Radical Print Culture in Periodical Form

Abstract

The period of British history that literary scholars have long associated with the second generation of romantic poetry also marked a distinct phase, and even a revival and recovery of strength, for a less exalted cultural sphere, the popular radical movement for parliamentary reform. The defeat of Napoleon released some of the pressure towards ideological conformity that had built up over the course of the wars with Revolutionary France, and ushered in a period of economic dislocation that helped galvanize popular radical protest throughout the 1810s and early 1820s. While the struggles of the 1790s were not forgotten, and while the continued activity of figures like Daniel Isaac Eaton and Major Cartwright helped to link political protest in the first three decades of the nineteenth century with a broader radical tradition, a new generation of leaders and new strategies had clearly emerged. That individuals like William Cobbett, Henry "Orator" Hunt, Richard Carlile, and John Wade often shared little more than a hatred of what they termed the "system" of political and financial corruption, and that they clashed among themselves as often as they cooperated, only served to increase the energy and vitality of early nineteenth-century radical protest.

Additional details