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Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism,cultural studies and the radical public sphereAlex Benchimol aa University of GlasgowPublished online: 04 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Alex Benchimol (2005) Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism, cultural studies and theradical public sphere, Textual Practice, 19:1, 51-70, DOI: 10.1080/0950236042000329645

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Alex Benchimol

Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism,cultural studies and the radical public sphere

Romantic period studies, as it is now practiced from Canberra toCambridge and Los Angeles to London, is a field that has been experien-cing something of a revolution in its aims and methods over the past twodecades, despite the lack of a coherent theoretical narrative to accompanythis global academic development.1 The most conspicuous sign of thistransformed intellectual agenda – from a preoccupation with poetic-textualist issues to an eclectic approach that borrows as much fromdevelopments in cultural studies, social history and critical theory asfrom literary criticism – was the publication in 1999 of a major scholarlycompanion on the period that set as one of its organizing aims the ‘redis-covery of neglected historical figures and events’ that would in turn lead toa ‘shifting’ of ‘our angles of vision’.2 The manner in which An Oxford Com-panion to the Romantic Age established itself so rapidly as a standard refer-ence source illustrates merely the endpoint of a process of intellectualconsolidation in the field; a process initiated and sustained over twentyyears through the publication of clusters of ground-breaking studies byscholars using methodologies that continuously challenged the criticalorthodoxy of Romanticist literary scholarship.3

Moreover, the companion’s attempt to highlight ‘the fiery debates,crushing commercial pressures, and chance events of a historical periodthat was felt to be seething with conflict’ not only marks out the culturalmaterialist aspects of the project – as likewise its deliberately broad con-ception of cultural production in the period – but also underlines theideological debt that this revisionist formation in Romantic periodstudies owes to an older, more explicitly politicized form of scholarship.4

British Marxist cultural studies was an academic movement that first flow-ered in the 1960s, became institutionalized in the 1970s, and began tofade under the dominant ideological onslaught of Thatcherism in the1980s just when the current movement in Romantic period studies wasemerging.5 In the absence of any contemporary narratives exploring how

Textual Practice 19(1), 2005, 51–70

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd

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DOI: 10.1080/0950236042000329645

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the relationship between these two academic formations has led to a newfocus on the spaces of cultural resistance in the period – embodied concep-tually in the key historical-theoretical space of the radical public sphere – itmay be worth mapping the origins, outlines and trajectories of this newcultural materialist agenda in Romantic period studies.

Academic treatises on methodology, whether polemical, speculativeor analytical, have proven the most illuminating when general forms ofdisciplinary critique are united with a critical focus on those episodes ofintellectual history that mark the development of new fields of studywithin disciplines. In these writings, for reasons of historical perspective,discrete cultural analysis is often subordinated in the imperative to classifywider scholarly trends. The following essay is no different. Unlike the par-ticular cultural materialist formation that it traces, this article does notattempt to engage in any detailed form of cultural analysis, but ratherseeks to demonstrate links between two academic traditions of culturalanalysis – British cultural studies and Romantic period studies – that,when properly understood, may perhaps shed new light on the role theformer tradition continues to play in the making of the latter, with refer-ence to three key texts as case studies.

This kind of disciplinary mapping is necessary in part because the newwork in Romantic period studies lacks the foundational narrative that AlanSinfield and Jonathan Dollimore provided for the more widely known for-mation of cultural materialism in Renaissance studies in their seminal 1985essay collection Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism.6

Building upon Raymond Williams’ concept of ‘cultural materialism’ as ‘atheory of the specificities of material cultural and literary productionwithin historical materialism’,7 Dollimore and Sinfield set out the basicparameters for cultural materialist practice in the Renaissance:

our belief is that a combination of historical context, theoreticalmethod, political commitment and textual analysis offers the strongestchallenge and has already contributed substantial work. Historicalcontext undermines the transcendent significance traditionallyaccorded to the literary text and allows us to recover its histories; theor-etical method detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeksonly to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commit-ment confronts the conservative categories in which most criticism hashitherto been conducted; textual analysis locates the critique of tra-ditional approaches where it cannot be ignored.8

In the explicitness of the political investments it makes, the culturalmaterialist agenda outlined here is a contemporary manifestation of thetradition of ethical scholarship on the intellectual Left that animated the

