Elijah Fenton

 My first teaching job, many years ago, was at Newcastle-under-Lyme school in Staffordshire. There hung above the door in the Memorial Hall a portrait of the 18^th century poet Elijah Fenton, and on many occasions I wondered who Fenton was and why he appeared there. It was only recently that I sought enlightenment from “The Lives of the English Poets”, by the great Doctor Samuel Johnson, who was himself a Lichfield man and proud of his Staffordshire origins.

  Elijah Fenton was born at Shelton in 1683, the eleventh child of a local landowner, and attended Cambridge University. He published a collection of poems and a verse drama, “Mariamne”, which was staged successfully. He also attracted the support of Alexander Pope, England’s greatest poet of the time, and assisted in the latter’s translation of Homer’s “Odyssey”, so he must have been a reputable scholar. But Johnson, though devoting six pages of his book to Fenton, only quotes two lines of his poetry, and even these he admits are not very good.

   Fenton was a Jacobite, which means that he did not accept George of Hanover, who became King George I in 1714, to be the legitimate King of England: instead he gave his support to the exiled James Edward Stuart (“the Old Pretender”) and his son Charles (“Bonnie Prince Charlie”) who led the great risings of 1715 and 1745. Because of this, Fenton could never aspire to any official position, for that would involve an oath of loyalty to the Crown, and any patronage could only come his way from fellow Jacobites. Jacobitism was very strong in Staffordshire: Johnson himself never made any attempt to conceal his own Jacobite sympathies.

   Fenton left Staffordshire early in his career and moved south. He became a schoolmaster and tutor, and was briefly secretary to the Earl of Orrery, but Johnson admitted he found it impossible to trace Fenton’s career exactly. He was described as being amiable and well-liked, but also physically very lazy, lying in bed until late in the morning and seldom taking any exercise, which resulted in him being very corpulent. This possibly hastened his early death in 1730: Pope indeed said that he “died of indolence”!

   One difficulty remains. Investigating portraits of Fenton via Google, I found that none of them looked anything like the picture in the school Memorial Hall. I wondered who identified the portrait. And since Fenton died more than a century before the school was founded, precisely why his portrait should be hanging there, I had no more idea than when I started!

Political Philosophy: Human Rights

 Rights are “advantages that may be legitimately claimed” (Mill). They can be considered under different headings.

 

 Human Rights; earlier known as "natural rights" were first postulated as “Life, liberty and the possession of property” (Locke) and “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (Jefferson), and listed by the French Revolutionary leaders as “The imprescriptible rights of man”. They exist independently of positive law, and are common to all humanity: it is wrong for the state and any other power to deprive us of them without due process of law, and if they are infringed unjustly, we are, according to Locke and Jefferson, entitled to rebel. The concept is fundamental to liberal thought and the desire for a limited, non-interventionist state. 

    The concept of human rights was unknown to the ancient Greeks or the mediaeval writers. The idea of the “Rights of man” was denounced by the conservative thinker Edmund Burke, and dismissed by Bentham as “Nonsense on stilts”.

   A common argument is that even if “human rights” are an imaginary concept and cannot be proved to exist, most people think they ought to, and that the idea provides a good basis for moral conduct and a useful restraint on the power of the state, and that it is useful to treat them as if they had a real existence.

Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau agreed that under the Social Contract we rely on the power of the state to safeguard our rights. But what right do we have to oppose the state?   

Punishment, by definition, involves the removal of some natural rights. The question of how far the state is justified in infringing them (e.g. by conscription in wartime) has been endlessly debated!

 

Civil Rights are what we hold as citizens of a state, and are guaranteed (at least in theory!) by positive law. Examples would include the right to vote, to hold an official position, etc. Women did not hold such civil rights until they were given the vote. Children and lunatics do not have the same civil rights as sane adults, though their human rights may be the same. Criminals may forfeit civil rights. In some states (e.g. the USA) civil rights may be precisely stated in constitutional law. There is obviously an overlap between human and civil rights, but an example of the difference would be “the right to a fair trial” (which is surely a fundamental human right), and “the right to a jury trial” which is a civil right determined by law.

