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It is current thinking, and this writer anticipates no change amongst academic circles, in the forseeable future, that the Victorian anarchist Royston Tappitt was a man of such muddled philosophy and hypocritical reasoning that any attempt to rationalise the thought-processes behind his "utopian dream" of global Anarcho-Pogromatic Dualism will be doomed to failure at the outset.This may be an over-simplification of the situation; it could be argued that, far from being muddled and hypocritical, Tappitt was merely the victim of a tortured mind - whether physically through the syphilis and opium addiction which killed him or morally, through the manifold injustices he experienced in mid to late Victorian Britain. Let us now consider, individually, some aspects of Tappitt's, seemingly self- contradictory, moral stance.
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A wealthy cloth merchant from Bradford, Algenon Sawyer, financed Tappitt's lecture tour of 1889 to the considerable sum of �65.10s.6d. on the proviso that Tappitt wore bespoke outfits fashioned from Sawyer's imported cloth. Let us remember that finished, imported cloth and linen was a rarity at this time as most manufacturers, taking advantage of new technology, merely bought in the raw materials and finished the cloth in the UK, thus depriving the Indian sub-continent of much-needed revenue. In this respect Sawyer was an early exponent of ethical trading and, as such, was lauded by such well-known figures as Oscar Wilde and Frederick Delius.
Tappitt, dutifully, wore his coat of many colours throughout the three week tour. A recurring theme of his speeches was: "The human and social condition as made manifest by sartorial exosistence". He would challenge, for example, the right of the Royal Family to "own" the colour purple,as an interesting aside, to this day any cheque or promissary note written in purple ink is invalid unless signed by the reigning Monarch).
Tappitt's final appearance on this tour was at the Piece Hall in Halifax. To the amazement of his followers he removed his colourful garb only to reveal himself to be stark naked underneath, and paraded around the balconies for "fifteen minutes full" denouncing Queen Victoria as "a drab peahen"! (Her Majesty had, of course, only worn black in public since the death of Prince Albert although a single photograph of her wearing white can be seen at Osbourne House on the Isle of Wight).
Tappitt was arrested and jailed although all public records of this episode have, mysteriously, been "lost".
Was Tappitt really denouncing Royalty? Perhaps.
It is equally likely that he was taking a stand against Algenon Sawyer, for it was Sawyer who introduced him Frederick Delius whose wife Jelka, it is believed, infected Tappitt with syphilis.
Irony or Anarchy?
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We know that Tappitt was not a chaste man; he had numerous affairs with affluent ladies associated with his circle of followers. Some of these liasons may have been instigated by his fellow Anarcho-Podualists as a result of his documented desire to "break down this socially-tiered country by corrupting those at the very top". We will probably never know the true reason but let us not forget that the permissive society was not an invention of the 1960's, it was already well-established by the 1860's!
Tappitt was a man of his times and suffered the same moral dilemmas that many of his contemporaries were subject to. Is it no suprise that he was in the habit of quoting on of his heros, Marcus Aurelius, in public? Sexual intercourse was merely "the friction of a piece of gut and, following a sort of convulsion, the expulsion of some mucus". Privately, however, he would leave the dias from which he was moralising and proceed to violate one of his lady followers or pick up a prostitute of which there were thousands in the cities of late Victorian Britain.
"Tibi ipsi voilentium frequenter fac" was yet another of Marcus Aurelius' meditations which Tappitt was fond of quoting to his weaker-willed followers: "Get in the habit of mastering thine own inclinations". Was, therefore, irony a central tenet of Tappitt's anarchism? Possibly, bearing in mind the background to his famous protest at the Piece Hall in Halifax.
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