Agents of Reason
John
Issitt
I wrote Agents of Reason over four Scottish summers
whilst escaping my then day job as a Provost in the University of York. I owe
it and its hero Jeremiah Joyce a debt. Since its publication I have realized
that writing is my vocation. I have taken the risky step of becoming a full-time
writer. I swing from the thrill of new beginnings to the fear of having no
money to fix the boiler!
Agents of Reason grew from my historical research and my
frustrations with academia. My doctorate concerned Jeremiah who was a political
radical and religious dissenter in London over the period of the French
Revolution. The western world was rearranged by the events in France. At first
it was welcomed by the metropolitan intelligentsia who saw it as feeding their
own causes. But such support rapidly evaporated as Robespierre and then
Napoleon led it to self destruction and war. Jeremiah lived through these times
and was part of the movement that attempted to secure political representation
for ordinary people independent of religious persuasion. He failed in his
lifetime as did his collaborator Tom Paine, but over the longer term his
efforts contributed to the march of freedom. Today we enjoy rights he fought
for and on those grounds alone his story is worth telling.
But therein lies
the difficulty. To tell his story simply through the archival record is
impossible for a number of reasons. The first concerns the limited surviving
archive. Records of radicals and radical publications were dangerous – they
provided evidence to used in law. Most radical goings-on were conducted by word
of mouth - records were minimal and normally destroyed. Only scratchings remain.
Also, over time most radicals became deeply embarrassed about their former enthusiasm
and destroyed their letters. Jeremiah burnt his and the same happened to the
records of his employer – the Earl of Stanhope.
The second
reason or set of reasons, is to do with how history has been written. Academic
history attempts to provide an objective account from evidence – impossible if
there isn’t much. The records that survive are mainly those of the official
world – the papers of government, the prime minister and the aristocracy.
Furthermore, most academic history has little feel for the life of a common man
like Jeremiah. Such history reflects the winners and tells the story through
the lens of the great and the good – not through the experience of men like
Jeremiah. As a result there are many silences – the voices of the lower orders,
of women and of the different, who were actually no less important in the
action, are rarely heard.
I came to
academia late after working in a range of physical employments – timber
cutting, building and technical jobs in the film industry. Like Jeremiah I had
worked with my hands, knew the difficulties of unemployment and demanding working
conditions. I entered academia as a stranger to the values it operates and I
remain estranged from a world which seems at the same time a wonderful opportunity
to think, but ludicrously constrained by conventions it is largely unable to
recognise.
One such
constraint is the demand to write in a particular way. My doctorate, numerous
papers in learned journals and a book on Jeremiah’s life and writings. were
written within the limiting conventions of academic history which I felt never
let me get close enough to Jeremiah the man. The license for interpretation of
the motivations of the common man is small and has, if you are to be published,
to be aligned within academic rules that debar the fictional. The result is
that it is impossible to capture the textures of a life
lived.
Agents of Reason comes from negotiating and hopefully
resolving some of these factors – at least to the best of my ability. I have tried
to put my head into Jeremiah’s world armed with 20 years of study and half a
century of life. I have used the archive but not been afraid to fictionalize
when the story demanded. How well I have done is for the reader to judge.
Learn more about our newest contributor John Issitt at:
Website: http://www.agentsofreason.co.uk/
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3175872.John_Issitt
Friend on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/john.issitt.10
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Issittjohn
