Introduction

The radical press of the first half of the nineteenth century is often seen as an element in journalism's evolution (Chalaby 1998; Conboy 2004; Harris and Lee 1978; Thompson 1968). If this is so, then how was it different from earlier deployments of printed periodicals that sought to engage readers politically during, for example, the English Civil War, and the early eighteenth-century opposition to Walpole's political hegemony?

This chapter will argue that, on the evidence of the content and intention of this range of radical periodicals, the key distinguishing element was that of social class. In order to demonstrate this innovative aspect of print culture, it will explore how these publications created identities of class as well as propagandising politically on behalf of new readers. To this extent, the radical press marked both a continuity as well as a rupture with previous traditions of the press: continuity in the claims of the press as a force that eroded the traditional hierarchies of information flow, claims which had accompanied print as a technology since its introduction into Western Europe; rupture in that the press had hitherto been incapable of generating a lexicon of appeal to anything other than an elite political or mercantile audience. The radical form of advocacy that the radical press launched was not long in the ascendancy. Its disruptive impact was dramatically reduced when many of its claims and much of its rhetoric were subsumed within a mainstream popular press, responding reflexively as it claimed to incorporate the interests of the ‘people’ in its own coverage.

We will consider the radical newspapers across the threshold of the eighteenth and into the first third of the nineteenth century as, in effect, a thwarted branch of journalistic development crushed by commercial and political pressures. However, their legacy continues to assert an alternative vision of advocacy and engagement to many of the core claims that journalism in the contemporary age fails to live up to; for example, telling truth to power and acting as a watchdog on behalf of ordinary people.