Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy by John Gardner (review)

John Gardner’s discussion of English Romantic literature and contemporary radicalism concentrates on a sequence of three political events that gripped the English popular imagination from 1819 to 1821. The first of these was the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when thousands of peaceful protestors seeking universal suffrage and the end of the Corn Laws, among other reform agendas, were callously attacked by Manchester yeomanry, leaving more than a dozen dead. The massacre made evident the extent of brutality that local magistrates, members of Parliament, and the Crown were willing to condone to suppress popular protests. The second event was the 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy, when government spies goaded a circle of ultra-radicals into an assassination plot. The conspirators were arrested, paraded before an incredulous public, and hanged. It was a revelation: the government not only was prosecuting radicals publicly, but also was targeting and entrapping them clandestinely (measures undoubtedly intended to inspire divisive paranoia among organizers). The third event was largely a media event. In a final attempt to muster popular protest against mounting repression, radicals agitated for support for Queen Caroline when she returned from Spain in 1820 to assume her throne next to George IV. The new king spurned her and sought a divorce while radicals rallied around her and her claim to the throne, not so much out of sympathy for her cause as out of loathing for the seated government and the new King. Public outcry, they hoped, might be steered toward broader reform efforts, but by 1821 it was clear that both Caroline and the radicals had failed in their suits, and as a result, popular protests and radicalism were all but extinguished for a decade.

Gardner argues that the sequence of these three events from 1819 to 1821 “constitute a distinct literary period, characterized by the relationship between literature and popular protests that seemed to be leading toward a Revolution” (p. 3). Following the work of Marilyn Butler, James Chandler, and Iain McCalman, among others, he addresses a range of texts—canonical and noncanonical, high and popular, poetic and graphic—to explore how literature can take advantage of popular outrage, use an event “as a fulcrum” in order to work for political reform, and shock its audience with the energy necessary to motivate protest (pp. 2–3).

Gardner opens with an analysis of a George Cruikshank caricature, “The Radical Ladder” of 1821, that links these three events. Gardner then moves into a contextual study of Samuel Bamford’s poetry of 1819, detailing Bamford’s familiarity with prison life, the persecution of Henry Hunt after Peterloo, and the government spy networks that hounded the radicals. Drawing compelling comparisons to P. B. Shelley’s Mask of Anarchy, he explores Bamford’s evolving attitude toward revolutionary violence before and after Peterloo, a study that advances the work of Michael Scrivener and William Keach, among others. His concluding reading of Shelley’s Swellfoot the Tyrant, which builds on the work of Steven Jones and Olivia Smith, among others, explores the shared figures of literary and graphic satire of the period. Similarly, Gardner provides a compelling reading of two of Charles Lamb’s neglected poems, revealing the liberal (though not radical) politics of this author who, since Hazlitt, has been deemed largely apolitical (p. 128). The strength of these readings of Bamford, Shelley, and Lamb are not in the novelty of methodological approach but in their attention to political allusions, tropes conventional in radical culture, and satirical humor.

More original in approach are Gardner’s readings of William Hone and Lord Byron. Picking up on Ian Haywood’s thesis that radical print culture was characterized by “a process of continual appropriation and reappropriation, of rapid response, innovation, imitation, assimilation and subversion,” Gardner argues that Hone “utilized whatever narratives and means he had at his disposal,” including “pirating and parodying some of the best-known and ablest poets of the day” so...