This chapter examines Shelley’s relation to the periodical print culture associated with the revival of political radicalism in the 1810s. It offers a summary overview of the generic and ideological diversity of the reformist press in this period and provides a broadly chronological account of Shelley’s interactions with radical journalism. His religious scepticism brought him into contact, early in his career, with the ‘unrespectable’ literary milieu associated with Spencean freethought, but Shelley soon moved into the more socially congenial circle of the celebrated poet and reformist newspaper editor Leigh Hunt. Despite his enduring concerns about the potentially revolutionary consequences of cheap print, Shelley was a committed reader of William Cobbett’s Political Register, and the influence on his writing of the post-war radical press – including both the Register and Hunt’s Examiner – was sustained even after the poet’s departure from England in 1818.

Wedderburn’s view of Black-led abolition was further outlined in his life narrative, Horrors of Slavery. The narrative initially emerged as a series of letters to a working-class periodical, Bell’s Life in London, after the editor had questioned whether plantation owners ever enslaved their own mixed-race children. The question prompted Wedderburn to share his life story, in which he represented himself as a “product” of plantation slavery and testified to his father’s moral depravity as a “slave-dealer.” Although the letters prompted threatening replies from his half-brother, Andrew Colvile, Wedderburn republished the Bell’s Life letters as a pamphlet that was sold by ultra-radical booksellers in London. Horrors radically tracked Wedderburn’s life from slavery on a Jamaican plantation to his harsh sentence of solitary confinement in an English prison for blasphemous libel, making it an essential supplement to more commonly studied Romantic-era slave narratives, such as Equiano’s Interesting Narrative.