Susannah Wright and the Battle of Goose Gate

In which a working-class mother faces down an empire.

THE FANATICS BEAT IN NOTTINGHAM
Dear Sir,
I have the pleasure to inform you that the Victory is ours, and that we have succeeded in establishing free discussion in the most fanatical and bigoted town in England. Yes, we are conquerors.
— Susannah Wright, letter to The Republican, 1826.

I first encountered Susannah Wright while reading court transcripts from the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, and immediately knew I had to learn more. Which is exactly what she was going for. Wright’s legal strategy, after having been indicted for selling and publishing blasphemous books, was centered around maximizing the amount of time she spent speaking in court, so that she could get as much blasphemy into the transcripts as possible. Utterly fearless, she was determined to change the world through sheer force of personality.

And so she did.

If you call it a misfortune

Her earliest appearance in those records is actually as a defense witness in someone else’s trial. Richard Carlile, a radical who wrote, printed, and sold subversive literature, had become a priority target after reprinting the works of Thomas Paine, which by this point the government knew for a fact could lead to mass revolt. Government spies began shopping at his store, building cases against him and each of his employees. Two booksellers caught in the 1821 sweep were William Vamplew Holmes and Susannah Wright. In 1822, they stood trial.

Both of them seem to have dragged it out as long as they could, even when it meant long pre-trial imprisonments. They gave false names, were charged under them, then “pled misnomer,” forcing the government to redo all of its paperwork and schedule a new court date. Wright was pregnant, and used that to delay her trial too. And they engaged in some shameless tactics to sow doubt in what should have been an open-and-shut case. Holmes’s trial was first. His main defense was to claim that, when he was arrested, he heard the spy say to the arresting officer “He is not the man I bought the pamphlet of.” Any sort of mixup like that had the potential to invalidate the whole thing. The officer and spy both denied this.

So, in the transcript, the defense calls “Susan Wright, housekeeper at Mr. Carlile’s,” to back up Holmes’s claim. This is of course actually Susannah, and she gets a few shots in almost immediately.

SUSAN WRIGHT. I was housekeeper at Mr. Carlile's. When this man was arrested, on the 27th of December, I lived there; I had just come down to prepare dinner for the two men.

Q. What two men -

A. The man unknown, and the prisoner. I saw someone open the counter, and assume an authority, which I thought he had no business to do. I opened the door directly, and asked what he wanted; it was near one o'clock - he looked very contemptuously and made no reply. I asked him again what he came for, and he was talking to Purton, the spy.

Q. What do you mean by a spy?

A. An informer; persons who go and buy these pamphlets to entrap them; they buy them and pretend that they understand them to be seditious, and I heard Purton say to the officer,

"That is not the man."

So now the prosecutors have to call more witnesses and marshal more evidence to counter this claim. Eventually, they must have realized who the “housekeeper” was and that it was necessary to discredit her. The lead prosecutor calls her back to ask her to clarify exactly what her role was in this business. She sticks to her story, so they ask her point blank:

Q. Have you the misfortune to be indicted for selling these pamphlets?

A. If you call it a misfortune, Sir, I have. I would rather enjoy my own opinion, of course, and be indicted for it.

She wasn’t lying about being the housekeeper, she insists. She’d been a “shopwoman” there before being indicted, but afterwards had switched jobs. The prosecutor, realizing he’s not going to win this argument, changes tack:

Q. You talk of enjoying your own opinion, have you any belief in the Holy Scriptures?
A. I shall not answer that, I do not think it a question I have a right to answer.

COURT. The question is whether you believe the Holy Gospels, on which you have been sworn.
A. When I am brought to trial, perhaps I may give my opinion.

Amazingly, he folds again, and moves on to another piece of damning evidence—news reports that the store had a sign in the window that literally said "This is the mart for blasphemy and sedition." Wright cheerfully swears that she never saw that sign in the window, but the prosecutor does catch the loophole there and asks if she saw it anywhere else. “In my hands,” she replies, but says it was mistranscribed; the actual sign read

This is the mart for “blasphemy and sedition.”

Holmes is eventually found guilty, and sentenced to two years, which was always going to happen, barring jury nullification. The purpose of these cheeky defenses was the cheek, not defense.

Perhaps I may give my opinion

If Susannah Wright stole the show as a witness, she ran it as the defendant. Wright represented herself, and from the moment she walked into court, carrying her newborn baby and flanked by a paralegal squad of other freethinking women, she owned the room. She started by cross-examining the spy who’d testified against her. Mimicking the prosecutor who’d tried to cast doubt on her testimony in Holmes’s trial, Wright interrogated the spy about his own religious beliefs. “You say you’re a Christian? Name the ninth commandment¹. Oh, you can’t? Judge, this man’s oath on the Bible is clearly invalid.”

