Influence On Literature and Popular Culture
- In 1966 a faction of the San Francisco Mime Troupe formed a Diggers group in the hippie community in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. A strongly anti-establishment group, they handed out free food in Golden Gate Park
- "The World Turned Upside Down" by Leon Rosselson, 1975, a song about the Diggers and their activities on St. George's Hill in 1649; this song was performed by Billy Bragg on his Between the Wars EP, 1985; by Dick Gaughan on Handful of Earth, 1981; by Chumbawumba on the b-side of their single "Timebomb," 1993; by Four to the Bar on Another Son in 1995; by Attila the Stockbroker with Barnstormer on The Siege of Shoreham, 1996;by Oysterband on their albums Shouting End of life and Alive and Shouting, 1995 and 1996;by Clandestine, a Houston-based Celtic group, on their To Anybody At All album, 1999; by the Fagans, an Australian folk group, on their album, Turning Fine, 2002; and by Seattle Celt-rock band Coventry on the album Red Hair and Black Leather, 2005.
- Winstanley, a fictionalized 1975 film portrait of the Diggers, directed by Kevin Brownlow, was based upon the novel Comrade Jacob by David Caute.
- Rev Hammer's Freeborn John (The Story of John Lilburne—The Leader of the Levellers) (Cooking Vinyl CD, London, 1997), is a recent example of confusion between the Levellers and True Levellers.
- As Meat Loves Salt by Maria McCann, Harcourt, 2001 (ISBN 0-15-601226-X) deals in part with the founding and destruction of a fictional Digger colony at Page Common near London.
- Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is strongly influenced by Winstanley's writings, including the idea of the Republic of Heaven.
- Caryl Churchill's 1976 play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, named after the Digger pamphlet and set in the English Civil War, charts the rise and fall of the Diggers and other radical ideas from the 1640s.
- Jonathon Kemp's 2010 play The Digger's Daughter tells the tale of the Diggers and quotes much of Winstanley's teaching directly.
Read more about this topic: Diggers
Famous quotes containing the words influence on, influence, literature, popular and/or culture:
“The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies’ resources, and minimized their own.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration.”
—James Connolly (1870–1916)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)