The Reverend Jeremiah Joyce

I knew nothing about Rev. Joyce until I decided to write this blog and thought it might be a sensible thing to research him a little, to find out what other books he'd written if nothing else. It turns out that he was involved in an important event at the end of the 18^th century that I didn't really know anything about, although it is a precursor to a very important Act of Parliament in 1832 that I did learn about in school (mind-numbingly boring though it was at the time).

What follows may read like a list of facts, that's because it is.

Born in 1763, Jeremiah doesn't seem to have been from a poor family but he was a long way off gentry. He inherited land from his father (Jeremiah) in his mid teens even though he was not the first son. With assistance from Joshua, his eldest brother, Jeremiah studied to enter the Unitarian ministry. From my understanding denying the Trinity was illegal until the passing of the Doctrine of  the Trinity Act (1813), Jeremiah seems to have been showing radical tendencies fairly early on.

Joyce became a tutor to the sons and the private secretary of the 3rd Earl Stanhope, Charles Stanhope. Earl Stanhope was scientifically educated at Geneva. He was published, a successful inventor, a fellow of the Royal Society and married to the sister of Pitt the Younger (although Stanhope fell out with William Pitt over politics, which will prove interesting later).

Now this is where it starts getting politically interesting, Joyce was a member of the Society for Constitutional Information and the London Corresponding Society, both radical organisations wanting parliamentary reform. Parliament was in dire need of reform but it was far from the interests of anyone in power to accede to the wishes of educated poor people, elections were rotten. The British government feared a violent popular uprising with good reason, The French Revolution led to a declared republic in 1792 and the execution of a monarch in 1793.

May 12^th 1794: Thomas Hardy (secretary and founder of the London Corresponding Society) and Daniel Adams (secretary of the Society for Constitutional Information) were arrested and their papers seized on charges of Treasonable Practices. Two days later while teaching his students at Earl Stanhope's residence in Kent, Joyce was arrested under a warrant of the same charge and all documents connected to the two societies were seized. Within 5 hours of arrest he was in front of the Privy Council refusing to answer a lot of questions, he was remanded into the custody of the King's messenger who served the warrant. It has been speculated that Pitt targeted Joyce in the arrests in order to irritate Stanhope. In all, over 30 men from the two organisations were arrested on the same charge. On the 19^th of May, Joyce was moved to the custody of the Governor of the Tower of London under a warrant for High Treason issued by the Privy Council.

Following a government report on the papers seized from the arrested radicals, amid fears of them spying for the French, the government introduced a bill suspending habeas corpus. The bill received royal assent on 23^rd May. The prisoners could now be held without charge until February 1795. Joyce and a dozen others remained in the Tower until late October that year. From a parliamentary debate on the suspension of habeas corpus:

Those members remained, in consequence, close prisoners in the Tower, till they were brought to a solemn trial before a special commission at the Old Bailey, on the 25^th of October.  A bill of indictment had been previously found in the grand jury, at the Sessions-House, Clerkenwell, on the 2^nd of October, against Thomas Hardy, John Horne Tooke, J.A. Bonney, Stewart Kydd, Jeremiah Joice, Thomas Wardell, Thomas Holcroft, John Richter, Matthew Moore, John Thelwall, R. Hodson, John Baxter, and John Martin.

From Joyce's pithily titled narrative of the trial An account of Mr. Joyce's arrest for 'treasonable practices;' his examination before His Majesty's most honourable Privy Council; his commitment to the Tower and subsequent treatment; he and the the other prisoners were moved from the Tower to Newgate jail on 24^th October and were arraigned at the Old Bailey on the 25^th on one indictment to which they all pleaded not guilty. The trials started on October 28^th; by November 22^nd two lead radicals had been tried and found not guilty. Jeremiah was called to court on December 1^st with three others (over 6 months since their arrest) ; after the jury was sworn in, the Attorney General asked the jury for a verdict of acquittal and presented no evidence. They were freed; not a single arrested radical was found guilty of treason.


Joyce became the secretary of the Unitarian society and wrote a number of books (mostly scientific), one of which is the initial focus of this blog. He died in June 1816 at the age of 53. Parliament was reformed in 1832. Habeas corpus was reinstated and has quite recently disappeared to a large extent. William Pitt almost starred in Blackadder the Third. Thomas Hardy was not *that* Thomas Hardy.


Is it just me or were people's lives intensely interesting back then?


Also.. all this has happened before, and all this will happen again


Roll credits, onto the science

What's all this about then?

Among the many things I find fascinating are science, books and history. This blog is a place where I will indulge myself with these things like a geek with a keyboard and a net connection.

Look! It's an old book.

Some years ago while browsing an antique book store I found a small, well loved volume that I instantly fell in love with and bought. It's smaller than modern paperbacks and fits nicely in the hand even though it runs to almost 500 pages. The lightweight blue hardback cover is slightly embossed and the spine bears the gilded inscription "SCIENTIFIC DIALOGUES — BY THE REV^D J. JOYCE — COMPLETE AND ILLUSTRATED WITH 200 — WOODCUTS". Above the title is an image of a train in full steam, below is a device which could be a map or compass surrounded by four sailing ships. The full title given on the title page is longer and more descriptive yet but we shall get to that in a bit. It has the wonderfully uneven page size of old books that makes you realise just how recently absolutely everything was done by hand; easy to forget in our completely automated and industrial age.


I say recently but this book is old, really old. Over 150 years certainly but it's hard to say for sure, there is no printed date in any of the normal places although it does have a hand written owner's name and the date of August 15^th 1857. The Dialogues were initially printed in six separate volumes at the very beginning of the 19^th century. Jeremiah Joyce's entry in the 1885 edition of the Dictionary Of National Biography gives publication in 1807. However the 1815 edition of volume 3 has a dedication by the author dated at 1802. It was updated and reprinted many times including a Welsh translation in 1851 (some 35 years after the Reverend Joyce's death). Apparently the Dialogues were still in use in the 1890s. While the author was not alive during the reign of Queen Victoria this was most definitely a book that was read by a great many Victorians, I can feel justified in the name Scientific Victorian for this project.

This is how books should look; used and friendly.

The book is, as its title suggests, a series of conversations. These conversations are between the author and two of his children, Emma and Charles; they very politely ask sensible questions and he very politely responds with educational answers. Socrates would have been proud of this fine book. The language seems strange (and at times humorous) to my modern sensibilities, that's part of its charm. What I find most interesting is where the science is horribly wrong from our understanding, this demonstrates to us exactly how the scientific method works over time and it's a wonderful thing.

My plan is to scan and transcribe each of these conversations into a post where I'll add my own thoughts, sometimes even touching on the science. There are 140 conversations in the book, this could take a while, if I do one a week that's almost 3 years of work.

While doing my research for starting this project I discovered that the author was something of an interesting character beyond writing this book. I shall look at that a bit in the next post.

Also, I don't claim to know everything. If I get anything wrong then please point it out and give references (and no, wikipedia isn't always right)