48 - ‘Radical publishing’

Summary

When considering the effect of the popular movement for radical reform on English publishing and book production in the nineteenth century, the crucial time-frame runs from the beginning of the 1790s until the passage of the first great Reform Bill in 1832. It is almost impossible to outline and explain radical publishing in terms of its form, content and economics in the first three decades of the nineteenth century without indicating the revolutionary nature of developments in the early 1790s. In other words, British radical publishing was initially spawned by the French Revolution and by responses to the political and cultural outfall from that event in Britain.

What are the overall patterns and developments that might work towards a map of book and serial publishing directed at producing extreme social and political reform during the early nineteenth century? The first thing is to emphasize is that, like any broad-based political phenomenon which evolved over a long period, English radical publishing was not a stable phenomenon. Radical publishing enjoyed a series of rapid highs and lows during the last decade of the eighteenth century, and then again in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In terms of the overall contours it is, however, fair to say that there were two periods when radical publishing was produced on a scale, and in innovative ways, which had a lasting impact upon both the British publishing industry and the formation of reading audiences. The first period ran from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the end of the notorious ‘Treason Trials’ of 1794. In 1790 Edmund Burke published Reflections on the revolution in France. The book constituted a loyalist touch-paper that set off one of the most remarkable pamphlet wars of English publishing history. The so-called ‘Revolution Debate’ that resulted generated a mass of radical theory and loyalist counter-theory, but at its epicentre lay the two parts of Thomas Paine’s The rights of man. This blow-by-blow response to the Reflections was an unprecedented publishing phenomenon, which, as we shall see, in many ways set the rules for popular radical book production in the ensuing thirty years.