8. The Antichrist and the Shaven Monkey

The incoming editor of the Owenite house organ, the Crisis, was shocked by Saull’s monkey ancestry. The Rev. James Elishama Smith was a heretical Glaswegian millenarian, who had bathed in disreputable Southcottian waters before his arrival in London. Here he delivered his inflammatory “Antichrist” lectures at Borough’s blasphemy chapel in 1832-1833. So extreme were these (he made God and the Devil one) that the police kept tabs on him, and a spy thought him the greatest abuser of Christianity he had ever heard. His talks alternated with Saull’s at the chapel, so he knew the latter’s views well. He agreed with Saull on so much: life’s graduated scale, huge geological time spans, on mankind’s rise from savagery. And the two shared reformist views and worked together at Owen’s Institution. Smith took over the flagging Crisis just as Saull was delivering his Bristol lecture, and Smith’s first act was to print a transcript of the talk and attack its monkeying conclusion. This would be the start of Smith’s lifelong trend, through a series of publications, of spoofing Saull’s monkey man. The causes of the differences between the Owenite millenarians and materialists are dissected, and Smith’s unsettling transformation of the Crisis into a millenarian organ is analysed.