Winstanley the Digger : a literary analysis of radical ideas in the English Revolution

Gerrard Winstanley was founder of the Utopian Digger colony in Surrey, a radical attempt to till land in common and assert the rights of the rural poor. A prodigious pamphleteer and preacher to the left of Cromwell, Winstanley is the quintessential English Christian communist.

This book provides a complete literary analysis of all of Winstanley’s works. Moreover it explores the connection between literature and politics by examining Winstanley’s dialectical use of alchemical symbolism, a use which embodies the development of his ideas. T. Wilson Hayes explains how Winstanley grounds his view of natural and historical change in Scriptural interpretation and bases his plan for civil society on his idea of the Utopian family. The purpose of this first full-scale study of Winstanley is to show that he defies categorization as mystic or materialist and is best seen as an immensely talented poet-prophet in the tradition of Langland and Blake.