significant epic have been largely overlooked by scholars. However the similarities in the way millennarian themes are treated in both, as well as the problems posed to liberal universalism in both epics by the particularistic identities of women and Jews, show a continuity in Chartist aesthetic and philosophical approaches to history. Further, their similar uses of homogenous space and temporal shifts in the poems reveal a specifically Victorian sense of modernity that shapes both their aesthetic and their understanding of utopian society. In their revision of eschatological and millennial tropes of past poetry and religious writing, these writers place themselves in a long and continuous history of Western thinkers, but in their use of modern tropes of space and time to grapple with liberal universalism and the problem of particularistic identities, they are very much of their moment.

Although both poets were Chartists and wrote in prison, their lives were otherwise quite different. Cobbler, poet, journalist, teacher, and politician Thomas Cooper (1805–91) was a working-class man, the son of a Leicester textile dyer who died when Cooper was four. An autodidact, he received little formal education, and began his working life as a cobbler. He taught himself the classics and opened two schools, but later took full-time work as a journalist. In 1840, he became a Chartist, and began to involve himself in politics. After one of his speeches was followed by strikes and riots, he was convicted of organizing the Plug Plot Riots of August 1842, and imprisoned for two years in Stafford Gaol. During this time, he was allowed some books and writing materials, and he composed his elaborate epic. He was later expelled from the Chartists when he began decrying physical force. Although at the time of his imprisonment he was not religious, he later became a traveling preacher, and finally wrote an autobiography. Barrister, journalist, novelist, and poet Ernest Jones (1819–1969) was born and educated in an elite school in Germany. His family experienced somewhat straitened finances, but was well-connected; his father, Major Charles Jones, was equerry to the Duke of Cumberland. He married into a substantial landowning family in 1841, but his business affairs did not prosper, and he became a bankrupt. In 1846 Jones found a place in the Chartist movement as a speaker, journalist, and organizer, working under Feargus O'Connor, whose support of Cooper had cooled when Cooper stopped advocating force. Jones published a poetry collection, Chartist Songs (1846), that made a small sensation. He soon became friends with Marx and Engels and declared himself a socialist. In June of 1848, Jones was arrested for seditious speech when he publicly proclaimed that the Chartists’ green flag would fly over Downing Street. Jones served two years in Tothill Fields Prison, Westminster. Perhaps because he was seen as a class-traitor, he was treated more harshly than some other Chartist prisoners such as Cooper. He refused to pick oakum and so was punished with solitary confinement. Sick and poorly fed, he nonetheless continued to write, and he stated that it was during this period that he wrote The Revolt of Hindostan. The two poets were as different in background as two Chartists could well be, and yet their poetry shows a consistency of concerns that demonstrate the coherence of Chartist thought in the period.

Chartism was one of a variety of movements that was loosely associated with liberal ideas. Liberalism, as a term encompassing a broad set of beliefs and philosophical positions, embraced Enlightenment views of progress, the importance of science, the de-emphasis of religious authority, and a humanist belief in the perfectability of the material world. Most liberals believed that society would evolve toward equality and inclusivity, that poverty would be abolished or at least reduced, and that political structures would – eventually – become more democratic. Central to liberal discussions of progress were questions about the nature of human history – how did societies develop toward perfection? Was it a gradual process or one marked by periods of radical change? Mainstream liberalism in the mid-century, such as that of Matthew Arnold, moved toward a gradualist understanding of change, seeing radical structural change as counter productive. Social and political change, such thinkers argued, had to take place organically, and had to come first from subtle shifts in values and culture – what Marx would call superstructural elements – that would only then drive structural change. Such thinkers tended to emphasize educational and aesthetic concerns as ways to make workers ready for political rights which would eventually come to them. Radicals such as the Chartists, believed in structural changes – specifically, political changes in voting and representation. Cultural change, they believed, would follow structural change, and to win structural change required dramatic, perhaps even revolutionary action. They also tended to have less faith in individualism as a historical force and more in collective action.

But after several defeats in their attempts to win universal adult male suffrage, Chartism in the late 1840s became less focused on national, institutional solutions such as enfranchisement, beginning to advocate instead an internationalist, long-term workers’ movement. Still, instead of focusing on a linear narrative of gradual progress to explain historical change, as did such mainstream liberals as Arnold, these Chartist authors focused more on the cycles of action and reaction necessary to such progress, and the suffering these cycles engendered. Both middle-class liberals and Chartists believed in the power of education and reason, but Chartists tended to focus on the failures of reason to triumph at particular historical moments. Cooper, especially, relies less on the inevitability of progress than on the necessity for active and rational cooperation to achieve the fulfillment of history. They shared with mainstream liberal thinkers, however, a belief in the necessary realization of enlightenment principles.