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first flowering of British cultural studies. Cultural materialism, asDollimore and Sinfield write, ‘registers its commitment to the transform-ation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender andclass’.9 Its focus on a materialist practice of textual analysis, as Sinfieldarticulated in a later defence of the cultural materialist method, forcesscholars to engage with ‘the histories and social conditions in whichreading and writing has occurred and may occur’.10 In this it alsobetrays its debt to the postwar British Marxist cultural studies tradition,challenging the politically complacent (and often politically complicit)textual formalism of literary criticism with an imperative to historicize cul-tural texts as artefacts of cultural struggle. It is no criticism of the essays inPolitical Shakespeare to observe that this ambitious theoretical agenda set byDollimore and Sinfield is yet to be fully realized. Indeed, judging by therange of contributions in the collection that went on to become classicillustrations of the new work in Renaissance studies, one would thinkthat the cultural materialist project outlined by Dollimore and Sinfieldcould have been neatly extended to include other key periods in British cul-tural history with similarly insular, ideologically stifling critical traditionsdefining the contemporary terms of scholarly practice, not least theRomantic period. The story of the cultural materialist formation inRomantic period studies is, however, more complex.11

The transformative impact of E. P. Thompson’s seminal text ofMarxist cultural studies, The Making of the English Working Class(1963), on the practice of historiography in the English-speaking worldis now widely acknowledged. The text’s influence on the terms of debatein Romantic period studies is less familiar, not least because of thewidely held perception that Thompson, as part of his revisionist historicalproject, was more concerned with highlighting the neglected contexts ofradical political culture in the period than in attempting to situate radicalcultural practices in relation to the ‘elite’ intellectual world of the majorRomantic poets more familiar to literary scholars. Another reason forThompson’s work being overlooked as a key foundational text in Romanticperiod studies was the attempt by professional critics to discipline thenew academic formation in strictly literary terms. This came about primar-ily through the efforts of critics based in English departments who soughtto appropriate the scholarship inspired by The Making as merely a usefulempirical supplement to the broader narrative of a largely unrevised tra-ditional literary history, ignoring the implicit challenge this scholarshipposed to orthodox critical practices in the discipline. This attempt at neu-tralization through studied ignorance is not surprising. As Sinfield hasrightly observed, cultural materialism ‘embarrasses Englit. . . by requiringknowledges and techniques that we scarcely possess, or even know howto discover’ – with historiographical knowledge being perhaps the most

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fundamental (and most embarrassing) lack for a generation of literaryscholars conditioned to believe in their practical competence in thewriting of cultural history.12 The final and most important reason forthe marginalization of Thompson’s influence on this new academic for-mation may be found in the peculiarly anti-theoretical impulses ofThompson himself; an intellectual prejudice that prevented him from ade-quately conceptualizing the cultural space he described so vividly in TheMaking which was to become so crucial for the subsequent mapping ofthe radical public sphere in some of the key works of Romantic periodstudies.13

The first Thompsonian work of Romantic period studies that engagesconstructively with the narrative from The Making, while in some veryimportant ways challenging it, was produced not by a literary critic butan historical sociologist. Craig Calhoun’s The Question of Class Struggle:Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution(1982) takes issue with the social homogeneity and cultural holism ofThompson’s narrative of popular radicalism and instead emphasizes theideological complexity of plebeian political culture during the early nine-teenth century.14 As part of this re-examination of what Calhoun callsthe ‘theoretical and empirical basis of Thompson’s great work’, The Ques-tion of Class Struggle develops what amounts to a cultural materialistreading of those radical social formations which rose up in opposition toindustrial capitalism.15 Indeed, in his theoretical critique of Thompson’smethodology, Calhoun essentially restates Raymond Williams’ plea for acritical method that restores the whole social material process to thecentre of its practice.16 He writes:

Culture is not autonomous; it is part of a broader social formation,all parts of which influence each other, the whole being ultimatelydetermined by the stage of social and economic development . . . .Thompson’s argument depends considerably on the notion of theunequal development of different aspects of this social formation,so that class could develop culturally in advance of social or econ-omic definition.17

In his recasting of Thompson’s radical artisans as more sociallyspecific ‘reactionary radicals’,18 Calhoun also provides the basic outlineof a new cultural concept for the period: the radical public sphere.19 Ina key illustration of his cultural materialist method, Calhoun presentsthis cultural space as fundamentally constitutive of the wider political iden-tity of these ‘reactionary radicals’: ‘Reading Jacobin literature and listeningto oral traditions through the filters of their own attachments to commu-nities and trade groups, these people created a new and important position