 Nowadays, “democratic rights” such as freedom of speech and writing, freedom to mount political campaigns and to criticise the government, are seen as essential aspects of a democratic society. Are these natural rights or civil rights?

 

All sorts of other rights have been postulated, which are more properly “Claims”; e.g. the right to education, a living wage, decent housing, medical care, etc. These are different from natural rights, in that they will probably involve intervention by the state to bring them about (unless the hope is that they can be provided by the workings of the free market), and therefore seem to be at odds with the old liberal ideal of a non-interventionist state. 

 

Some have argued for a “hierarchy of rights”, to establish that some are more important than others: for instance, if a starving man steals food to survive, how does his “right to life” weigh against someone else’s “right to property”? What about the competing rights (the right of the foetus to life as against the mother's right of control over her own body) in the debate over abortion? And what rights are there in suicide?

 

Recent discussion of rights has postulated a number of specific issues: gay rights, trans rights etc. What are these? What specifically might women’s rights be? (Animal rights are different again, and have been discussed in an earlier post)

 

The Marxists did not disagree with most of the above rights and claims, but argued that, as long as there were massive inequalities of property ownership, they were meaningless for the vast majority of the population. They also argued for giving priority to the fulfilment of the claims over absolute property rights, and also over the “democratic rights” claimed in the West.  

 

Privileges are benefits or advantages that may be claimed by particular individuals or groups, but are not available to everyone (e.g. British nobles having a seat in the House of Lords, or Privy Councillors having access to state secrets). They may be defined by law and be liable to be withdrawn. Should all legal rights perhaps be regarded as privileges?

 

Justice is often seen as being based on respect for the rights of others: unwarranted infringement of someone’s rights being by definition unjust.

Obligations would seem to result from rights: if I have a right to liberty, it would follow that other people (and the state) have an obligation to respect it.

When and how far, if at all, do we have any right to break the law of the state we live in? Thomas Aquinas makes it clear that we should not obey any human law that clearly goes against God's commands (e.g. to worship pagan idols), and Locke argues that we have the right to resist a law that threatens our natural rights. Hobbes strongly disagrees that we have any right to follow our consciences where they conflict with the state's laws, arguing that this effectively means that we can all disobey any law we choose. Of course, there is a major difference between a passive refusal to obey the law and open active revolt!   

Cricket: The Chinese Test Cricketer

A back-of the hand delivery by a left-arm spin bowler, which turns from off to leg for a right-handed batsman, used to be called a "chinaman". That term appears to have been discarded, presumably for its racist implications, though in fact it was coined for the man who first practised this kind of delivery: the only man of Chinese descent ever to pay test cricket.

Ellis Edgar Achong (1904-86) was born in Trinidad and played half-a-dozen test matches for the West Indies in the 1930s, including a tour of England in 1933. He then married and settled in Manchester, and over the next few years he took more than a thousand wickets whilst playing for various Lancashire League clubs. After the war he returned to Trinidad, where he coached cricket and stood as umpire in a test match in 1954.

The story goes that his stock delivery was given its name when in 1933 he dismissed the England player Walter Robins, who exclaimed in disgust, "Fancy being done by a bloody Chinaman!", to which Learie Constantine of the West Indies replied, "Do you mean the man or the ball?"  

 The "chinaman" delivery was used successfully later in the 1930s by the Australian bowler Fleetwood-Smith, and more recently by Paul Adams of South Africa. They have also bowled the left-armer's googly, which turns from leg to off. 