Chartism also shared in the larger liberal tradition's fascination with the eschatological and messianic implications of the end of history. From Hegel's profoundly Christian notion of the end of history as the fulfillment of Spirit, through Marx's revision of the teleology of economic development as a return to an edenic communism, liberal thought's preoccupation with progress leads toward the utopian problematic. Jacques Derrida's rereading of Marx (Specters of Marx) reveals the nineteenth-century thinker's profound investment in, as well as distrust of, the religious trope of the eschaton. Nineteenth-century liberal and radical thinkers grappled with both Christian and secular visions of the eschaton and of a universalist vision of humanity. The root texts for these rereadings were Paul's Epistles and the books of Daniel and Revelations. Only Paul, however, articulated the particular problems of grappling with a universalism that displaced the particularities of identity, and the difficulties of living both in the no-time (or as Agamben calls it, the time that “remains”) after the coming of Christ and before the millennium: after the revelation, and before the fulfillment.Footnote ⁴ This article explores the importance of the time that remains in the utopian epic poetry of the Chartist movement, a form uniquely suited to the exploration of a time which is both historical and atemporal, recursive and unique.

Modernity, Space, and Time

In his recent study of utopian narratives, Phillip Wegner has argued that although modernity has generally been read as having a “telos, gradually moving toward the realization of a single, universal, sociocultural space and subjectivity, wherein all forms of contradiction and conflict have been abolished” – in short, an end of universal history – “modernity is in fact constituted by a fundamental contradiction between universalism and particularism” (xxii). In the nineteenth century, “the link between the imaginary community of the utopia and the imagined community of the nation-state had become so firmly established that later expressions of the form now also serve to recontain the anxiety-producing clash of publics” occurring within the national community. One of the ways in which these narratives do so, according to Wegner, is to posit spatial structures in which such struggles are resolved on the side of the universal, or in Lefebvre's terms, in the abstract, transparent space favored by the modern. By gesturing to universalized spaces and a homogenous time in which differences of class, race and geography are nullified, Jones and Cooper address the specific concerns of those subaltern publics for which they speak, and they do so in ways that are consonant with Wegner's observations about other utopian narratives’ use of space. However, unlike the typical nineteenth-century utopias of which Wegner speaks, they envision the destruction of the nation as necessary to history's plan. And as we shall see, the manipulation of time, as well as space, was crucial in these works, which addressed questions that were not simply political, but, in their origins, theological as well.

The fulfillment of modernity posits a homogenized space in which not only geographic difference but also temporal progress ceases to signify. Typically, such a space is identified in the nineteenth century with the ideal modern nation. In these poems, however, the same tools are used to reject nation as the privileged instrument of history, in favor of the establishment of a universal modernity which transcends national identifications. Both Cooper and Jones posit a common knowledge and language as necessary for their utopias. As Jones says early in the poem, empires only take on a “soul” when a common language unites them, “One speech, one law, one God, alone efface/ From conquered lands the frontier's lingering trace” (2). When the global community is united, at the end of the poem, he explains, “One language then endearingly extends;/ Shall tongues be strangers still, when hearts are friends?/ With Babel's curse, war, wrong, and slavery came” (42).

Because in Cooper's poem, “souls” communicate telepathically, the common language that Cooper gives to purgatory is effectively instantiated from the beginning. Like Jones, Cooper believes in science and reason as a unifying force. He envisions a Habermasian public sphere of reasoned discourse; the poem is structured around a series of debates, first between souls in like circumstance (“thrones,” or monarchs and emperors, are together, traitors are together in another section, philosophers in yet another, and so on with poets and patriots, and enthusiasts of all kinds), and finally, in one grand debate of all souls convened in one place, which results in a consensus that equality is the appropriate social structure for both purgatory and its mirror, earth. The poem creates a homogenous time in which recent British political history and ancient world history are brought together in simultaneity. In the first half of the poem, time has stopped in purgatory, and although there are days and nights, there is no progression – merely a cycle of action and reaction, of suffering and respite. The poem then re-enters time and history when the inhabitants of purgatory decide to call the grand debate; this takes place exactly halfway through in Book Five. Book Six is the debate itself. For the first time in the poem, one thing recognizably happens after another; there is a “before” and a “later.” This re-entry into linear time, in which all world history participates simultaneously, brings the narrative closer to the end of history itself: when “universal life doth bloom/ With joy” (344). By the end of the debate, the souls are able to speak aloud again, but with the same understanding vouchsafed to their earlier, telepathic communication – in other words, they speak a literal common language which is presumably reflected on earth. Yet, Cooper finally awakens in a Britain still imprisoned in particularity, “and I awoke to find my home/ A dungeon, – thence, to ponder whence would come/ The day that Goodness shall the earth renew” (344). Finally, the liberated world – which rewrites all of history in simultaneous time, freeing the past from the prison of action and reaction which is purgatory – is contrasted to Cooper, and Britain, in prison still.

