Et exspecto resurrectionem

February 5

On the 5th of February, 1751, were interred, at Stevenage, in Hertfordshire, the coffin and remains of a farmer of that place who had died on the 1st of February 1721, thirty* years before, and bequeathed his estate, worth £400 a-year, to his two brothers, and, if they should die, to his nephew, to be enjoyed by them for thirty years, at the expiration of which time he expected to return to life, when the estate was to return to him. He provided for his re-appearance, by ordering his coffin to be affixed on a beam in his barn, locked, and the key enclosed, that he might let himself out. He was allowed four days’ grace beyond the time limited, and not presenting himself, was then honoured with christian burial.

*Text has seventy, but this is clearly an error

William Hone (1780–1842)

from The Year Book (1832)

A footnote in my edition cites the Gentleman’s Magazine for this story.

I have a lot of time for William Hone, a radical writer, publisher and bookseller of the early nineteenth century. He did British culture good service in 1817 when he successfully defended himself against a prosecution directed against some of his anti-government publications, and by so doing, put a very large hole in the oppressive regime of censorship then operating. He was ill at the time, too.

In his perpetual struggle to make a living, he also appears to have been the original inventor of the kind of book which has an entry for every day of the year, with strange stories, historical information, folklore items, poems &c.

His first publication of that kind was The Every Day Book (1826). I remember browsing that some years ago and coming across a passage in which he applauds the recent abolition of the State Lottery as a generally enlightened measure. I read that at around the time the National Lottery was being brought in, with many fanfares. That was under John Major’s Conservative government. It has been left to Tony ‘Bung culture rules&rsquo Blair, with his associates John ‘Cowboy’ Prescott and Tessa ‘See no evil’ Jowell, to throw out Britain’s gambling laws and bring us the Supercasino.

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