Print Politics

Print Politics is the first literary study of the culture of the popular radical movement for parliamentary reform in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The period was characterized by popular agitation and repressive political measures including trials for seditious and blasphemous libel. Kevin Gilmartin explores the styles and strategies of radical opposition in the periodical press, and in the public culture of the time. He argues that writers and editors including William Cobbett, T. J. Wooler, Richard Carlile, John Wade, and Leigh Hunt committed themselves to a complex, flexible, and often contradictory project of independent political opposition. They sought to maintain a political resistance uncompromised by the influence of a corrupt ‘system’, even while addressing and imitating its practices to further their oppositional ends.

• The first literary study of the popular radical press in England, 1800–1830 • First book to apply theoretical notion of the public sphere - especially Habermas - to popular politics and culture • Analyses connection between Cobbett and surrounding political discourse - best since E. P. Thompson

Introduction: locating a plebeian counterpublic sphere; Part I. A Rhetoric of Radical Opposition: 1. Party, corruption and political opposition; 2. Representing the people: the press and parliamentary reform; 3. Beyond corruption: independence, personality, egotism; 4. The radical profession and ‘the wholesale trade of sedition’; 5. Countersystem and the ends of opposition; Part II. Radical Print Culture In Periodical Form: 1. Popular radicalism in print; 2. Periodical forms in crisis; 3. A form deformed; 4. Radical reading and radical organization; Part III. The Trials of Radicalism: Assembling the Evidence of Reform: 1. The law of libel; 2. The courtroom defence as public offence; 3. Radical assembly in print; 4. ‘A fair, plain and honest account’; 5 The language of fact: apocalypse without imagination; Part IV. Reading Cobbett’s Contradictions: 1. ‘The system’; 2. Writing as system and countersystem; 3. The economy of the world and the disappearance of the writer; Part V. Leigh Hunt and the End of Radical Opposition: 1. ‘Reform of periodical writing’; 2. The antinomies of independent opposition: egotism and community; 3. The language of class in a progressive public sphere; Afterword: William Hazlitt: a radical critique of radical opposition?