Cooper, then, attempts the reconciliation of particular and universal histories by conflating temporal orders: he pulls all of history into the same time space, pairing figures in recent British history against more ancient figures by similar characteristics in the same setting; for example, “traitors” Judas and Castlereagh are paired together in the same corner of purgatory. These two larger temporal frames are in turn embedded within the very particular and much briefer history of his own two year imprisonment. Cooper begins each of his ten books with sections addressing his own experiences in prison, his political opinions, and the fates of those arrested with him. In short, he grounds each book thoroughly in a particular ethos and particular physical circumstances – a prison that the narrator carefully describes, down to the local flora and fauna. In each book, the narrator falls asleep and has a dream that proceeds first in a kind of horizontal sequence – an exploration of the spaces of the Purgatory of Suicides as time fails to progress – and then after Book Five, in a linear sequence, as purgatory ceases to be a continuous seesaw between suffering and reflection on suffering, and through dialogue between the many characters introduced in earlier books, begins to approach enlightenment.

The dream setting is insistently spatialized; Cooper endows Purgatory with a specific geography and meticulously detailed architecture. In each of the first five books, he must retraverse this terrain to enter deeper into Purgatory. One key site is that which he first enters: the area leading to the thrones. This is built like a Gothic cathedral, “. . . mingling rage/ Grotesque of apes with ire of angels dread, – /Aiming all contraries to blend and wed,/ Until with hybrids she [Artifice] had filled the mind, / And with wild wonderment its powers misled” (11). This antechamber leads to a giant dome, which is both beautiful and frightening. The columns which hold the “rainbow roof” up are “Distorted things–abortions of the past,” monstrous figures of myth. The dome is filled with beautiful thrones, mingling many different cultures and their architecture. It thematizes the conflict between different points of view, between the good in history and its evils, and the oscillation between hope and despair, action and reaction that structures history. The decision of the souls, after debate, to instantiate democratic equality brings the end of suffering, and allows all the souls to enter a transformed space: the gothic area of the thrones which we entered in the first book morphs into a structure shaped around the new social order. The architecture, purged of thrones and of all dissonance in its style, becomes a wondrously beautiful “amphitheatre” (326). The decorations change from gothic monsters and “hybrids” to illustrations of science: “lo!–no more/ Monarchal thrones and monster shapes were seen/ Within; but, from the middle of its floor/ Immense, shelved gently upward countless store/ Of sculptured seats extending to the bound/ Of that ellipses vast, – and wisest lore/ By plastic art into each seat seemed wound/ So that the mind read deepest lessons all around” (325). Just as time is transformed in the poem – a stalled history is reinitialized and then fulfilled – a heterogeneous and confusing space is rationalized and transformed to reflect the structure of the new community.

Both Cooper and Jones are preoccupied with a Hegelian teleology, but whereas Cooper sees the force of history in Carlylean terms, as embodied in heroic individuals, Jones draws upon nascent mid-century understandings of race as “the” historical actor–to arrive at a future that abolishes racial difference itself in metissage. Whereas Cooper sees Britain as part of a universal history of seesawing oppression and development that is largely class-based, Jones sees Britain and all other historical powers as sites of imperial development and oppression that is specifically racial and geographic. This oppression must lead to revolt, he argues, that ultimately, by erasing racial boundaries as well as geographical differences, will result in global peace and equity.

Time and History are personified in Jones's poem and function to frame the narrative of action and reaction which Jones details. Humanity is trapped in time, subordinated to fate and history; yet history leads to its own end, inevitably: “And History, as the record sad she keeps,/ Traces the mournful truth, and writing, weeps;/ For o'er Time's dial as the hours sweep by, / Tis through the shadow that she notes them fly./ And yet that shadow, be it dark as night,/ Serves but to prove the progress of the light” (19). Enlightenment is the fulfillment and goal of history, but it also obviates history itself, which is a chronicle of ills. Jones explores the temporal orders within which he works through a baroquely complicated series of movements as he tells the same story at several different levels of temporal and geographic generality. Like Cooper, Jones must address two dominant temporal orders: universal global history and recent European political history. However, by shifting back and forth between levels of temporal specificity and using tense in a jarringly defamiliarizing way – he narrates obviously future events in the past and present tenses – he forces a constant confrontation between temporal levels as the reader must struggle to situate him or herself. He begins with universal history – of empires and continental forces. However, he then shifts ground to detail a political history which is generalized, but recognizably European, and finally, recognizably British, before returning to global history again. In this way he seeks to reconcile the larger sweep of history with the particularities of British experience, much as Cooper does. Jones then reinserts Britain and Europe into the larger cycle of action and reaction that their earlier colonial activities have set in motion. It is not enough, he suggests, for Britain to solve its own domestic and imperial problems, because it will still fall prey to global historical forces.