Political Philosophy: Power and Authority

 (Related topics are Sovereignty: the supreme authority withing a certain field: Obligation: the duty to obey: the Social Contract: an agreement to obey; and Democracy: nowadays seem as the sole source of political authority)

 

   Power and Authority are two related but different concepts in political thought; exemplified in the difference between “CAN I do this?” and “MAY I do this?”: in other words, am I capable of performing a certain action, as against, is it legitimate for me to do it.  Political power generally involves getting people to do something which, initially, they might consider to be not in their best interests. This might be achieved by the use or threat of violence, or by some non-violent method of persuasion. Power is a “de facto” concept: either I possess it or I don’t. Thus, Mao said, “Power comes out of the barrel of a gun”, and Lenin said that the only question that mattered in politics was “Who – whom”: “who is pointing the gun at whom? and how do I ensure that I’m on the right end of the gun?" Both of these leaders believed that all power is ultimately based on the threat of violence.

  Authority is different. Suppose we were meeting in a public room, and I asked, “Can I remove this chair?” Yes: I can easily carry it. “Can I take this table?” No: it’s too heavy for me to carry on my own, and I would need the help of others. They might well ask whether I had the authority to take it. I might get them to help, either by threats, or bribery, or by persuading them that someone higher up had given me permission to take it. We could deduce from this that authority is delegated downwards.

   But what is authority? Unlike power, it is a “de jure” concept: it is based on the notion that it exists in law. Does it really exist, or is this merely propaganda by those in power, to persuade subjects that they ought to obey? This interpretation might be argued by Hobbes, Machiavelli and the Marxists, and the Utilitarians refuse to discuss the question. And if it exists, what is its source? The Emperor Frederick II in the 13^th century said his authority stemmed from “God, the Pope and the People”; three sources being better than just one!

Max Weber (1864-1920) famously defined Authority into three categories:-

1. Traditional: based on custom (e.g. a tribal chief or priest; presumably deriving ultimately from God(s)

2. Charismatic: based on force of personality (e.g. a gang leader; ultimately deriving from the democratic support of followers, and liable to be withdrawn if the leader proves unsatisfactory)

3. Rational/legal: in a more stable and bureaucratic society; authority granted by accepted constitutional methods.

(King Charles’s authority would appear to be based on a mixture of 1 and 3, and if he is to establish himself in the hearts of his subjects, he needs to display a measure of 2 as well!)

 

Authority is always delegated downwards from a sovereign authority to subordinate authorities, and can only be overruled by a superior. But what is the chain of this delegation?

1. God direct to King (Divine Right of Kings)

2. God to Church to King (The vision of the mediaeval Popes)

3. The People to Government (democratic theory)

In the USA the People elect the President and the Congress, but the supreme authority is the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court; which can override even an Act of Congress.

In Britain, the supreme authority is “The King in Parliament”, which can pass or amend any laws at will. The King, the hereditary Head of State, has the sole authority to appoint government ministers, but in practice the choice is limited by the need for a government majority in the House of Commons, which is elected by the People.

Possible limitations on the authority of a government:-

1.    1. Constitutional law – but who interprets this?

2.    2. God’s commands – perhaps speaking through an organised church?

3.    3. Individual conscience – are all citizens entitled to make their own judgements?

4.    4. The will of the people – when and how should this operate? (it will almost always mean the will of the majority of the people)

 

 Hobbes would reject all of these, and Rousseau would reject the first 3 but support 4. Aquinas would support 2. Mill had doubts about 4, fearing “tyranny of the majority”. Locke and the American Founding Fathers argued for 1, basing it on 4. In Britain, the Brexit referendum was taken as a clear example of 4 by MPs and peers, a majority of whom presumably voted Remain.

Historical note-

   In the Middle Ages, there was always a dichotomy between two different themes:-

1.    From Constantinople: a quasi-divine monarch, surrounded by elaborate ritual and answerable to God alone;

2.    From the Germanic tradition: a King chosen by the tribal chiefs, who then took oaths to obey him, but with royal authority  ultimately charismatic and thus always capable of being withdrawn

This was further confused by ambitious Popes who attempted to force Kings to be subordinate to them!

All mediaeval Kings were effectively elected by the nobles (and in Poland and the German Empire remained so right through to the 18^th century!). In England, unsatisfactory Kings (e.g. Edward II, Richard II and Henry VI) were overthrown and murdered by the great nobles acting in the name of “the People”.

