Abstract
Hazlitt remembered the Queen Caroline affair as a unique moment in political and cultural history:
It was the only question I ever knew that excited a thoroughly popular feeling. It struck its roots into the heart of the nation; it took possession of every house or cottage in the kingdom; man, woman, and child took part in it, as if it had been their own concern. Business was laid aside for it: people forgot their pleasures, even their meals were neglected, nothing was thought of but the fate of the Queen’s trial. The arrival of the Times Newspaper was looked upon as an event in every village, the Mails hardly travelled fast enough; and he who had the latest intelligence in his pocket was considered as the happiest of mortals. It kept the town in a ferment for several weeks: it agitated the country to the remotest corner. It spread like wildfire over the kingdom; the public mind was electrical. So it should be on other occasions; it was only so on this.1
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Notes
William Haziitt, ‘Common Places’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1930–4), vol. 20, p. 136.
Quoted in Jane Robins, Rebel Queen: How the Trial of Caroline Brought England to the Brink of Revolution (London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. 16.
Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 163.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 221.
Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 149.
William Carew Hazlitt, Memoirs of William Hazlitt, 2 vols (London, 1867), vol. 1, p. 300.
Anne Cobbett, Account of the Family (London: William Cobbett Society, 1999), pp. 49–52.
Quoted in George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 2, pp. 580–1
Quoted in G. D. H. Cole, The Life of William Cobbett (London: Collins, 1924), p. 249.
Tim Fulford, Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey and Hazlitt (Basingstoke: Macmillan, now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 164
John Stevenson, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair’, in John Stevenson (ed.), London in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), pp. 117–48
See Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Atlantic Books, 2006)
Mary Dorothy George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the British Museum: Vol. X, 1820–1827 (London: British Museum, 1952), p. 185.
See J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)
Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 199–200.
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© 2014 James Grande
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Grande, J. (2014). Cobbett and Queen Caroline. In: William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380081_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137380081_6
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