Jones begins his poem with an apostrophe: “From Freedom born to Time, transcendant birth!/ Colossus destined to bestride the earth,/ While heaved old empires with unwonted throes,/ Man's sanctuary, America, arose” (5). However, we soon discover that America, though auspiciously born, will fall prey to the same evil ambitions of her predecessors.Footnote ⁵ Slavery is already a corruption of American freedom, and eventually “when, thy natural limits once possessed,/ Thou, too, shall seek to colonise a West; Round coral-girt Japan thy ships shall fly,/ And China's plains behold thine armies die” (5). America, too, must fall – its freedom is merely “born to time.” Internally, America will eventually experience a revolt of the oppressed which will lead to a peaceful synthesis of the races: “Swift sinks the white, and towering over the rest,/ The hot mulatto rears his fiery crest: – / Awhile the jarring elements contend,/ Til mingling hues with softening passions blend:/ Thus wrong's avenged and Afric's burning stain/ Darkens her torturer's brow, and floods his vein,/ And, in the children, brands the father – Cain./ The Titan fragments slowly break away, – / Ripe fruit of ages men misname decay;/ But from the change no rival powers shall soar,/ And freedom's friendly union fight no more” (7). Jones ends his apostrophe to America then, with the prediction that she will become a racially mixed, “mulatto,” nation, and that her subsequent overreaching as an empire and transformation, “misnamed decay,” will give rise to no further action or reaction, but arrive at a happier stasis (6–7). Jones then turns back in time again to “Hindostan” which rises up to drive the British out, and grows into an empire of its own: “Then spread as grand an empire to the view as History, Time's untiring scribe, e'er knew” (13). Next, Hindostan invades China, and America fights them, thus beginning the “Union's overthrow” that has already been told (13). In turn, Russia and Persia invade and conquer the Hindu empire. This is preparatory to the final global conflict which will be narrated closer to the end of the poem. In this section, then, Jones rejects the possibility that any one nation or region will provide a solution to the problems of history.

The poem begins in medias res, in Jones's present, and then comes nearly to the end of global history. In the second section Jones moves backward again in time, turning his attention to the more restricted historical cycle of action and reaction in European systems of government, moving swiftly through the decline of monarchy and rise of the power of nobles, “The Past and Future on each other gaze,/ That sinking prince, that rising power between” (18). The next reaction comes when the middle class takes power and offers workers slow reform and emigration as the answers to poverty. This rehearsal of political history dovetails then again with the theme of colonialism, as Jones compares the famine in Ireland with the colonization of Ceylon, “while Ceylon's landlords dance in Hindostan” (25). Finally, the people rise up, and a bloodless revolution is accomplished. Then, Jones moves substantially forward again to the end of European colonization, but not yet to the end of history: “Free Europe, placid in her later day,/ While changing empires round her fleet away,/ Marks these enact, in sober pity's mood,/ The same career of folly she pursued” (28).

However, Europe's chickens still come home to roost: “an old curse was cleaving to her still,” as “The smouldering wrath of full four thousand years: /Whatever name caprice of history gave,/ Moor, Afrit, Ethiop, Negro, still meant slave!” (28). The narrator shifts now from the past to the present tense to detail a last global conflict: Sub-Saharan Africa first conquers North Africa, and then, allied with Caribbean nations, heads for France. Crossing the straits of Gibraltar, “Bursts the black horror on the coasts of Spain./ Laugh Mexico! And clap thy hands Peru!” exhorts the narrator (29). Europe rises to defend Spain and France, but is defeated (though the African forces come only as far as the Danube, because God protects “guiltless Germany,” which Jones did not think a colonial power) (29). Following this conflict, a permanent peace finally ensues. In a strange interlude just before the end of history, the Jews return from all corners of the earth to their ancestral homeland, which is conveniently waiting for them, empty, in an unspecified location. Almost parenthetically, women gain equal rights. The poem then shifts to the future tense to describe how a new and final world order will rise, centered, oddly, in Tahiti. Science will enable this world to be unified, disease and hunger will be defeated, knowledge will be universally available, and the global climate will be (favorably!) changed: “polar isles” grow “stately palms,” grapes “cluster” in Greenland (33).