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in the firmament of political ideologies and practices.’20 Their ideology,much like their conception of cultural praxis, was ‘shaped by the commu-nities in which they lived and the concrete demands of their immediatesituations – economic and social’.21 Calhoun argues that Thompson’s nar-rative, though rich in its description of a shared popular culture of ritualsand customary rights, ignores the specific manner in which the ‘similarexperiences’ of the radicals were transformed into ‘shared experiences’; adynamic process in which their social rituals became part of the largerarticulation of a ‘vital and wide-reaching’ symbolic culture.22

Crucially for later scholars of the radical public sphere, Calhoundescribes these rituals as ‘communicative activities’ including ‘a widevariety of symbolic content’.23 In his conceptual revision of Thompson’sthesis from The Making, Calhoun argues that this new kind of culturalpraxis was deployed by a threatened workforce as part of its collectivedefence of the residual moral economy of the early nineteenth century.Radical cultural activities became a key means of protecting ‘the materialweb of social relations which situates individuals in their communitiesand in the world at large’.24 According to Calhoun, ‘Kinship bonds, infor-mal meetings in public houses’ and ‘the ability of many artisans to conductconversations at work’ helped to give ‘an enduring basis to collective actionwhich did not have to be formally defined or mobilized on each newoccasion’.25 For Calhoun, the problematic progression in Thompson’snarrative from an articulate Jacobinism of the late eighteenth century toa fully formed industrial working-class consciousness of the 1830scovered a period when cultural values were being defined in new socialcontexts and when an ideology of popular resistance, based in part onJacobinism, was being developed ‘in the minds of artisans, outworkers,craftsmen, shopkeepers, journalists, and what we might now call “intellec-tuals”’.26 For these participants in the new cultural space of the radicalpublic sphere, this ideology was embedded in ‘their minds and in certaincrucial writings’ where it ‘could be held on to for later application’.27

So, from Thompson’s broad overview of popular cultural resistancein the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a more specific andcarefully focused cultural narrative emerges in Calhoun’s study, one inwhich the radical movement’s key modes of political activity may beappreciated in all their rich ideological hybridity and symbolism. The Ques-tion of Class Struggle was a key intermediate text in the development ofRomantic period studies not only for the conceptual sophistication inwhich it treated radical cultural activity of the time, but also for itsinitial mapping of that activity as part of a larger radical public spherebased, in different ways, upon the speeches and critical writings of ‘main-stream’ radical reformers such as William Cobbett, T. J. Wooler andHenry Hunt, and the more inchoate efforts of a London radical

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underground consisting of ‘agrarian socialists (among the Spenceans in par-ticular), opportunistic adventurers bent on coup d’etat, old Jacobins holdingto the notion that London could in 1816 or thereabouts play the role of Parisin 1789, and a parcel of less clearly defined partisans’.28 This latter radicalphenomenon was explored in all its complexity and detail by a differentkind of scholar – this one a cultural historian based in Australia – whowould provide Romantic period studies with another crucial narrativebased upon an imaginative engagement with Thompson’s landmark study.

Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries AndPornographers In London, 1795–1840 (1988) vividly re-creates the culturallifeworld surrounding one of the most marginal figures in Thompson’snarrative, the agrarian socialist, millenarian prophet and radical Enlighten-ment theorist Thomas Spence. The methodological inventiveness dis-played in McCalman’s evocation of the rich profusion of discourses,narratives and symbols of the early nineteenth-century London radicalunderground was such that he quickly established himself at the forefrontof the Romantic period studies movement, later acting as general editor ofwhat would become its most obvious collective manifestation in referenceform, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999). McCalmanconfirmed his affiliation with the new critical developments in the fieldin a 1993 Preface to Radical Underworld. In a rather explicit attempt atretrospective contextualization, he writes with an informed awareness ofhis study’s relationship to what he calls the ‘new historicist’ challenge to‘canonical versions of “Romanticism’”.29 Indeed, he confesses that thestudy ‘would have had both a wider resonance and a greater theoreticalinterest had I known more of the work of such scholars as MarilynButler and Jerome J. McGann within Romantic studies, or StephenGreenblatt within the Renaissance period’.30

What distinguishes McCalman’s study as a major work of Romanticperiod cultural materialism is its remarkable reconstruction of an over-looked radical subculture of the time. Much like Thompson before him,he develops a compelling narrative of diverse plebeian cultural practicesthrough a dedicated trawl of British government archives. However, it isthe imaginative extrapolation from these official sources that gives thestudy its power as an academic counter-cultural narrative in its ownright, providing its readers with ‘glimpses of an underworld of alehouses,chapels, workshops, backroom cellars and brothels; echoes of toasts,boasts, debates, songs, oaths, curses, gestures, rituals, and burlesques’.31

