The Popular Radical Press in Britain, 1811-1821 : A Reprint of Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Periodicals

The radical weekly newspaper or pamphlet was the leading print organ of popular radical expression during what has been called the "heroic age of popular Radicalism"; the years of public agitation for parlimentary reform between 1815 and 1820.

This work reprints the original runs of the rarest periodicals.Following the model of the radical weekly paper established by William Corbett's "Political Register" (1803) and John and Leigh Hunt's "examiner" (1808), and spurred on by a difficult period of post-war economic dislocation, and by Corbett's invention of an unstamped, two-penny format that managed to evade newspaper taxes designed to keep political information out of the hands of the poor, these newspapers flourished in the period leading up to the Six Acts of 1819, which closed the legal loophole exploited by Cobbett and his imitators, and effectively suppressed popular radical expression in periodical form until its revival in the Chartist period.These weekly periodicals had a social, cultural and political impact far beyond what their brief period of circulation might suggest, and they have been the subject of revived interest in recent times by historians and literary scholars alike.

Emerging under extraordinary conditions of social and political crisis, and in some cases produced from prison by editors found guilty of blasphemy and sedition, these periodicals occupy a critical nexus of rapid social and litearry transformation in an age of revolution.With the exception of the longer periodicals, this edition includes nearly all of the London-based radical periodicals of the period, and allows researchers and students to appreciate the fullrange of a confident radical culture, from the more traditional, constitutionalist protest of the "Cap of Liberty" and the "Radical Reformer" to the progressive, infidel arguments of "The Theological Comet"; from the more middle-class premises of John Hunt's "Reformists' Register" to the plebian "Cap of Liberty" and "White Hat"; from the high seriousness of Richard Carlile's "Deist" to the festive language of the celebrated satirist William Hone; and from the self-consciously literary tenor of the "Radical Magazine" and "The Yellow Dwarf", for which William Hazlitt produced some of his most brilliant politiacl essays, to the more rational discourse of John Wade's "Gorgon", patronized by Jeremy Bentham and a crucial medum for the transmission of utilitarian principles to the working class.