'The Prisons of the Mind Have Been Opened'

“The history of the last week would fill you with amazement, it is without any modern example.”

Dr. Johnson is describing what came to be known as the Gordon Riots in a June 10, 1780 letter to Mrs. Thrale. On this date, June 2, a mob estimated at between 40,000 and 60,000, organized by the Protestant Association and lead by Lord George Gordon, had marched to Parliament with a petition to repeal the Catholic Relief Act. Passed in 1778, the bill eased restrictions on the civil rights of Roman Catholics, though anti-Catholic sentiment in England remained pervasive.

The marchers on June 2 came to Parliament, putatively to oppose easing the terms of the Popery Act of 1698. What started peacefully led to widespread rioting and looting. Newgate Prison was opened, and prisoners released. On June 7, “Black Wednesday,” the Bank of England was attacked. The army was called out that day and given orders to fire on groups of four or more who refused to disperse. Some 285 rioters were fatally shot, another 200 wounded and 450 arrested. Thirty of them were tried and executed.

Edmund Burke judged the Gordon Riots a precursor to the French Revolution, writing in “A Letter to a Noble Lord” (1796): “Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.” In his June 10 letter, Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale:

“Several chapels have been destroyed, and several inoffensive Papists have been plundered; but the high sport was to burn the gaols. This was a good rabble trick. The debtors and the criminals were all set at liberty . . .”

Johnson’s observation is uncannily echoed by Evelyn Waugh in Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson (1939):

“There are criminal ideas and a criminal class in every nation and the first action of every revolution, figuratively and literally, is to open the prisons. Barbarism is never finally defeated; given propitious circumstances, men and women who seem quite orderly, will commit every conceivable atrocity. The danger does not come from merely habitual hooligans; we are all potential recruits for anarchy. Unremitting effort is needed to keep men living together at peace; there is only a margin of energy left over for experiment however beneficent. Once the prisons of the mind have been opened, the orgy is on.”