Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 pp 143-156 | Cite as
Spreading the Radical Word: The Circulation of William Hone’s 1817 Liturgical Parodies
Abstract
In December of 1817, the London bookseller William Hone stood trial before the King’s Court at Guildhall charged with three libels for having written and published three parodies based on passages from the Book of Common Prayer. The year 1817 marked one high point in the government’s efforts to stifle radical discourse — Habeas Corpus had been suspended, Cobbett had fled to America and many other prominent radicals had spent time in prison. As chief writer and publisher of the two penny weekly, The Reformists’ Register, Hone was making his influence felt in radical political circles. The liturgical parodies for which he was being tried are also manifestly political in character and Hone was accordingly charged with both blasphemy and sedition. The Attorney-General, however, thinking that it would be easier to secure guilty verdicts on charges of blasphemy against the Church rather than sedition against an already unpopular government, opted to pursue only the blasphemy charges in the courtroom. The scheme backfired miserably, for it put Hone in a most unusual and ironic discursive position. As Olivia Smith explains: ‘Inappropriately charged with blasphemy, Hone was probably the only radical in history who could legitimately detend himself by claiming that he had attacked the state.’2
Keywords
Public House Regency Period British Readership Oral Performance Religious LanguagePreview
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Notes
- 2.Olivia Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984), p. 180.Google Scholar
- 3.Ibid., pp. 1–34, 154–201; Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1832 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 96–154.Google Scholar
- 4.William Hone, The Late John Wilkes’s Catechism of a Ministerial Member (London, 1817), no pagination.Google Scholar
- 6.Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor, 4 vols. (1861–2; rpt. New York, 1968), I: 236.Google Scholar
- 7. Ibid. Google Scholar
- 8.Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office papers, HO 42/160, Margette to Lord Sidmouth, 22 February 1817.Google Scholar
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