The Chartist reader, who begins in a comfortably European present, observing America as the hope of the future, is led through a series of political victories that are aligned with national and racial defeats. The reader must project him- or herself forward in time twice, through two orders of history – global and local – to the narrator's “present” when workers have long since gained their rights, but when Britain has also long since been defeated and stripped of its empire, and Europe is about to be overrun by African armies, described in terms redolent of contemporary racist literature: “black horror,” etc.Footnote ⁶ In this way, yet another temporal order is introduced: that of the contemporary reader, who is already of the poem's narrative past. The poem encourages the reader to look beyond the present range of national, political solutions offered to date (such as the defeated Charter). Nation, geography and race are also radically – and violently – undercut as a site of identification in order to usher in the utopian future. The poet offers a new cosmopolitan identification that is mediated through these several temporal displacements and through a geographic progression which is the reverse of the usual Western narrative of civilization: Jones begins in the West, moves East and finally ends substantially South of the equator.

In their insistence on a modern view of homogenous space, as well as their preoccupation with temporal orders, Cooper and Jones show a specifically Victorian tendency to focus on a scientific vision of progress as human control of nature and history to the end of abolishing difference. The vision of liberal government in this period, with its tendency to level particularity in the service of an overarching bourgeois ideal of liberal universalism, is appropriated to a specifically socialist narrative. The expert knowledge that ideally drives such a change in a liberal government is in Cooper democratized and made available to all.

Particularity

Within this ideal, particularity constitutes a challenge to universalist egalitarianism – a problem with which Victorian Britain, as an imperial power, was especially engaged. In both poems, particularistic identities constituted as biologically or culturally essential pose a problem to be solved through the narrative. Jones charts a history of action, reaction, and synthesis at the national level, which is subsumed in a larger region-and-race war, as Africa and Asia overrun Europe, finally resulting in a common family of humanity that all speaks the same language, and is so racially mixed as ultimately to eliminate race as a historical actor or basis for identity – a global homogenization of geography and race. However, his specific exemption of certain groups from this process undercuts his argument. In a long inset poem within the poem, Jones delineates the fate of the Jews within this utopian New World; they will return to their “homeland,” forming a happy but very separate community. They thus pose a singular exception to his universal mixing that rather undoes the whole premise of the poem, which relies on universal language, religion, and intermarriage: he insists that, in the perfect society, man owns “No holier law than Christ's great law of Love” (42). Jewish exceptionalism requires a separate, regressive time which either stands still or moves backward, in contrast to all the other temporalities of the poem: “Who can believe those thrice ten centuries flown?” (39), the narrator muses, as the Jews strap on their pre-modern sandals and start walking home. Ambiguously, Jerusalem is “Bequeathed by History to Misfortune's son” (38), to “Time's great nobility of hope and woe” (39). But in this poem, History and Time are parents who, like Cronos, eventually devour their children. Jones also brings in women's rights extremely briefly at the end of the special section on Jews. (His mention of women is so subordinated to this section that the reader could be forgiven for thinking that perhaps only Jewish women will have equal rights.)

In his odd treatment of women and Jews, Jones to some extent repeats Cooper. For Cooper, the Jews feature as simply one more oppressed minority to be welcomed to the universal brotherhood of man, whereas for Jones, they are a group apart: as Jones says, “They leave! They leave! A God-collected band” (30). But Cooper also pairs his discussion of Jewish oppression with that of women's rights, also placed in a separate, penultimate section of his poem (Book Nine). It is suggestive that both poets group the Jews with women, as if both groups pose a special difficulty – needing both to be addressed and yet bracketed off from larger human history. Although scattered female characters appear throughout Cooper's volume, in Book Nine, women as a group first appear in what seems to be a separate section of purgatory. (Now that the millennium has arrived, we see the entire population of women happily fulfilling their nature by picking flowers and doing each other's hair.) Cooper pleads in this section for the rights of women, but the fact that the women appear in a kind of coda suggests that this issue may be somewhat problematic. It is in this section, also, that the oppression of the Jews is explored for the first time, although there are a number of Hebrew characters throughout the poem.

