Nigel Little
This is the first biography of William Duane to study his American career in light of his formative years in Ireland, England and India.
Duane was an influential radical journalist. He is most famous as the editor of The Aurora, the Philadelphia-based paper which vigorously supported Thomas Jefferson in his 1800 presidential election campaign. Although Duane presented himself as a US citizen by birth, he was born in Newfoundland and a British subject. Little explores how the influence of Thomas Paine, membership of the London Corresponding Society and a ruinous dispute with the East India Company helped shape Duane’s later Republican convictions. This monograph is based on extensive archival research in England, the United States and Ireland.
Irish, Indian and American History, History of Print and Publishing, Eighteenth-Century Studies
Introduction
Chapter 1: Origins
Chapter 2: The ‘great gulf of all undone beings’
Chapter 3: The Bengal Journal
Chapter 4: An Indian World
Chapter 5: ‘Tribe of Editors’: Censorship and the Indian Press, 1780–99
Chapter 6: London Interlude
Chapter 7: Mythical Homeland Made
Chapter 8: Jeffersonian Victory
Chapter 9: Towards 1812
Chapter 10: The Later Years: 1815–35
Conclusion