User:Shetland71/sandbox

Hi There

This articles describes the life of Charles Hall an early English Socialist and author of The effects of civilization on the people of European states.

Who was Charles Hall
‘There is a subject...that never enters into the thoughts of anyone to make inquiries about; namely, the state and condition of the great mass of the people.... To know these particulars with regard to the poor...is truly to know the state of a nation’. These lines were written by Charles Hall in ‘The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States’ (1805), a book in which Hall rigorously analyses the economic causes of poverty in England. ‘The Effects’ Hall’s only book, was well known to radical reformers such as William Cobbet, Thomas Spence and Robert Owen and was recommended reading for the Owenite societies. Through influence on these and later reformers Hall's ideas played an important role in ‘the rise and shaping of that critical socialism that was the lifeblood of the movement in the second quarter of the [nineteenth] century’, a movement which lead in time to the ideas of Marx and Engels. Hall along with writers such as Thomas Spence, and the three Williams; Ogilvie, Godwin, and Thompson have been called the Early English Socialists. Hall's reputation has grown with time. Asa Briggs wrote ‘Forty years before Engels, Charles Hall had stressed the snapping of the “chain of continuity” in society and stated perhaps for the first time the central proposition of a class theory of society’. Other modern commentators  have also singled him out  for  his originality, calling him  ‘the first of the early  socialists’ ,    the thinker who provided  ‘the first interpretation of the voice of rising Labour’   and Gregory Claeys writing in 1994  thought Hall the first to ‘substantially confront manufacturing as a new form of activity’. It ‘is hard to think’, wrote a reviewer of Hall’s work, ‘of any writer who had combined so fully an uncompromisingly radical critique of the political structure with an equally radical critique of the social and economic system’. Hall unlike many contemporaries grasped that the poverty of the masses was the result of the grinding out of a bad system, a social and economic system in which all were morally damaged, many were economic victims and few had evil intent. Hall's ideas on poverty deserve close consideration as they evolved, not just from the writer's desk, but as a result of medical visits to poor families in their homes. On one such visit Hall finds: ‘the children several of them generally lying in the same bed: heated by and heating each other in a small room, corrupted by the exhalations of the whole family; disturbed by one another's cries; ….... the effects of disorder increased by the vermin and hard beds, covered by filthy clothes; have nothing proper to use from the cellar, the kitchen, the garden, or apothecary's shop; no attendants, but the poor mother worn out by watchings’ ‘The Effects of Civilization on the People in European States’, which can only be briefly summarised here, is a cohesive whole in which Hall argues his case step by step and in a modern way backs up his analysis with data on wages, production and demography. The labour of the poor, he says, is the foundation of the whole wealth of the state, but despite this the poor do not enjoy  the wealth generated by their work. Hall then tries to quantify how much of this wealth they actually receive. First, he adds up the annual value of the country’s agricultural production, plus the exported and home consumption of manufactured items and arrives at a total figure £312 million. This he then divides by the total annual wages of all labourers of the country estimated at £40 million and shows that poor workers, who constitute eighty percent of the population, only receive one eighth of what they produce the remaining seven eighths being consumed by the twenty percent who are rich. In Hall's view this concentration of wealth is the source of power by which landowners and manufacturers  suppress workers through low wages, government diktat, the law and the church. These instruments of power are constructed by the wealthy, totally for their own advantage and are ,he says, most blatant in wartime, when the poor are forced to suffer and die to serve the greed and ambitions of the rich. However, most of the time the control is insidious as ‘All these things’ …. are ‘brought about in a regular, orderly silent manner, under specious forms, with the external appearance of liberty, and even of charity’. There is ‘more oppression exercised over them by this cool, deliberate, systematic junction of art and force, than force alone was ever known to accomplish’. In summary Hall’s thesis is that the interests of the poor and the rich are diametrically opposed. ‘as plus and minus’ a sentiment  set out more fully forty-three years later in the Communist Manifesto. Hall's remedies are not a long list of new laws for each specific ill, rather his approach is to suggest two reforms which will inexorably work out over time to improve the situation of the poor. His first solution is the abolition of primogeniture so that gradually the land will become more divided amongst the population. According to Hall a major cause of the scarcity of food is the low productivity of the land as a result of the reduction in the number of labourers working it. Thus, and this is his second solution, there must also be a turning away from manufacturing and a return of people to the land for in Hall's view it is manufacturing which is drawing labour from the land and drastically reducing agricultural production. Manufacturing, particularly the manufacture of luxury goods, should be heavily taxed. When a physician tries to improve a patient's constitution, the change should be gradual and so it should be with the political constitution. Thus, Dr Hall does not advocate rash and violent remedies for society's ills, the French Revolution and its terror were too fresh in the memory. Thus  the poor should not be the agents of change because, as a result of their subjection, they would be too violent, rather it is the rich who having been made aware of how their lifestyles were harming the poor will then bring about the required changes. This is expecting idealism of a very high order indeed, an expectation which contemporary critics strongly ridiculed. However modern social historians have praised much of Hall’s critique of eighteenth century poverty if not his wish to return to what sounds like a rural arcadia. Hall was perhaps understandably unable to see a future, beyond the terrible toil of the factories, a future in which manufacturing and commerce would eventually raise the living standards of all, not just the rich. As noted above Hall's work has been analysed by several social historians but his life has been a blank. J R. Dinwiddy remarks that “it seems unlikely, owing to the paucity of material, that a biog-raphy will ever be possible.’    The truth of this is borne out by the entry for Hall in the Dictionary of National Biography which contains very few facts about his life and two of these are incorrect. He did he did not write ‘The Medical Family Instructor, with an Appendix on Canine Madness’ and as we shall see he did not die in prison. The research reported here has interrogated the archives, and discovered more material which is used to reconstruct Hall’s life and to provide a richer context in which to place his work. The paper thus complements detailed studies of his work such as that by JR Dinwiddy and W Stafford.