Comparing his role to that of a deconstructionist critic, McCalmanmakes some important methodological recommendations based on hisstudy, arguing that cultural historians of the period ‘must be alert to dis-guised motives, significant absences and encoded rhetorical strategies’ aswell as pay attention to ‘the protean reshaping of texts as they pass

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through the successive hands of author, printer, publisher, bookseller andeven vendor’, and finally, that they must ‘expect diverse, aberrant and con-tradictory textual reception in accordance with the social and psychologicalattributes of reader and reading community’.32 In short, cultural historians– and by clear implication in his Preface, literary critics as well – shouldbegin to seriously engage with the complex and shifting cultural meaningsproduced in the radical public sphere of the time.

A prominent contemporary review of Radical Underworld begins bydistinguishing McCalman’s subject from that of Thompson’s in TheMaking with the observation that unlike the ‘generally respectable,secular, rationalist’ tradition mapped by Thompson, ‘McCalman writesof another world’.33 This is true in one sense but seems to miss thepoint in another. What McCalman does in Radical Underworld, toadapt a notable turn of phrase from his introduction to An Oxford Compa-nion to the Romantic Age, is to shift ‘the angles of vision’ of Thompson’smore broadly focused study.34 McCalman both enlarges the narrativefocus from The Making to include the rich metropolitan cultural lifeworldof the London radical underground, and narrows it as well, detailing thisLondon underworld through a series of compelling micro-historical narra-tives. More significant still, he re-emphasizes the social contexts ofRomantic period radicalism, illustrating the role played by the Jacobin‘ultra-radicals’ described by Thompson in the development of a complexpublic sphere complete with its own distinctive sites of discourse and cul-tures of print. As the review notes, McCalman provides a ‘revisionist argu-ment for the existence and importance of a heretofore slighted strain ofBritish plebeian radicalism’.35 However, it is the way McCalmanexpands the cultural contexts of British plebeian radicalism – his incorpor-ation of the morally transgressive radical ‘other’ into the narrative firstinitiated by Thompson – that makes his book, much like Calhoun’sbefore it, such an important illustration of how the new formation inRomantic period studies has its roots in imaginative revisions of thecentral narrative of cultural resistance provided by the British Marxist cul-tural studies tradition.

The study’s significance may also be measured by the way it expandsthe conceptual and cultural parameters of the radical public sphere.Turning away from the normative aims of Thompson and Calhoun intheir respective treatments of the intellectual culture of the radical move-ment, McCalman brings the notion of a counter-culture in the modernsense to his description of Romantic period dissidence. McCalman’sradical underworld, with its vividly evoked tavern debating clubs,popular pornography and blasphemous chapels, provides contemporaryreaders with a recognizably modern cultural geography through which torelate some of the key theoretical concepts that have recently become

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associated with the Romantic period, in particular that of a radical publicsphere. Interestingly, in its re-creation of a morally anarchic cultural spacewhere the social hierarchies of the outside world are bracketed during thefluid time of ‘radical sociability’ in the taverns, McCalman’s radical under-world most resembles the original Habermasian model of the liberal publicsphere where social intercourse ‘disregarded status altogether’.36 However,for cultural historians and other scholars of early nineteenth-century radic-alism, Radical Underworld will be appreciated chiefly for its ability to mapa coherent cultural space out of what was thought to be the unnavigablepolitical volatility of the Spencean underground.

McCalman’s ‘Spencean–Jacobin underground’ is in many respectsthe missing transitional cultural space linking the Jacobin public sphereof the London Corresponding Society mapped by Thompson to the emer-ging periodical-based plebeian public sphere of the early nineteenthcentury described by Calhoun, and later developed in more conceptualdetail by Kevin Gilmartin.37 McCalman describes the tavern ‘free-and-easy’ – the convivial debating clubs where members of the original Spen-sonian Society gathered – as ‘a feature of the Jacobin movement from theoutset’ which ‘between 1798 and 1803 became its dominant form’.38