In 1846 some Jewish Disabilities were removed under the Religious Disabilities Act. Lionel de Rothschild was elected to Parliament in 1847, and 1852 and but was repeatedly unable to be seated until his third win in the General Election of 1857. The Jewish Disabilities Bill was passed in the House of Commons in February 1848, but rejected twice by the House of Lords. In short, the political and social rights of Jews in England were topics of strenuous public debate and interest. The Jewish community provided a strong challenge to a culture with a national church, which had difficulties embracing even other kinds of Christians. It is exactly the kind of subaltern public that, competing for attention with that of the Chartist movement, had to be addressed and recuperated in a utopian narrative. Amanda Anderson has identified “The Jewish Question” as a key problem in nineteenth-century articulations of modernity, particularly among Hegelians, for whom Jews were “incapable of . . . becoming modern” (126), being bound to “extrinsic law” which left them incapable of developing the interiority that defined Protestantism (126). However, she notes, there was also a tradition (especially among left Hegelians) of seeing Jews as “too autonomous” – as rootless cosmopolitans whose Jewish identity made them incapable of forming primary ties to a modern nation-state. Jews, then paradoxically stood for a backwards identity formed on ethno-religious lines and also for the dangers of modernity taken to its logical conclusion – extreme individualism untethered by national loyalties. Richard Dellamora has also identified the Jewish question as holding a pivotal place in Victorian discourses of citizenship, which often positioned Jews figuratively alongside of Sodomites, as opposed to the godly denizens of the hills. Dellamora argues that the parodic reversal of the good citizenry with ties based on homosocial friendship was imagined as the specter of a society based on untrammeled sexual desire between men. For both of these critics, Marx's left Hegelian anti-Semitism, which rhetorically identified Judaism with bourgeois capitalist values, crystallizes traditional German romantic anti-semitism at the heart of the left materialist tradition in the mid-nineteenth century.

Women's suffrage was also under discussion in this period, especially in the US, (Seneca Falls was in 1848, the year of the final defeat of the People's Charter). Cooper describes the oppression of both Jews and women sympathetically, though he discusses it in broadly historical terms rather than political ones. It is possible that Cooper brings in the question of Jewish oppression through a female speaker precisely in order to strip it of politically threatening qualities, setting it in the sphere of social rather than political ills. For Cooper, the capacity for thought makes women equal: “The Mind is of no sex,” he proclaims, referencing Edgeworth, Baillie, and Hemans as exemplars of female genius (388). Yet he introduces the book with a meditation on women's physical frailty and liability to sexual victimization – a reference to material irreducibility which his invocation of a sexless mind does little to address. Cooper invokes religion, but as a (temporary) atheist, he uses his Jewish speaker to remind the reader of the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity, rather than to focus on differences in doctrine. In this regard, Cooper more successfully addresses the issues of non-class minorities than does Jones, as his temporal structures are more capacious and less limited by religious specificity. However, both poets’ uneasiness points to the ultimate incapacity of liberal thought to deal with claims to status based on racial, religious, or sexual difference as such. Although some of the writers’ preoccupation with Jewishness might reflect the influence of German Romantic thought, the alignment of women with Jews suggests a broader structural focus on the problem of identity. The irreducible particularity represented at this historical moment by women and by Jews troubles the possibility of a homogenous and universal public and the elimination of all geographical boundaries. These poems remain, however, among the most ambitious and complex poetic attempts to address these questions seriously.

Tradition and the End of Days

The Hegelian vision of history and its end is based largely on Christian eschatology, and many scholars have noted that Marx's theory is a reworking of Hegel that replaces the Spirit with materialism, but retains the eschatological structure of the original intact. It is therefore hardly surprising that the conversion of the Jews, which traditionally must take place before apocalypse, is a key concern in these poems, which follow a left-Hegelian tradition and also address the poets’ own religious concerns. It is probably not coincidental, either poetically or historically, that Christian eschatological scholars widely believed that prophetic time would end in 1847 or 8, thus initiating the end times – a point that was debated heavily in such popular venues as the Christian Observer from 1802 through at least the 30s. By the forties, many had come to believe that the date was more likely to be around 1868 (Froom 3: 704).Footnote ⁷ Yet, surely at least some Chartist activists believed that their hand in 1848 would be the beginning of a momentous end – and its defeat must have seemed to such activists more than simply politically significant.Footnote ⁸

Many have commented on eschatological and millennial traditions in Romantic poetry; most recently Morton D. Paley took up this theme in his 1999 Apocalypse and Millennium in English Romantic Poetry. But little has been said about Victorian millennial poetry, and studies of eschatology in the period have tended to focus on the personal (individual soul and judgment) rather than the societal or global (end of days) level, such as studies of resurrection theology in Christina Rossetti. Paley claims that “by the end of the Romantic period, the time for linking the apocalypse and millennium in “a sequence that would secularize biblical paradigms is . . . ‘finished,’” at least in poetry (289). Clearly these two poems alone would challenge that statement, and I suspect they are not unique in that regard. However, the Chartists, in inheriting the political radicalism espoused by Shelley and Byron, saw themselves as their special heirs. Jones's poem comes closest to a global apocalyptic vision in the style of Shelley's Queen Mab (and draws heavily from that example), whereas Cooper's apocalypse takes place in purgatory itself. Both, however, use the combination of apocalypse and millennium to advance a secular vision, and both are clearly continuous with the Romantic projects as well as the larger Enlightenment commitment to reason. But they are also part of a more widespread concern with these issues which carries into other forms. And like those other forms, these poems go beyond their predecessors, not only in their politics, but in their attempts to negotiate the time of the nation with the time and space of a global modernity – and as I have mentioned before, they go beyond many contemporary prose forms in pushing resolutely beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. Paley claims that these issues after Keats were relegated to “utopian and dystopian prose narratives, and then to science fiction. The conventions of such genres insulated readers from possibly disturbing effects. . . . Poetry, potentially vatic and dangerous, was another matter” (289). Leaving aside the question of whether poetry is, or even was believed to be, more dangerous than prose, or how prose genre conventions would indeed “insulate” readers from dangerous effects – whatever those might be – more effectively than would conventions of epic, this seems an eminent example of false periodization. Yet these claims have remained largely unchallenged at the time of this writting.

