Radical print culture from 1815 to 1822

Abstract

'“Radical” is a new word since my time—it was not in the political vocabulary in 1816' (Byron in a letter to John Cam Hobhouse, April 1820). Following the end of the war with France, street literature, in the form of pamphlets, broadsides, illustrations, pornography, pirate publications and advertising, became increasingly radical, and ephemeral. This paper will examine radicalism in this period and its literary and cultural legacy