# Thomas Pooley blasphemy case

Thomas Pooley (1806–1876) was a Cornish well-sinker and controversial thinker whose case became an important one for secularists and freethinkers when he was imprisoned for blasphemy in 1857.

## Biography

Pooley was born in the town of Liskeard, Cornwall. He was employed as a well-sinker (digging wells), but took on other work where it was available, including bill-sticking. In the 1851 United Kingdom census he is identified as '(Pauper) General Labourer'). He was married with four children. Over a period of fifteen years Pooley displayed unconventional habits and an anger towards established religion. A contributory cause may have been the refusal of the local Anglican and Methodist churches to bury his son Thomas, who died aged eleven in 1852.
He developed religious ideas of a pantheist nature, becoming convinced that by digging into the ground, which was his profession, he was digging into a living being. He advocated the burning of all bibles and the spreading of their ashes over the land as a means to cure potato rot. Pooley wrote anti-religious statements on walls and gates is the Liskeard area, and in the end papers of bibles, actions which led to increasing irritation among the local clergy.
On 25 April 1857, an advertisement was placed in the Cornish Times, with the aim of soliciting evidence against him:
   BLASPHEMY- Any person who has seen a man writing blasphemous sentences on gates or other places in the neighbourhood of Liskeard, is requested to communicate immediately with Messrs PEDLER and GRYLLS, Liskeard, or with the Rev. R HOBHOUSE, St Ive Rectory.
Several witnesses came forward to say that they had seen Pooley writing on the gates of the Reverend Paul Bush, newly installed as the rector of Duloe, five miles south of Liskeard. This included the words 'Duloe Stinks of the Monster Christ's Bible – Blasphemy' 'T Pooley'.
Pooley was arrested and brought before magistrates, at which point he uttered the words "If it had not been for the blackguard Jesus Christ, when he stole the donkey, police would not be wanted, . .. he was the forerunner of all theft and whoredom". He was tried at Bodmin Assizes on 30 July 1857, where he was charged with:
   Having unlawfully and willfully composed, wrote and published a certain scandalous, impious, blasphemous and profane libel of and concerning the Holy Scriptures and the Christian Religion, and for having blasphemously spoken against God and profanely scoffed at the Holy Scriptures and the Christian religion, and exposed it to ridicule and contempt, and also for having spoken against Christianity and the established religion.
The judge was John Taylor Coleridge; the prosecuting counsel was his son John Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge. Pooley pleaded not guilty and defended himself. He was pronounced guilty and sent to prison for twenty-one months, at which Pooley declared that the judge might as well "put on the black cap and finish the matter at once". Pooley was sent to Bodmin gaol but spent only two weeks there before being moved to the county asylum.
Following his imprisonment, Pooley's case was taken up by campaigner George Holyoake, editor of the secularist newspaper The Reasoner. Holyoake visited Liskeard, interviewed Pooley's family, and wrote two articles on Pooley for The Reasoner, subsequently published as a pamphlet, The Case of Thomas Pooley. This did much to draw attention to his plight. Holyoake's campaigning led to Pooley being released from the asylum with a free pardon in December 1857.
Pooley's story continued to attract attention after his release. In 1859 John Stuart Mill mentioned it in his essay On Liberty:
   It will be said, that we do not now put to death the introducers of new opinions: we are not like our fathers who slew the prophets, we even build sepulchres to them. It is true we no longer put heretics to death; and the amount of penal infliction which modern feeling would probably tolerate, even against the most obnoxious opinions, is not sufficient to extirpate them. But let us not flatter ourselves that we are yet free from the stain even of legal persecution. Penalties for opinion, or at least for its expression, still exist by law; and their enforcement is not, even in these times, so unexampled as to make it at all incredible that they may some day be revived in full force. In the year 1857, at the summer assizes of the county of Cornwall, an unfortunate man, said to be of unexceptionable conduct in all relations of life, was sentenced to twenty-one months imprisonment, for uttering, and writing on a gate, some offensive words concerning Christianity.
The historian Henry Thomas Buckle, in a review of On Liberty, drew attention to the conduct of the Coleridges, emphasizing the injustice of imprisoning someone of unsound mental condition. Pooley's case contributed greatly to the discrediting of the blasphemy laws in Britain, though it did not lead to the abolition of the law.
Following his pardon and release, Pooley imagined that he was the friend of Holyoake and the freethinkers, though he was not a freethinker himself and could not imagine Atheism. He wrote that 'but I was found by them that knew me not and delivered from the horrid snares by those that do not believe there is a God. But I hope there is no such man or woman.' But Pooley's incoherent letters on Christianity, his personal theology, prison reform and the state of the world were ignored and he eventually stopped writing. He died in Liskeard in 1876.

## Legacy

Pooley's post-prison correspondence is held by the Co-operative Archive in Manchester as part of its George Holyoake papers.
In her 1998 book Word Crimes Joss Marsh proposes that Pooley was an inspiration for the character of Jude Fawley in Thomas Hardy's 1895 novel Jude the Obscure.