The Popular Radical Press in Britain, 1817–1821:
A Reprint of Early Nineteenth-Century Radical Periodicals
Editor: Paul Keen
Advisory Editor: Kevin Gilmartin
978 1 85196 752 0: 234x156mm: £525.00/$925.00
The radical weekly newspaper or pamphlet was the leading print organ of popular radical expression in England during what has been called the ‘heroic age of popular Radicalism’, the heady years of public protest and agitation for parliamentary reform between 1815 and 1820. This six-volume facsimile edition republishes in the full, unexpurgated versions of the original runs of the more rare and ephemeral of these periodicals.
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 years by historians and literary scholars alike. As literary scholars of the romantic period have deepened their appreciation for social and historical contexts, and as historians have turned increasingly to language and culture as sites for historical analysis and explanation, radical culture has become an important arena for interdisciplinary analysis. 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 literary transformation in an age of revolution.
To date, just one of the periodicals (The Yellow Dwarf) has been reprinted in a facsimile edition, now out of print, and a few others have been available in widely scattered, and poorly reproduced, microfilm form. Most are extremely rare, and available in just a handful of specialised research library collections.
- General introduction, headnotes and index
- Facsimile texts
Sample pages
Contents
Volume 1
Hone’s Reformists’ Register, Volume I (1817)
Volume 2
Hone’s Reformists’ Register, Volume II (1817); The Yellow Dwarf (1818)
Volume 3
The Gorgon (1818)
Volume 4
The Gracchus (1818); The Cap of Liberty (1818); The Briton (1819)
Volume 5
The Medusa (1819)
Volume 6
The Theological Comet (1819); The London Alfred 1819); The Democratic Recorder (1819); The White Hat (1819); The Radical Magazine (1821)
Reviews
'The publishers are to be congratulated for taking on such a costly task, while the editor and his team are to be commended and sincerely thanked for its efficient execution. The work is handsomely produced and bound and the problems attendant upon the facsimile production of matter that was cheaply printed on poor, translucent paper have been skilfully overcome.'
– Michael Bush, History
'this is an important collection that provides an excellent window onto a crucial period in the development of popular politics in Britain.'
– Paul A Pickering, Enlightenment and Dissent