Then she moved on to her defense, which consisted of a 50-page statement that was, more or less, “I have written a book about the separation of church and state and I will now read it aloud in its entirety.” 30 pages in, one of the jurors figured out her “maneuver” and tried to alert the judge: she was getting a blasphemous and seditious text read into the official record, so that, instead of censoring it, the court would be obliged to publish it itself. The judge was worried, though, about the legality and optics of preventing the defendant from defending herself. He tried, several times, to order her to cut her speech short, or at least censor parts of it, but she adamantly refused, to the delight of the growing crowd.

Defendant: How much more painful must it be for one of obscure birth and a female! Yet justice to my own character forces away these distinctions, and obliges me to trample under foot considerations, which under other circumstances would be sacred to my heart. This learned lawyer prejudges the question—

Chief Justice: I cannot suffer you to proceed upon such a subject.

Defendant: This is my defence and I have no other.

Chief Justice: Then strike out as much as refers to the learned Judge.

Defendant: I shall strike out nothing. This learned lawyer…

The only one to succeed in interrupting her was her baby, who cried until she requested a 20-minute recess to nurse in private. On her way back, she waved to a cheering crowd of thousands of people² who had gathered to listen. Then she went right back into it.

The jury took all of two minutes to find her guilty. London’s Times wrote that “happy would it be for the credit of Christianity and the interests of society if she were purposely forgotten, and the fanaticism of an uninformed and misguided female were not to be sanctified in the eye of the vulgar by severity of punishment…”

But at sentencing, she pulled the same trick. While the judge begged her to beg for clemency, she read aloud from a prepared speech, refusing to stop. In the speech, she begins by comparing herself to Jesus, then starts roasting the judge, that one juror who kept interrupting, Trinitarianism, the Thirty-Nine Articles—and if they hadn’t dragged her off right then, Christianity as a whole would’ve been the next target. Her allies published the full speech anyway.

She and her baby were sentenced to 18 months in Coldbath Fields prison, a place Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written about in his poem The Devil’s Thoughts:

As he went through Cold-Bath Fields he saw
A solitary cell;
And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint
For improving his prisons in Hell.

My spirit is as good as ever

Prison was not kind to her. She emerged blind in one eye, among other physical and mental traumas. She took a year or two to recover, during which her husband died. Then she dove back in to the fight.

She took it to her home town, Nottingham. Georgian-era Nottingham was…pretty bleak, dominated by slums and textile factories. Every decade or so, in a quaint local tradition, the slums rioted and burned down the textile factories. The tendency of local officials to selectively enforce the law in the service of the status quo was literally legendary—Robin Hood’s main nemesis was the Sheriff of Nottingham. After doing a survey of the country, one civil engineer called it the worst town in England. Just the place for Wright to open her new mart for “blasphemy and sedition.”

This ran into trouble even before it opened. She rented a storefront on Goose Gate, a street in the downtown neighborhood named Hockley. When she went to hang the sign outside, her new landlord stopped her. Someone had told him who his new tenant was—the one the newspapers called The She-Champion of Impiety. He would not permit her to sell her “infamous books.” Wright, of course, laughed in his face and told him she didn’t need his permission. He went to the authorities, who told him their hands were tied: they could not interfere “unless there was a riot.”

So he went off and asked some buddies to show up at 11 PM and break a window or two, hoping that would count as a riot. Wright, either lucky or prepared, was still awake and had backup. She captured one of the vandals (or possibly a hapless passerby who could identify them), got the names of those involved, and then browbeat her landlord into confessing to her and her crew. Good luck going to the police now.

The next month seems to have been one long siege. Wright was told she’d be assaulted the first time she was caught alone, so she always had friends with her on the streets. Running her shop, though, this wasn’t always possible. She wrote:

I have a loaded pistol by me on the counter, which keeps them out of the shop in the day time; for they have attempted, even in the day time, to drag me out; and as I am unavoidably alone sometimes, my friends persuaded me to protect myself in the best manner I can. Two youths came in and began to use the most dreadful language. I took up my pistol and very coolly asked them if they should like it fired at them; if they did not they had better go on; I certainly would let it off. They did not stay, but scampered off. Though I am getting rather worse from wear after all this ill-treatment, my spirit is as good as ever.

But not everyone who entered the shop meant her harm. All of this publicity was, naturally, good for business. One resident wrote to Carlile that interest was growing.

