19th-Century Radical Print Culture and the Idea of a Free Europe

Abstract:

This talk will assess the role of the radical nineteenth-century press in transmitting and preserving revolutionary British and European texts from the Romantic period. There were three innovations in print culture which enabled this process: first, the use of excerpted key passages in radical periodicals and related genres such as anthologies; second, the reprinting of whole texts in a variety of formats ranging from cheap serializations to more expensive, collectable editions; third, the determination of the radical press to remain as cheap as possible, ideally selling for the talismanic penny, a price pioneered in the 1790s and heroically defended in the ‘unstamped war’ of the early 1830s. Taking a chronological span from the ‘revolution debate’ of the 1790s to Chartism, this talk will survey a wide range of titles, beginning with Spence’s Pig’s Meat and concluding with Reynolds’s Weekly News, and utilizing the bibliographical information which is manifest in adverts and publishing lists in order to reconsider what William St Clair calls the ‘radical canon’.