These alehouse clubs proved to be ideally suited to the semi-covert organ-izational activities of the Spencean underground during the politicallyrepressive first decade and a half of the nineteenth century. In thisvariant of the radical public sphere the outlines of a genuinely popular pol-itical counter-culture developed where ‘Members of the [Spencean] circlecomposed, sang and printed Spencean songs to the tune of popular folkballads. . . . [D]ebated Spence’s land plan and other topics’ and ‘circulatedtracts, broadsheets, posters, poems and metal tokens advertising Spence’splan’.39 Under the leadership of Thomas Evans, the Society of SpenceanPhilanthropists – the successor to the Spensonian Society – developed acultural space that ‘combined elements drawn from the traditional ple-beian free-and-easy, the more formal radical debating club, the Jacobin-style political society and the trades or benefit lodge’.40 These Spenceangatherings were also key sites for the dissemination of radical knowledge,where numbers of Cobbett’s Political Register and T. J. Wooler’s BlackDwarf were ‘read out occasionally for those unable to read or affordpublications’.41

Despite this overlap with the journalism of two central postwar radicalintellectuals, McCalman’s narrative essentially pivots around three repre-sentative figures of the ultra-radical underground and their associations.The London Corresponding Society veteran and artisan-activistEvans, the black itinerant tailor and radical Methodist preacher RobertWedderburn, and the middle-class lawyer, radical philosopher and peren-nial ghost writer George Cannon are what McCalman calls the ‘ideal types’

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featured in Radical Underworld.42 Despite, or perhaps because of, theirshared experience in the Spencean society, these three occupied thefringes of a larger radical public sphere whose more mainstream partici-pants – like those in the rival Hampden Clubs – benefited from the stea-dying cultural presence and continuity provided by the leading postwarradical weeklies.43 The cultural products of this radical underground –short-lived religious and political journals, cheap pamphlets, and latterly,pornographic literature – often made for erratic, ephemeral and ideologi-cally unstable texts. It would take another scholar, an American literaryhistorian with more direct connections to the discipline of English thanMcCalman, to properly assess the cultural and conceptual value of themainstream periodical-based radical public sphere.

Kevin Gilmartin’s 1996 study Print Politics: The Press and RadicalOpposition in Early-Nineteenth Century England is, as he puts it in theIntroduction, ‘pitched towards the upper reaches of the “radical under-world” mapped by Iain McCalman’.44 Gilmartin’s work may be distinguishedfrom McCalman’s Radical Underworld – and from Calhoun’s study aswell – in more than this one respect. Most specifically, it is the only oneof the three texts under discussion to be published after Jurgen Habermas’Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was translated into English in1989, and hence the only one to use the conceptual term of the ‘publicsphere’ to describe the cultural activities of its subjects. Not surprisingly,because of this theoretical investment in the public sphere model, PrintPolitics is explicit in its articulation of the utility of the concept for thestudy of media-based radical cultural practices. Gilmartin writes in hisIntroduction that ‘beyond romantic studies, theories of the public spherewould seem to offer a promising framework for a study of the language,organization, and public profile of the radical movement in print’.45 Hisadaptation of the original Habermasian model of the bourgeois publicsphere into what he calls a ‘plebeian counterpublic sphere’ reveals a soph-isticated understanding both of the history and uses of the concept inrecent academic contexts, as well as the wider politics of contemporary cul-tural theory. Perhaps most importantly, in its theoretical projection of theprint strategies of some of the leading intellectuals of the radical movementas explicitly counter-hegemonic cultural practices, Gilmartin’s ‘plebeiancounterpublic sphere’ functions as a crucial conceptual bridge betweenCalhoun and McCalman’s studies, linking the radical populist ideologyof intellectual leaders such as Wooler and Cobbett discussed inThe Question of Class Struggle with the notion of an active lifeworld ofcounter-cultural resistance from Radical Underworld. In this respect,Gilmartin’s book may be viewed as the most evolved example of theparticular Thompsonian fraction within Romantic period studies tracedhere.