Claims to Divine Right monarchy were only effective when governments had become more bureaucratic and had brought the Church under control. The great constitutional conflicts of 17^th century England turned upon how far the King could govern without the consent of Parliament (as representing the People) and how far the King’s authority was limited and restricted by “law” – in other words, by what we would call a Constitution.

The strange guests, part 2

(The story so far: Betty Worthing, a chambermaid, has got to know a mysterious foreign couple, who call themselves Ilych and Nadezhda, staying at her hotel. Now another foreigner has tried to persuade her to intercept and hand over the couple’s letters. Betty is unsure what to do)

One morning Betty came down to the foyer of the hotel and found the place empty, apart from one guest sitting in an armchair in a far corner reading a newspaper. Behind the deserted reception desk was the board with the letters waiting to be collected, including one with a foreign stamp. She stepped behind the desk and examined it. Yes: it must be for the couple in room 212! This was her chance!  Quickly she took the letter from the board and slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She was still undecided what to do next: whether to deliver the letter to room 212 or to pass it on to the stranger who had offered her money for such letters; but all that could come later!

    There were footsteps behind her. The guest had dropped his newspaper and risen from his chair, and was now looking at her intently. He was a shortish man, bearded, wearing a tweed suit.

   “I see you’ve picked up the letter for our Russian friends”, he said. He had a strong Scottish accent, and his voice was firm but not threatening.

   “Yes, sir”, Betty replied, since it was pointless to deny it. “I was just going to take it up to them, sir”, she added impulsively. She sensed that she was falling into a situation beyond her control. What on earth should she do now? Suddenly coming to a decision, she told the gentleman how she had been asked to intercept and pass on letters. “But I wasn’t going to do it, sir! And I was afraid if I didn’t take the letter, he might come and take it himself, now there’s no-one about”.

   “Are you with us, then?” he asked.

   “Oh yes, sir!” replied Betty emphatically. Now she was really committing herself; getting in deeper and deeper!

    “Good. I’ll go up there with you then. It’ll save me the trouble of waiting for one of them to come down”. He returned to his chair to pick up his coat and a large bag.

   

    He let her lead the way up the stairs. At the end of the corridor he stopped. “Now, lassie, you go and knock on their door and tell them the Scotsman’s come with the pamphlets. I’ll bide here to make sure the coast’s clear”.

    Despite her fears, Betty could not help feeling a tremor of excitement as she knocked on the door. She really was in an adventure now! As usual, the door opened just a crack at first, but then Nadezhda recognised her.

    “If you please, miss: I’ve a letter for you”, Betty said, “and the Scotsman says he’s brought the pamphlets”.

    Nadezhda opened the door, and Betty signalled to her waiting companion to come in. He glanced down the stairs to check they were not being followed before walking to the room. He greeted Nadezhda and Ilych, and then produced a large pile of pamphlets from his bag. Betty noticed that they were printed in strange foreign letters. Ilych thumbed through one of them eagerly, purring to himself with pleasure as he did so.

    “Very good, very good!” he said at last, “I shall arrange for these to be sent into Russia. But tell me: why did you bring the chambermaid up with you? Is she to be trusted?”

   The Scotsman briefly recounted what Betty had told him. The two foreign guests were silent for a while, then Ilych asked her to describe the stranger who had asked her to pass on the letters. “But I wouldn’t do it, sir!” said Betty, “I didn’t like him!”

   Nadeszda still looked distrustful, but Ilych chuckled, pinched Betty on the cheek and called her “a true proletarian heroine”. Betty had no idea what this meant, but gathered that it was intended as a compliment.

    Ilych then sighed. “So they have found us!” he said. “So we must be moving on again; Nadezhda and me. I think we must leave England. Now, child, you may tell your police spy we have gone, and you do not know where. Because, of course, you do not know! Do not tell him this until next week: give us time to get away. We shall take these pamphlets, but I shall give you one. You cannot read Russian, but one day you may learn. I shall write my name on it in your alphabet, so that you will remember me”.

