ABSTRACT
These ten lines are drafted in ink in Nbk 10 on the otherwise blank f. 60r rev. The draft, which has no title, is relatively clean with only a few revisions. As People of England, ye who toil and groan (Longman iii 253–5, no. 281) is drafted on either side of it — ff. 57v rev. to 59r rev., continuing on 60v rev. and 61r rev. — What men gain fairly was probably in place before S. completed drafting that longer fragment. Mary included the lines in 1840 under the title Fragment XIX, though she removed line 7, and assigned no date to them. Rossetti 1870/1878 grouped the nine lines of 1840 with other fragments of 1819. Forman 1876–7 iv 7–8 combined the 1840 text with the first six and a half lines of People of England, which Richard Garnett had transcribed from Nbk 10 and published in Relics, entitled the resulting fifteen and a half lines Fragment: To the People of England and dated them 1819, conjecturing ‘I think there can be little if any doubt that the whole sixteen lines, hitherto printed apart, belong together’. When, in preparing Huntington Nbks, Forman came to examine the draft in Nbk 10, he altered his opinion only a little:
The occurrence of the heroic quatrain [i.e. ll. 5–8], now restored by the insertion of the suppressed line 7, lessens slightly the likelihood that this was part of the poem To the People of England, which, fragmentary and unfinished as it is, was, I scarcely doubt, intended for a poem in heroic couplets.
(Huntington Nbks ii 182–3) The position of What men gain fairly amidst the drafts for People of England raises the possibility that the two might have been conceived as parts of a whole, but that possibility diminishes on examination. Although the first stanza of People of England appears to fall into the rhyme-scheme aabbcbcbdd, which is also that of What men gain fairly, the former is unfinished, and so inferences from the draft can only be made tentatively. Rhetorically each is distinct: People of England adapts a catalogue of specific grievances to a mode of direct address and exhortation, while What men gain fairly sets out the social dimension of morally acceptable ownership as a succession of principles. It is difficult to imagine how the two could fit harmoniously into a single poem. The moderate and realistic position on property set out in the opening lines contrasts with such earlier statements of S.’s as ‘No man has a right to monopolize more than he can enjoy’ of A Declaration of Rights (Prose Works i 59), so preparing the temperate ground against which the direct challenge to illegitimate possession that concludes the poem stands out the more trenchantly. Lines 1–4 lay down the principle that all value is founded upon labour, while conceding that the inconveniences of accumulation and inheritance may be consistent with general welfare. Then the force, fraud and connivance with these that S. regarded as underpinning the unjust political system of contemporary England are equated with thievery, and the right of the dispossessed to recover what is theirs unequivocally declared. S. advances more detailed and nuanced arguments for these positions in a passage in PVR (Julian vii 37–43) which serves as an illuminating commentary on What men gain fairly. Between the poem and the prose treatise, there is a critical difference, however. In the latter, the only recovery of unjustly held property which S. countenances is a tax to be levied for the general good in case of ‘public emergency’, while in the poem, the remedy is uncompromising: the possessor may be divested of goods of illegitimate origin as a thief would be of his plunder. As the lines are so intimately related to the passage of PVR cited above, they were probably composed at the same time or slightly thereafter — from early November 1819 to end of January 1820 (SC vi 951–5). And, as the passage of PVR in question occurs some two-thirds of the way through, that range may be narrowed to the period December 1819 to January 1820. It was probably to be included in S.’s proposed volume of ‘popular songs’, for which see headnote to Song: To the Men of England.