Mrs. Wright’s display of your publications for open sale is a novel thing in this town; hitherto, they have only been dealt in as a sort of smuggled article, a kind of contraband goods…

Nottingham had a lot of literate-but-ignorant workers. They identified as Christian but knew very little about Christianity. When Wright displayed a caricature of King George IV in a shop window, they thought it was a caricature of Jesus. The bookshop excited their curiosity as much as it did their outrage.

This was probably the one. Having just read The Colors of Her Coat, I wonder if the blue coat contributed to the confusion.

Nationwide, the tides were turning. A lawyer came to her shop to threaten her with imprisonment, but nothing came of it. The local police, from the beginning, took her side. Nottingham quickly reached a tipping point: enough people were buying Wright’s literature that instead of making you look weird, it made you look sophisticated. Who wants to be a rube?

A month later, The Republican received the last of her regular updates on the struggle in Nottingham. She was declaring victory.

She really had won. Here’s how I know. One of her best sellers in 1833 was a book by William Howitt titled A Popular History of Priestcraft—blasphemous and seditious from the beginning:

to the end:

Howitt, with his wife and frequent co-author Mary, had moved to Nottingham. After reading his book, any paragraph of which would have been enough to imprison him just a few years earlier, the town council elected him as alderman.

I haven’t been to modern-day Hockley, but by reputation, it’s still the place Susannah Wright conquered—a hip neighborhood, known for its street art and indie businesses. It led the Times’s 2022 list of coolest places in Britain. (Of course, that’s the same publication that called for Wright to be “purposely forgotten,” so take it with a grain of salt.)

Every time I say “No.”

Victories for tyrannies and ideologies are the establishment of an oppressive power structure, a self-sustaining system. Victory for freedom takes a different form. Every act of defiance is, in itself, a victory. Susannah Wright had freedom of the press. She exercised her right to publish and sell whatever she wanted. The law disagreed, but since she was willing to suffer the consequences, the law couldn’t actually stop her.

Revolution, true revolution, consists of the spread and normalization of individual freedom. That’s how it builds. In her speeches in court, Wright described how the laws against rejecting Christianity were already going unenforced: Jews, Muslims, and Hindus could write what they pleased without fear. All she wanted, she said, was to enjoy the same tacit privileges as all the other non-Christians. Those privileges, themselves, had been hard-won.

A revolution is a nation, not a state. Its borders are not lines on a map, but in each of our minds: the borders between conscience and fear, conscience and self-interest, conscience and habit, conscience and ideology. Wright was building on victories won by people like Leonard Busher in times past, who in turn was building on victories for minority rights in the Ottoman Empire. Later, the Young Ottomans, and then the Young Turks, built on victories won by people like Susannah Wright.

The tragedy is that revolutionaries don’t always realize when they’ve won. They think that victory looks like creating a new system, with the power to defend freedom and defend itself. At the apex of liberty, more often than not, they begin to reforge their own chains.

But freedom is a choice that’s always available. As Peter Lamborn Wilson wrote, we can declare any space, at any time, to be a Temporary Autonomous Zone. As Thomas Jefferson wrote, that right is unalienable—you can’t sign it away, or have it taken from you. No matter what happened yesterday, or what the consequences will be tomorrow, right now, in this moment, you are free.

Everybody has their favorite cinematic moment of defiance. Mine, because I’m a dork of a certain age, is a scene from the Babylon 5 episode “Intersections in Real Time.” The world government of Earth has been taken over by a fascist movement fueled by xenophobia. John Sheridan, a rebel leader, has been captured and imprisoned, and they’ve spent the episode trying to break him. They want him to sign his name to a confession that’s full of lies. His interrogator, cribbing from 1984, tells him that truth is fluid, anyway: the state has the power, so they define reality. Sheridan could only make his own truth if he beat them, but he’s lost. Finally, having successfully bluffed him into believing that they’ll kill him if he refuses, the interrogator gives Sheridan one last chance.

Sheridan: I was thinking about what you said, that the preeminent truth of our age is that you cannot fight the system. But if, as you say, the truth is fluid, that the truth is subjective, then maybe you can fight the system. As long as just one person refuses to be broken, refuses to bow down.

Interrogator: But can you win?

Sheridan: Every time I say “No.”

Susannah Wright lived in this moment, and you can too. No matter how many times you’ve said “Yes,” as we all have, to unjust or immoral orders. No matter how much your self-styled masters try to make you forget your own agency. The next time, remember, and say “No.”

1. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. A good one to know if your job is to spy on citizens for their government.

2. The “crowd of thousands” claim comes from her allies, so it might be exaggerated. The hostile mainstream newspapers repeated it without challenge, though, so maybe it was legit.