Early Life
St Mary and St Peter at Salcombe Regis East Devon has one of the most picturesque locations of any church in England lying as it does  at the head of a steep and narrow valley looking out across the English Channel. On the north wall of the chancel is a plaque which commemorates ‘Joseph Hall who was 63 years vicar of this parish’. (FIG 1) Joseph Hall was Charles's father. Joseph and his wife Honaria had eight children. Charles the fifth child was born on March 9th 1739. (FIG 2 )

Medical Training
Why go to Edinburgh? In the mid eighteenth century, many medical practitioners particularly in the provinces did not have any formal qualifications but the majority had probably served an apprenticeship with a practising doctor. The cream of the profession was those with a university degree. However, in Britain it was Edinburgh that had the pre-eminent reputation for medical education because, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, it offered a coherent series of lectures on current medical knowledge, access to patients at the infirmary, cheaper student costs than at Oxbridge and a galaxy of professors descended from a great tradition coming down from Boerhave of Leiden who revolutionised medical knowledge and teaching and whose pupils went on to staff the Edinburgh medical school. (FIG 4)

Physician at Daventry and Braunston
After Charles left Leiden three years have elapsed before he appears again in the historical record when, in 1768, he published an article ‘On the Catarrhous Cough’ in The Gentleman's Magazine which described him as ‘Physician at Daventry’. Hall argued from his experience of clinical cases  that a copious discharge of mucus from the lungs is not always caused by an ulcer or tubercular infection. A Dutch version of the article also appeared in Niuwe Vaderlandsche Letter –Oeffeningen, presumably because he had graduated in the Netherlands. The article in the Gentleman's Magazine, which had a national circulation of around 4000 per month, would have advertised very effectively to the gentry the presence of a competent new physician in the Daventry district. It is not clear exactly why Charles chose to set up his practice in Daventry. However, it was a good choice for a young doctor as Daventry was growing, rising from 1,450 in 1676 to 2,582 by 1801. According to a 1712 guide, Daventry ‘stands upon the same road with Towcester and is of Note for its Good Inns and has a flourishing trade; being reckoned a town of very good business’. Daventry was also at the crossroads of several important eighteenth century routes for stage coaches and wagons such as  those from London to Chester, Northampton to Warwick and Oxford to Stamford.