Table Of ContentRadicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848
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Radicalism and Revolution
in Britain, 1775–1848
Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis
Edited by
Michael T. Davis
First published in Great Britain 2000 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-41008-8 ISBN 978-0-230-50938-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-0-230-50938-2
First published in the United States of America 2000 by
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0–312–22490–7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Radicalism and revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 : essays in honour of
Malcolm I. Thomis / edited by Michael T. Davis.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0–312–22490–7 (cloth)
1. Great Britain—Politics and government—1789–1820. 2. United
States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Influence. 3. Great
Britain—Politics and government—19th century. 4. Great Britain–
–Politics and government—1760–1789. 5. France—History–
–Revolution, 1789–1799—Influence. 6. Radicalism—Great Britain–
–History—19th century. 7. Radicalism—Great Britain—History—18th
century. I. Thomis, Malcolm I. II. Davis, Michael T., 1969– .
DA520.R33 1999
941.07'3—dc21 99–22233
CIP
Selection, editorial matter, Introduction and Chapter 8 ©Michael T. Davis 2000
Chapters 1–7, 9–14 ©Macmillan Press Ltd 2000
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2000
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with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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forest sources.
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Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Notes on the Contributors viii
Introduction: ‘To Grow Gently Older and Wiser’ – Personal
Reflections on Malcolm Thomis xi
Michael T. Davis
1 ‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American
Revolution 1
H.T. Dickinson
2 Two Doubting Thomases: the British Progressive
Enlightenment and the French Revolution 30
Jack Fruchtman, Jr.
3 The Political Showman at Home: Reflections on Popular
Radicalism and Print Culture in the 1790s 41
Jon Mee
4 The Pop-Gun Plot, 1794 56
Clive Emsley
5 John Thelwall’s Political Ambivalence: Reform and
Revolution 69
Michael Scrivener
6 Wondering about Wonders: Paine, Constâncio and The Age
of Reason, 1794–97 84
Hélio Osvaldo Alves
7 The United Irishmen and the Politics of Banishment,
1798–1807 96
Michael Durey
8 ‘Good for the Public Example’: Daniel Isaac Eaton,
Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793–1812 110
Michael T. Davis
9 A Loyal Englishman?: John Lloyd and Aspects of Oath-taking
in 1812 133
Bernadette Turner
v
vi Contents
10 Spreading the Radical Word: the Circulation of William
Hone’s 1817 Liturgical Parodies 143
Kyle Grimes
11 Political Economy and Popular Education: Thomas Hodgskin
and the London Mechanics’ Institute, 1823–8 157
Gregory Claeys
12 ‘Rural War’ and the Missing Revolution in Early Nineteenth-
century England 176
Ian Dyck
13 Whiggery and America: Accommodating the Radical Threat 191
Paul Crook
14 Controlling the Riots: Dickens, Barnaby Rudgeand Romantic
Revolution 207
Iain McCalman
Malcolm I. Thomis: a Bibliography 228
Tabula Gratulatoria 230
Index 233
Acknowledgements
As a festschrift this book is produced only by virtue of the collective
efforts of individual contributors. For that reason I would like to thank
each of the authors for their academic generosity, commitment and
patience throughout the entirety of the project. Particular thanks are
due to Harry Dickinson who has been a constant source of advice
when, as editor, I needed some guidance. In compiling the tabula grat-
ulatoria I was given invaluable and, for some time, necessarily
clandestine assistance in obtaining contact names and addresses by
Margaret Dawson, Noeline Hall, Mavis Little, Anne Nelson, Anne
Palmer and Jackie Thomis. Many others were also privy to the progress
of this work and were thus burdened with the difficult task of keeping
a secret from the omniscient Malcolm. I am grateful and indeed
impressed by their silence. The Department of History at the
University of Queensland has also been supportive of this project from
the moment of its inception, and Serena Bagley deserves special
mention for her skills not only in word processing but also in toler-
ating my frequent interruptions to her duties. Finally, I would like to
thank my editor, Ruth Willats, for her attention to the typescript, and
Aruna Vasudevan, my commissioning editor, for her efforts in seeing
the book through the publishing process and for enduring my
moments of being overanxious.
vii
Notes on the Contributors
Hélio Osvaldo Alves received his PhD from University College
London. He is now Professor of British Studies at the University of
Minho, Portugal, and has published the results of his research on
cultural movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries in several journals. His latest work includes editing a volume
on William Morris, and The Eagle and the Mole, a Portuguese transla-
tion of poems by William Blake. He is currently preparing an extensive
study of radical activity in Britain during the 1790s.
Gregory Claeys was born in Paris in 1953 and educated at McGill
University and the University of Cambridge. He has taught at the
University of Hannover, Washington University, St Louis, and since
1992 he has been Professor of the History of Political Thought at Royal
Holloway College, University of London. He is the author of three
books and editor of about thirty volumes of primary sources.
Paul Crook recently retired from the Department of History at the
University of Queensland. He is author of a number of works on
Anglo-American history and Social Darwinism, including Diplomacy
During the American Civil War(1975); Benjamin Kidd: Portrait of a Social
Darwinist(1984); and Darwinism, War and History(1994).
Michael T. Davis was an undergraduate and postgraduate student
whose research was supervised at the University of Queensland by
Malcolm Thomis. Since completing his PhD in 1995 he has been an
Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow in History at the
University of Queensland and is currently writing histories of the
London Corresponding Society and of the Scottish Martyrs of the
1790s (both forthcoming from Macmillan).
H.T. Dickinsonhas taught at the University of Edinburgh since 1966
and has been Richard Lodge Professor of British History since 1980. He
has published extensively on the parliamentary politics, popular poli-
tics and political ideas of eighteenth-century Britain and has edited
the journal Historysince 1993.
viii
Notes on the Contributors ix
Michael Dureywas educated at the University of York and is currently
Associate Professor of History at Murdoch University, Australia. His book
on Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic(1997) won the
1998 SHEAR Book Prize and he has subsequently edited Andrew Bryson’s
Ordeal: an Epilogue to the 1798 Rebellion(1998).
Ian Dyckis Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University,
British Columbia. He is author of William Cobbett and Rural Popular
Culture(1992) and of articles in History Workshop Journal, Social History
and Rural History. He also edited Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas
Paine (1988) and co-edited (with Malcolm Chase) Living and Learning:
Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison(1996).
Clive Emsley is Professor of History at The Open University in the
United Kingdom. He was educated at the University of York and at
Peterhouse, Cambridge. His publications include British Society and the
French Wars 1793–1815(1979); Crime and Society in England 1750–1900
(1987); and The English Police: A Political and Social History(1991).
Jack Fruchtman, Jr., is Professor of Political Science at Maryland’s
Towson University in America. He has published several studies on
Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Reid, Helen Maria Williams,
Thomas Paine and other eighteenth-century figures. He has most
recently served as associate editor of Britain in the Hanoverian Age,
1714–1837: an Encyclopedia(1997).
Kyle Grimesis a specialist in British Romanticism in the Department
of English at the University of Alabama, Birmingham. His research
focuses primarily on Regency period radicalism, covering especially
the poetry of Shelley and Byron as well as radical publicists such as
William Hone, Richard Carlile, Thomas Wooler and William Cobbett.
Theoretically considered, his work focuses on the interchange
between literary texts and other forms of more immediately topical
writing and on the influence of censorship on literary form.
Iain McCalman is Director of the Humanities Research Centre and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the
Australian National University. His book on the Radical Underworld:
Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840
(1988) was republished in paperback in 1993. He has edited Horrors of
Slavery: the Life and Writings of Robert Wedderburn (1992) and more