    He picked up his pen and on the first page of the pamphlet wrote very carefully: Vladimir Ilych Lenin.  

Stories: The strange guests; part one

    Betty knocked tentatively on the door of room number 212. Voices from within told her that the occupants were still there, but it was now late in the morning and unless she was able to make their bed very soon she wouldn’t have time to get ready for her lunchtime duties. She hadn’t yet met the couple in 212, but Elsie, who normally did this room, said they were foreigners and “a bit funny”.

       The door opened a fraction, and a pair of eyes peered out through the crack. When they recognized Betty’s chambermaid uniform and cleaning gear, the door was opened more fully and a youngish woman, plainly dressed and with her hair tied severely back, poked her head out and quickly glanced each way down the corridor to ascertain there was no-one else there, and then pulled Betty quickly inside and locked the door behind her.

       The air inside was thick with smoke. A great mass of papers littered the table by the window, with more on the floor. Seated at the table was a man in shirt-sleeves and waistcoat, with a pen in his hand. The woman spoke to him in a foreign language, and he then turned to face Betty.

   “If you please, sir; I’ve come to make the bed and tidy the room”, said Betty.

   “And what is your name, child?” His accent was so strong that Betty had difficulty understanding him.

   “Betty Worthing, if you please, sir”. She dropped him a little curtsey, because she sensed that, despite the fact that his clothes were rather shabby and that he and his wife were occupying one of the cheapest rooms in the hotel, he was nevertheless a gentleman.

   “Ah, Betty Worthing, yes”. (He pronounced it as “Vording”) “You may clean the room, child. But you must never touch my papers. Never, you understand?”

    “Yes, sir”. Betty proceeded with her work, conscious that the couple were closely watching her every movement. She was careful not to touch a single paper, however much she longed to stack them in a neat pile and dust all the cigarette ash from the table. She allowed herself no more than a single fleeting glance at one paper, which was not only in a foreign language, but written in strange letters which she could not read. At last she finished her work, curtsied to the couple and let herself out. They were indeed “a bit funny”!

Betty was assigned to room 212 for the next few weeks. She never found the room empty, at any time of the day. The strange couple always had their breakfast in the room, and never went down to the dining room together for other meals. Sometimes the man went out for a walk on his own, or the woman went shopping, and to post letters. They wrote a lot of letters, often to foreign countries. Sometimes they had visitors, mostly other foreigners, and then animated conversations continued throughout the night.

     As the man became more accustomed to Betty’s presence, he began to ask her questions; about how much she was paid and the hours she had to work; about her family and life in the town. Often he made notes about her answers. In time she found it easier to understand him, though he never learnt to pronounce her name properly. In an odd way, she liked him. His wife said little. Betty worked out from their conversations (which were never in English) that she was called “Nadezhda” and that she called her husband “Illyich”. That’s a very strange name, Betty thought.

Then one day the clerk at the hotel reception desk called Betty over. “There’s a man wants to speak to you”, he told her, indicating a respectably-dressed stranger seated near the entrance. “He says it’s important”.

    Betty didn’t usually like to be seen walking out with strange men, but she allowed him to take her to a café (where fortunately there wasn’t anyone who would recognize her) and they sat in a quiet corner. She remained on her guard, and hoped he wouldn’t suggest anything improper.

   “You are Betty Worthing, chambermaid at the hotel?” He asked, and she nodded. “And you clean room number 212, where live a man and a woman, yes? Tell me now, how does he look?”

   Betty considered. This man was clearly another foreigner; perhaps from the same country as the couple in 212, since he pronounced her name in the same way. What was going on, she wondered. But she saw no harm in answering his question.

   “He’s not very tall, and his forehead’s bald. He’s got a little beard. He’s got high cheekbones and his eyes are a bit slanted. I think his wife calls him Illych”.

   “Ah yes! It is him!” the man hissed, “And his woman, Nadezhda, she is very plain, yes? She is not his wife, you know. Immoral behaviour! Yes, a very bad couple! Most wicked!”

