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Freedom of expression and censorship are frequently cast in opposing but symmetrical terms. According to the conventional narrative, the right to free speech was acquired when first the American and then the French Revolution overthrew the repressive censorship apparatus of the ancien régime. However this account of increasing emancipation overlooks the important role played by the French Revolution in establishing a new definition of censorship that was both tolerant of free speech and repressive of political difference. This paper contends that precisely when political representation in the widest possible sense is at stake, freedom of speech cannot be reduced solely to a question of rights. It begins by revisiting the Directory period when the enlightened ideal of an unmediated public sphere openly clashed for the first time with the opposing ideal of an ‘unmediated’ or ‘popular’ sovereignty promoted by the radical press. It then focuses on the Conspiracy of Equals to show how the presumed neutrality of the liberal press was forged by repressing competing understandings of the right to free speech. Rather than assume that revolutionary propaganda is the ‘other’ of liberalism, this paper demonstrates the joint origins of both liberal and revolutionary understandings of free speech in the new censorship laws that attempted to separate the message from the medium of revolution.

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This essay considers the Hampshire Chronicle, and the provincial newspaper in general, as a context for reading Austen. If the provincial newspaper would appear to afford a sharper framework for the historical interpretation of Austen’s novels, the Hampshire Chronicle and the history of the provincial press instead raise larger questions about the constitution of ‘the local’ in the early nineteenth century and suggest a different basis for understanding the significance of Austen’s focus on everyday life.

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Combining findings from the sociology of literature, the history of the book and reading, and studies on the materiality of the text, this paper reassesses a late-Romantic ‘scene of reading’ in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s My Cousin’s Corner Window (1822). This ‘scene of reading’ presents the lending library as one of the central institutions of Romanticism and depicts anonymity as a crucial mode of Romantic authorship. Furthermore, Hoffmann’s ‘scene of reading’ focuses on the significant and problematic fact that literary communication is ‘anonymized’ by the uniform materiality of the bookbindings used in late-Romantic lending libraries and associated reading practices.

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In this article I develop the work of a number of critics—Gillen Darcy Wood, Sophie Thomas, Peter Simonsen, Julia S. Carlson—who have recently begun to revise our understanding of the relationship of literary Romanticism, and in particular that of Wordsworth and Southey, to visual culture. I show first that new means of mechanical reproduction—the woodcut, the aquatint—combined with technological changes in book production, stimulated a new print genre known as Views—an ancestor of the coffee-table book and often a spin-off wherein the public could see engravings of the scenes their favourite landscape poets described. Pictures sold poets, and, for the first time in history, popular writers were marketed to a mass readership able—and avid—to buy images as well as words. Wordsworth and Southey were not popular writers and were not at first marketed as illustrated poets. And they at first disapproved of the visual turn of their culture. This disapproval, I show, was never consistent or total and in fact they strove to take advantage of the vogue for the visual, collaborating with artists to publish volumes of Views in which their writing was combined with engravings of landscape. And these collaborations, I argue, were greatly influential upon them, causing them to alter the form and style of their writing as well as the publication formats in which it appeared. Wordsworth and Southey, in their late work, became writers of a moralised picturesque—of words that deferred to pictured views and tourist sights—and that sought to derive truths about human nature, life and society from them. Departing from their earlier suspicion of the visual, and of Views, they became practitioners, in conjunction with artists, of a virtual topography. Their continued marketing, in the 21^st century, as part of the visual packaging of the Lake District in picture-book, DVD, and website is therefore not as contrary to what they stood for as it first might seem, shallow though it often is.

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This article explores a structural shift in techniques of representation in eighteenth-century travel literature as a reaction to the changing needs of cameralist governance, one in which space is no longer grasped as enyclopedic and all-encompassing. Instead of being understood as static territory, space is increasingly represented as a dynamic and continually updatable dataset. As a consequence, travel literature itself goes in search of new representational modes appropriate to this new understanding of space. And as I show, the medium of the book becomes increasingly problematic in this regard. As early modern travel literature (ars Apodemica) largely splits in the eighteenth century into statistics and geography on the one hand and literary travel experiences on the other, each of these categories requires new forms of mediation for their successful presentation. Common to both, however, remains a desire to communicate an immediacy of perception through representation. Taking Friedrich Nicolai’s Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz im Jahre 1781 as my primary example, I show how the medium of the book arrives at its own media boundary, one whose transgression necessarily results in failure because it can no longer account for an epistemological divide that has already transpired. This difference has far-reaching implications for the place of the book within the humanistic sciences today.

