George Jacob Holyoake's Journey of 1842

Instant fascination was my response when I first came upon George Jacob Holyoake’s story while studying with the Open University in the 1990s.  I started to read all I could find about him and, as I took down notes, it soon became necessary to start a narrative, and once the narrative was begun the notion of his walk from Birmingham to Bristol took over as a perfect way in which to bring together the events leading up to his trial and imprisonment in 1842.  It’s been a process of learning for me and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it all.  Prose writing is a whole lot different from lyric writing too!

The details of George Jacob Holyoake’s imprisonment, and the events running up to it, are scattered across a fairly wide range of sources so it was quite a task to bring them all together while at the same time trying to place his experiences as much as possible within the context of the world about him.  It’s an interesting story which shows how much England has changed over the last 170 years.  We’ve grown from a country where mine and mill children were used as commodities, where all workers were used as the living ‘hands’ of their masters’ manufactories, where less than 10% of the male population had the vote and women none, and where the church and the state possessed a strangle-hold (sometimes unwittingly) on the physical and moral lives of the powerless.  It was a world in which a great and controversial Church of England bishop could still say of England that religion “is the sole foundation on which the Government stands.  The whole frame of society rests upon religion”.  170 years ago we were riding on the tailcoats of a theocracy and we’ve come a long way since then.

Catherine is working on a second book which focuses on the radical history of her home town of Halifax.

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