Cooper and Jones were not simply the heirs of the late Romantics, however; they also saw themselves within a longer tradition of philosophers, poets, and theologians. Christian eschatology has concerned itself with the question of temporality since the writings of St. Paul. A fundamental question for early (and later) Christians was “when is Christ returning?” And, given that Christ had already come and the faithful were already saved, then what was the status of historical time between the death of Christ and the second coming? Had history already ended, at least for the saved? Eschatologists have split between a traditional approach to the question of history, based on the prophetic books of Daniel and Revelations, which seeks concrete historical events metaphorically described in the prophetic visions of Daniel and John of Patmos, and an ahistorical explanation: the Kingdom of God is not in the future but the present, the City of God is not a specific place but exists as the community of the faithful.Footnote ⁹ Some theologians find a basis for the ahistorical explanation in the writings of Paul, especially Corinthians I and II, in which Paul both insists on a imminent physical return of Christ and resurrection of the dead, and also a transcendent vision of an eternal kingdom in Christ which is already in place.Footnote ¹⁰

Cooper works in a secular mode within the Pauline contradiction – there will be an end of history in the physical world, which is mirrored in the metaphysical, eternal world in which it has, however, always already taken place. Meanwhile, however, the living faithful must make their way in the pre-millennial world, knowing always that they are in it but not of it–that this state of things must pass. The narrator suffers the present fallen world, but exists simultaneously, at least in his dream state, in the community of the faithful. However, in the materialist tradition, it is from the earth, from history, that its end can be brought about. Cooper simultaneously uses and inverts this order, when he has events in Purgatory determine events on earth, the metaphysical driving the material. On the other hand, because it is Purgatory, and therefore has temporal progression (as opposed to Heaven or Hell, in which time has stopped), history can still be a determining force. In the Pauline interpretation, then, metaphysical history stops with the death of Christ, and earthly history begins (the history of his church) to end with the second coming, finally uniting the two realms in a universal end of history. Cooper, however, temporally aligns Purgatory and Earth, eliminates Heaven and Hell entirely, and charts the intersection of multiple temporal lines–the individual, the earthly, the national and the metaphysical. Cooper suggests that universal history has stalled in a spiral of repetition, and only the apocalyptic advent of reason can restart it, leading to its fulfillment. Cooper follows Paul's rhetorical strategy, balancing between rallying the troops with promises of imminent utopia and heartening them for a struggle that might outlast their own lifetimes. It is also significant that Paul's letter to the Corinthian church was occasioned in part precisely by the conflict around the universalism of the early Christian community–he wrote to settle a dispute, set in motion by Jewish Christians, on the question of whether circumcision is necessary for conversion to Christianity. Paul's answer is a universalist one – “circumcision is nothing” before the mystery of Christ's resurrection, and the church is for all.Footnote ¹¹ Jones is more simply Hegelian, and his reading of history is more traditionally historical, possibly positioning itself as a revision of Daniel, which charts the rise and fall of several empires before the millennium. For Jones, there is no reaching toward a metaphysical eternity, but only a resolutely historical march toward its end. His, also, is a less universalist vision in which the Jews are unassimilable, though this can also be seen as a strikingly liberal position in its own way; mid-nineteenth century Jews were subject to a barrage of philosemitic attempts at conversion, for both Biblical and nationalist reasons. Jones's refusal to assimilate the Jews into his utopia might then be read as a defense of the Jews’ right to their own religious beliefs as easily as a partial fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy of return (Ezekiel and for some, Daniel and Revelations) and conversion (Revelations, the Epistles of Paul).