   Betty stiffened. Her brother was living with a girl who wasn’t his wife, and although she didn’t approve of such behaviour, she didn’t see why strangers had any right to make remarks about it.

    “Are they criminals?” she asked. “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

   “Ach, your police; they are so stupid! Just because this man commits no crime under your law, they ignore him! But this man, he is more dangerous than any robber; far more dangerous! But you can help us. He has many papers in his room, yes? Then perhaps you can bring some to us: you will be rewarded. Or does he let you post letters for him? No? Then you can persuade him to, and bring them to us. And also the letters he receives, yes?”

   Betty found herself disliking the man more and more. She might only be a chambermaid, but she still had some professional pride; and the suggestion that she, an honest girl working in a respectable hotel, might steal a guest’s papers and letters ….. the very idea! And why should a foreigner say the British police were stupid: what an insult! On the other hand, she was tempted. It wasn’t so much the promise of a reward, though heaven knows she could do with more money. But she’d always had the dream that she might one day be the heroine of a great adventure mystery, and now it looked as if the dream might be coming true.

     “I’ll see what I can do, sir”, she said, cautiously.

(To be continued in a later entry)  

Theology: Problems of Noah's Flood

 It is incorrect to believe that it was only with Darwin's writings in the mid-19th century that people began to doubt the literal truth of the book of Genesis. Problems in this account had already perplexed scholars at least a century and a half.

   According to Archbishop Ussher's famous calculations, the world had been created in 4004 BC (see my earlier post) and Noah's great deluge in 2349 BC. Envisaging this presented no great problem as long as Christian knowledge of the world was limited to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, but once European ships had rounded the Cape of Good Hope to reach Indonesia and China and crossed the Atlantic to encounter the utterly alien civilisations of Mexico and Peru, doubts and speculations began to arise. How could these people have journeyed such a vast distance from Mount Ararat in such a limited time? Why were the animals, and even the plants, so different in these places? And to some Christians, it seemed somewhat unfair of God to have pkaced these people where it would have been physically impossible to hear the message of Christ until the arrival of the first missionaries in the 16th century! All these questions became even more perplexing after the discovery of Australia, with its Stone Age people and weird marsupials.

   Then there were the problems created by the new science of geology. Isaac Newton was greatly puzzled by the fact that the earth appeared to be very much older than was told in the Bible, and, as lifelong believer in the literal truth of the scriptures, spent a vast amount of time and ingenuity trying to reconcile Biblical accounts with his own discoveries in maths and physics. Then, from the end of the 17th century, the first discoveries of fossils began to attract attention. But why were the vast majority of these plainly marine molluscs? and if so, how did they often come to be found a long way from the sea, even high in mountains? Could Noah's flood have washed them up there? Some men decided they could not be the remains of living creatures at all, but mere "sports of nature": rocks that chanced to resemble living creatures. The problem became more acute when at the end of the 18th century Mary Anning discovered on the Dorset coast the skeletons of giant marine reptiles unlike any living creatures. Such beasts would obviously not need a place on the Ark; but why and when had they become extinct? And also, if the Flood had wiped out almost all the human race, why were no fossilised bones of humans ever found?

   One learned man, Dr Woodward, at the start of the 18th century, put forward the suggestion that the laws of physics had been temporarily suspended and the entire surface of the earth reduced to liquid, so that when it solidified again the heaviest objects had naturally sunk towards the bottom. Unsurprisingly, this novel theory failed to atttract much support.

   In fact, hardly anyone was prepared to abandon Newtonian physics and argue that God had spontaneously created huge quantities of water and then dematerialised it. No: the waters that covered the earth must have come from somewhere and then, later, gone somewhere. As late as the early 19thh century the Methodist theologian Adam Clarke was trying to find natural answers to where the water had come from and then gone to afterwards. Or perhaps the continents had all sunk and then, soon afterwards, risen again? And if so, how had this been achieved? 

   These questions were never convincingly answered, but despite this, people still go in seach of the remains of Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat.