Radical Culture

Restriction, regulation and surveillance formed the dominant discursive context of England in the years 1790-1820. Underneath the "Romantic" writers, ultra-radical artisans developed a discourse based on the revolutionary ideology of Thomas Spence which proposed the corporate ownership of land and the overthrow of the Government by physical force. The story of the Spenceans is an extraordinary narrative of the articulacy of an artisan class which was kept under increasing scrutiny by the Government's secret service. This ground-breaking book explores the discursive context of the campaigns against sedition in the 1790s, Colonel Despard's intended coup of 1802, the Spa Fields rising of 1816, the planned Bartholomew Fair insurrection of 1817 and the debacle of the 1820 Cato Street conspiracy. Using Home Office files at first hand, David Worrall recovers a lost artisan culture recorded by the spies, moles and informers who infiltrated the organizations, debating clubs and taverns where black and radical speakers called for violent revolution.
For the first time, "Radical Culture" makes visible the speeches, conversations, songs, poems, pamphlets, autobiographies, letters, handbills, trials, interrogations, arrests, hoaxes, flags, clothing and appropriations which constituted the resistance to the Government's regulation of discourse. It follows the "ultras": what they said, how they reacted under extreme conditions of arrest or impending execution, even how they were "eavesdropped" by Government in their last hours of life.