Isobel Armstrong's excellent reading of Cooper calls the poem “a vast modern myth, a new working-class cosmogony, challenging classical and Christian orthodoxies by appropriating the epic . . . fusing the epic with a Dantesque visit to purgatory, and rewriting history and political relations in a ‘historical romance,’ . . . which is an attempt to reconstruct knowledge” (214). As Stephanie Kuduk remarks of Cooper's poem, “epic conventionally had been dedicated to telling the triumphant story of a society, as in Spenser's Faerie Queene (whose stanza form Cooper adopted)” (166). She points out that Cooper subverts this tradition by using the form to critique the institutions that Spenser lauds. But Cooper also uses epic in a very traditional way: to describe the triumphant story of human society, as yet only realized in Cooper's dreams, but sure to come–a chronicle of a history foretold. As with Milton or Dante, epic can also tell of the fall of human societies and of the final end of history: a paradise regained. In Cooper's and Jones's secular epics, the Fall is entirely human and historical, but paradise can be gained, if not regained, and that marks the end of both history and of narrative itself. Cooper uses references culled from classical literature, juxtaposed against recent British history, to reconcile universal history with the specifically British story of Chartist oppression and his own imprisonment. He invokes Spenser, Dante and Byron in his form, and Milton directly (in Book Two, Milton briefly appears to play Vergil to Cooper's Dante). His poem is Miltonic and Dantesque in its religious metaphors and evocation of a gainable paradise, Dantesque in mixing mythic and contemporary historical figures, and Spenserian in its attempt to detail the good society. Both these epics undo the national praise associated with the form, by shifting to a larger ground – a global or cosmological view. One sees this especially in Cooper's betrayal of the Spenserian epic through the invocation of Milton and Dante. But Jones, too, in beginning with an apostrophe to America, sets up expectations that this nation will be presented as the solution to the evils of history – an expectation reinforced by the double-entendre title “The New World.” Jones also suggests that America will be exceptional in lines nine through eleven: “Nations have passed, and kingdoms flown away/ But history bids thee hope a longer day,/ Wise witness of an ancient world's decay” (1). Yet, America ends as simply another in a long list of failed empires, and not the last.

Both poets, then, inherit from the epic a structure of travel through space, and both use the form to address the specifically modern problem of a universal space and time at the end of history, though in different ways – Cooper returning us to a transformed point of entry which is simultaneously specific in location and all encompassing, and Jones ambiguously giving us a empire whose center is geographically specific but encompasses a globe that is homogenously tropicalized. In addition to the challenges of negotiating spatial universality, the poets also face the challenge of reconciling at least three temporal orders: recent British history, universal history and the utopian no-time of the end of history. In so doing they use and transform Christian eschatology for their own purposes, just as they use the rhetoric of nation to undo its specificities. These poems are intrinsically interesting in their own right and have been largely overlooked; they also illuminate the genre of the long poem at mid-century and its overtly political stakes, while challenging what Victorians believed to be the “highest form” of art on its own grounds. The fact that they take their place outside or in partial opposition to the dominant liberal tradition per se makes them all the more valuable and intriguing.

The poetic form is uniquely suited to the problems of narrating the time that remains – the no-time of the eschaton. By nature recursive, depending in its very structure on the use of repetition and the play of differences between repetitions, poetry allows for lateral and retrograde movement which narrative appears to deny. However, as narrative poetry, and particularly as epic, this form also pretends to a linear function – the narrative of an event, usually a foundational event, which by its nature is unique. Eschatological narration allows for the exploitation of both these tendencies; the narration of a unique event that yet must be repeated to be complete and of a time which ceases to become time and instead expresses itself in expansion through space: in what Agamben calls the time of the “as if,” the event makes “all things as if they were not.”

Recognizing the eschatological underpinnings of these poems enables us to clarify a set of assumptions about the role of the universal and particular–and the significance of gender and the ethnoreligious particularity of the Jewish community – which were surprisingly pervasive in Victorian political discourse, and in some measure continue to inform (and perhaps misinform) liberal discourse today. Certainly the end-of-days discourse that we now tend to identify with the lunatic right fringe in US politics (and that in fact enjoys massive mainstream popularity in such forms as the Left Behind series) has its antecedents in the extremely progressive and liberal (and profoundly evangelical) discourses of the early republic. It is perhaps not coincidental that women's rights have suffered enormously in this political climate. The shape of this inheritance is less obvious in Britain, but certainly the identification of (non-Christian, nonwhite) religious particularity with anti-modernity persists. The superimposition of multiple temporalities marching toward one homogenously modern and transparent end of history remains with us in such works as Francis Fukuyama's, wherein backward, developing nations will eventually catch up with the fulfillment of liberalism in modern countries, thus ushering in a modestly Hegelian fulfillment of the Spirit. In short, these poems provide an important formal and thematic link in both political and literary history between Romantic and Revolutionary Europe, through Victorianism to the present – one often overlooked.