In Leslie Stephen’s Studies of a Biographer there is a
passage about the transmission of Kant’s philosophy to Britain that rather
warms my populist heart. I like an intellectual history to have detours,
eccentricities, and coincidences – and certainly the fact that one of the main
capillaries of Kantianism in London was a pornographic snuffmaker hits the
spot.
The snuffmaker in question is a man named Thomas Wirgman.
Wirgman’s father owned a “fashionable” toy shop on St. James Street, which is
known in Johnsoniana due to the fact that Samuel Johnson bought his silver
buckles there, when he had need of silver buckles. Wirgman himself appears not
only in the few books that examine the spread of Kant’s name in England in the
1790s, but also in legal history. In 1812,
he was arrested for offering for sale a toothpick case “containing on the
inside lid thereof one obscene, filthy, and indecent picture representing the
naked persons of a man and women in an indecent, filthy and obscene situation,
attitude and practice.” According to Augustus de Morgan, Lord Brougham was his
counsellor and somehow got him off. We go from legal history to philosophy in
an anecdote about Wirgman visiting the great Brougham years later. Brougham at
first thinks that his former client is in the soup again – but it isn’t that at
all. Wirgman is now a Kantian, and he wants to propound the doctrine at the new
University of London, with which Brougham is associated.
Wirgman visited Augustus de Morgan too, in 1831, to talk
Kant. “I’m an old brute of a jeweler”, he said. “And his eye and manner were of
an extreme jocosity…”Now”, he said, “I’ll make it clear to you. Suppose a
number of goldfishes in a glass bowl – you understand? Well, I come with my
cigar and go puff puff puff puff, over the bowl, until there is a little cloud
of smoke. Now, tell me, what would the goldfishes say to that?” “I imagine,”
said I, “ that they would not know what to make of it.” ‘By Jove, you’re a
Kantian,” said he, and with this and the like he left me…”
Truly, an anecdote that would have made George Bernard Shaw
think of the theatrical possibilities.
Wirgman, it seems, was converted to Kant when a German water
colorist friend named Richter took him to see a lecture by a man named Nitsch
in 1795 in London. The London of 1795 – the London of Blake, of radical
mechanics distributing copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. As well of
anti-Catholic/anti-Irish bigotry, bucks and whores and small children crippled
in the chimney-cleaning trade. Philosophy, outside of Edinburgh, was not in
great shape in Britain. But it was sneaking in from Germany in the oddest ways.
Wirgman taught himself German to read the great Kant. He became a persistent
disciple. He corresponded with Dugald Stewart, but Stewart was too old, too
ensconsced in sensualism, to get it. He corresponded with James Mill. He met
Madame de Stael when she came to England, and wanted to talk with her about the
reference to Kant in De L’allemagne. In his small way, Wirgman got his goldfish
to think about things – although Stephen doubts that one can connect Wirgman to
Coleridge’s interest in Kant. It was Coleridge who got to the goldfish.
In a fragment written at the end of his life, Coleridge
remembered the “rough crowd” of “Crown and Anchor Patriots,” who included
Wirgman, Nitsch, and Blake’s acquaintance, Thomas Holcroft. Kant in the London
nightlife – I like to think of it.
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