Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s: The Laurel of Liberty

Description

Jon Mee explores the popular democratic movement that emerged in the London of the 1790s in response to the French Revolution. Central to the movement's achievement was the creation of an idea of 'the people' brought into being through print and publicity. Radical clubs rose and fell in the face of the hostile attentions of government. They were sustained by a faith in the press as a form of 'print magic', but confidence in the liberating potential of the printing press was interwoven with hard-headed deliberations over how best to animate and represent the people. Ideas of disinterested rational debate were thrown into the mix with coruscating satire, rousing songs, and republican toasts. Print personality became a vital interface between readers and print exploited by the cast of radicals returned to history in vivid detail by Print, Publicity, and Popular Radicalism in the 1790s. This title is also available as Open Access.

Jon Mee is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies. He has published many essays and books on the literature, culture, and politics of the age of revolutions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He is also author of The Cambridge Introduction to Charles Dickens (Cambridge, 2010).

'A fascinating and insightful look at a very dangerous time in British history, Mee's excellent book also speaks directly to us in the early 21st century as radicals once more try to disrupt civilisation.' Sun News Austin (www.sunnewsaustin.com) '... [this is] a book of very high quality, a cultural history both nourished by ... deep research in archives and problematized by theoretical contributions through very fine micro-readings.' Remy Duthille, translated from Revue de la Societe d'etudes anglo-americaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles