Communist atheist pamphleteer, bill poster, slum dweller, early birth control advocate, fierce public ranter; Dan Chatterton is one of the most fascinating and undeservably obscure characters of the London radical scene in the second half of the 19th century.
From History Workshop Journal no. 25, Spring 1988, this article is a fine piece of historical research and the most detailed known writing about Chatterton. A collection of 'Old Chat's' selected works by some enterprising publisher is long overdue.
[Andrew Whitehead's website contains a page with further information on Dan Chatterton; http://www.andrewwhitehead.net/dan-chatterton.html ]
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Dan Chatterton and his
'Atheistic Communistic Scorcher'
'Atheistic Communistic Scorcher'
by Andrew Whitehead
The history of the left has conventionally been written as the story of movements and organisations. Those who left no institutional legacy, who were not pioneers of party or union, whose pamphlets have not been collected by libraries, have been more-or-less neglected. There's an injustice in this - not so much a personal injustice, as an injustice to the generations that follow who are deprived of a proper sense of the complexity of the past. Those mavericks who kept aloof from organised politics and struggled alone to preach and to persuade according to their own idiosyncratic values could have quite as much importance in transmitting ideas, in however vulgarised a form, to a popular audience as the closely-printed political journals and the in-house political rallies.
Most of these independent spirits cannot be redeemed from the condescension of history simply because little or no record survives of their lives and labours. It's only possible for Dan Chatterton to be the subject of an article because he attracted, by the exuberance and outlandishness of his propaganda, the attention of journalists and novelists, and more particularly because he took the trouble to deposit a of all (or perhaps nearly all) of his pamphlets and of every issue of his entirely self-produced paper, Chatterton's Commune, the Atheistic Communistic Scorcher, with the British Museum. His 'pamphlets elaborations' were preserved among the millions of books in `this one really social institute of the world', the individualist anarchist J. H. Mackay recalled, `bound, numbered, and catalogued just as carefully as the rarest manuscript of past centuries.'[1] And there still the curious can leaf through the fragile yellow tissue pages of the Scorcher, marvelling that such a precarious venture survived for almost eleven years, and can turn the pages of Chatterton's tracts with their irregular syntax and large, ill-matched type.
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