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This essay analyses representations of sympathy in radical periodicals in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre of August 1819. Recent accounts of the Regency radical press have noted that cheap journals employ a studied language of rational enlightenment in order to counter charges that they provoke unrest. I argue that these periodicals also employ a language of feeling. Through references to the suffering body, radical journals display moral outrage at the atrocity of Peterloo, but they also put the language of feeling to instrumental political use. Using sympathy as a figure for the transmission of riotous emotion within a crowd, these texts signal the physical power of the masses, but significantly, sympathy is also made a model for the processes of distribution through which these texts are diffused throughout the nation. Radical writers exploit the function of sympathy as a physiological process, through which disruption in one part of a body causes instant disruption in another. In a brief moment after Peterloo, the press becomes the circulatory medium through which both national emotional distress and political response can be co-ordinated. My analysis focuses on the often short-lived radical journals produced in the immediate aftermath of Peterloo, The Cap of Liberty, The London Alfred, The White Hat and The Democratic Recorder. I discuss these titles alongside the longer-running Hone’s Reformist Register, The Black Dwarf, The Gorgon, and The Medusa. In signalling the ephemeral and embattled nature of their existence, these journals mark the uncertain distinction between textual diffusion, emotional exchange and physical unrest at this moment of crisis.

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When John Scott and William Christie, representatives of the London Magazine and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, met in their fatal 1821 duel, the conflict was between more than two men with sullied reputations: it was a between the editor figures of two competing publications. This essay examines those editorial personae, the distinctive editorial voices crafted by individual journals, and how they played a crucial role in establishing a publication in the changing periodical market while simultaneously obscuring that process. Explicating the content and purpose of a publication, the editor figure established a journal’s unique identity in the marketplace, but it also established a point of contact between a periodical and its readers, an invitation that encouraged readers to feel included in the world of the publication. This affective connection socialized readers, incorporating them into the culture of the periodical as participants rather than just consumers, but it also created a brand for a publication, a unique voice that distinguished it (and its readers) from competing publications. While that combination of personal connection and commercial aspiration would appear to be mutually exclusive, I argue that the figure of the editor attempts to reconcile that contradiction, uniting the overt commercial ambition of a publication with a familiar, even friendly, presence. Just as crucially, however, it also reveals how periodicals of that time were caught in a period of transition, when the need to survive in an increasingly competitive print market clashed with older modes of literary consumption.

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This article examines Jean Paul's partially fictionalized "Leipzig" lectures at the end of his Vorschule der Aesthetik, asking as to how Jean Paul reflects on literary criticism’s movement across print and oral forms of presentation. Situating the Vorschule against the backdrop of Romantic cultures of scholarly lecturing, I argue that Jean Paul expressly highlights the mediality of literary and critical language, and I discuss the applicability of recent media theoretical concepts of remediation and intermediality to the phenomenon of the Romantic lecture.

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Of primary concern to late eighteenth-century society was the sheer volume of printed work being produced in England. The response of authors troubled by this perceived crisis was an outpouring of works on taste, aesthetics, genre and literature, which attempted to describe and provide corrective solutions to the problem of over-publication. Yet this response itself, of course, only added to the number of works within Britain. How did the solution to a deluge of print become more printed materials? Did these authors envision print’s agency as a self-corrective process? And, if so, how can we recover and perhaps even model the connections between works that encompassed the responses to print? This essay outlines a potential solution to this problem by sampling a highly focused selection of digitized texts that raise the issue of over-publication. Through a quantitative analysis of these texts, it identifies the lexical patterns that may reveal the ways in which authors of the period envisioned the work of aesthetics. In particular, this article identifies an emerging consensus on how printed objects became agents within the socio-cultural world of the long eighteenth century: both as objects which could act on readers and as objects which could act on other printed texts. By comparing the language that these clusters of texts deploy to discuss the agency of print to their traditional generic, theoretical or historical groupings, we can begin to examine the process by which the potential power of print became the solution to the dangers it, itself, presented.

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The popular Victorian preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon referred to Byron almost forty times in his published works. Drawing on first-hand examination of Spurgeon’s library, this essay shows how Byron’s words were mediated to Spurgeon through a variety of anthologies, primers, and collections of sententiae, and how Spurgeon mediated them to others in turn through his sermons and writings. In the process, Byron’s writing was broken into fragments, placed in new contexts, spliced with other people’s words, misremembered, misattributed and rendered strange. The essay suggests that analysing this contingent process of mediation reveals alternative possibilities for the study of reception history.