ABSTRACT
Flitting through the Utopian underground of those who did not agree with Owen's particularly environmentalist creed was the mysterious figure of James Pierrepont Greaves. He had drunk at more spiritual fountains, and to Thomas Carlyle was ‘a humbug’. ‘I know old —— myself’, Carlyle told Emerson, ‘and can testify, if you will believe me, that few greater blockheads (if “blockhead” may mean “exasperated imbecile” and the ninth part of “a thinker”) broke the world's bread in my day.’ 276 The extraordinary thing about Greaves was that he was a semi-invalid for these last years of his life when, clad in a grey dressing-gown, he wielded great influence from his home at 49 Burton Street, near Heraud, who lived at No. 28. There were others, unlike Carlyle, who considered Greaves a major influence in his day. He converted Charles Lane who considered him ‘a gigantic mind, bestriding the narrow world like a colossus’. To F. F. Barham he was ‘a greater man than Coleridge’; 277 a revealing comparison. Even level-headed G. J. Holyoake found him ‘the most accomplished, pleasant and inscrutable mystic which this country has produced’. Holyoake gave him credit for possessing ‘competence, which enables a man to be unintelligible, and yet respected’. 278 H. G. Wright described him as possessing ‘a lofty forehead, a well-defined contour, a nose inclined to the aquiline, a deep, slightly sonorous voice, a stature rather above the middle height, and a marvellous eye. Mystery, God, Fathomlessness, all were written upon him.’ 279 Emerson wrote of him in the Dial: ‘Pestalozzi declared that Mr. Greaves understood his aims and methods better than any other observer … He has been a chief instrument in the regeneration of the British schools.’ 280