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Indeed, Gilmartin makes a clear effort in the Introduction to Print Poli-tics to situate his study within the wider formation of Romantic periodstudies. This revealing gesture of affiliation is similar to McCalman’sattempt at self-contextualization in the 1993 Preface to Radical Underworldand reflects the growing intellectual self-awareness of this academic move-ment in the mid to late 1990s. Gilmartin writes:

Recent initiatives in romantic studies, or what we should perhapslearn to call romantic period studies, have informed the developmentof this book. Where a first wave of romantic ‘new historicism’ tendedto emphasize the way romantic poetry repressed, displaced, or ideal-ized political and historical content, more recent work has movedbeyond the romantic canon and attended to positive rather thannegative literary engagements with history.46

Of this so-called ‘second wave’ of scholarship in Romantic period studies,I would argue that the works of Calhoun and McCalman stand out asmodel examples, with the arguments and methodology of the formerfinding a particular echo in Print Politics. A further reflection of the move-ment’s maturity is illustrated by the specificity with which Gilmartin is ableto locate his work within Romantic period studies. Citing Anne Janowitz’snotion of ‘plebeian studies’, Gilmartin suggests that his book belongswithin this particular subcategory of the formation, alongside suchpioneering work as Jon Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992) and DavidWorrall’s Radical Culture (1992). Gilmartin argues that this subfield‘could be extended to include recent work on popular radical culture byJon Klancher, Michael Scrivener, Marcus Wood, Paul Thomas Murphy,and Leonora Nattrass’, adding – rather significantly for the wider argu-ment of this essay – that all this work could be ‘traced back to the forma-tive influences of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson’, and was partof the collective recent effort that ‘introduced romanticist scholarship tothe broader concerns of cultural studies’.47

One of the principal manifestations of this ideological inheritancefrom the Marxist cultural studies tradition in Print Politics may be foundin Gilmartin’s projection of radical print culture as a key practice of resist-ance in the early nineteenth century. For leading intellectuals of the‘plebeian counterpublic sphere’ such as Cobbett, Wooler and RichardCarlile, the overriding aim of their journalism was to confront the multipleforms of political corruption and repression with compelling counter-hegemonic cultural narratives: ‘Notions of a counterpublic and of counter-publicity do help account for the oppositional imperative behind a reformmovement that undertook to write, speak, organize, and act against corruptinstitutions and practices. Strict polarization was among the movement’s

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first principles.’48 However, what makes Gilmartin’s conception of theradical ‘counterpublic sphere’ so relevant to contemporary debates infields such as social theory and cultural history is how this ‘negative engage-ment with corruption’ functions beyond a merely negative role and mayserve as a normative theory for radical publicity in and of itself.49 Inaddition to this obvious theoretical utility, Gilmartin’s critical method inPrint Politics also significantly advances the development of cultural mate-rialist practice in Romantic period studies with its insistence that a realunderstanding of the radical press requires going beyond standard textual-ist forms of analysis to engage with the wider institutional complexity ofradical print culture. He argues that the popular radical public ‘was bothrepresentation and practice, elusive phantom and material body’, produ-cing a complex form of political protest ‘articulated through a rich assort-ment of rhetorical strategies and institutional practices’.50

Early in the study Gilmartin outlines the basic structure of radical dis-course in the period, framing the ways in which a compelling narrative ofpopular rights emerged in fundamental opposition to the ideologicallybankrupt disputes between competing Tory and Whig politicalprogrammes. This is a story that has been told before, perhaps mostfamously by Thompson, but in Print Politics these radical arguments areexamined in all their revealing and sometimes contradictory detail, unco-vering a diverse assemblage of intellectual practices with which the radicalmovement ‘exercised the deliberative as well as the critical function of apolitical public sphere’.51 Gilmartin’s explication suggests the ways inwhich this radical movement engaged in a process of differentiation withother publics over control of the very basis of intellectual protest at thetime: the idea of an organized public. He writes: ‘The radical press wasfrom the outset saturated with distinctions among publics, peoples, andopinions, as it struggled with its enemies over control of these empoweringterms.’52 An ongoing struggle over the material tools of intellectual protestalso helped to encourage the movement’s underlying didacticism – it per-ceived itself to be foremost an instrument of ideological instruction to anascent political public unjustly excluded from the formal institutions ofpolitical power. Gilmartin argues that what developed in radical discoursewas thus ‘a limited and provisional version of the fourth estate, compatiblewith the movement’s remedial self-image: the oppositional press couldprovide a transitional instrument through which the people reclaimedthe authority in the House of Commons denied them by corruption.’53

This surrogate model of civil society constructed by publicists such asCobbett, Wooler and Carlile helped to define the extra-textual nature ofradical discourse. The speeches and debates included in the leadingradical weeklies encouraged collective processes of dissemination, helpingto materialize in the many radical micro-communities scattered across

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the country the larger communitarian ideal argued for in radical plebeiancultural discourse.

Another key aspect of Gilmartin’s conception of the ‘counterpublicsphere’ in Print Politics is his mapping of an associated politics of ‘counter-system’ to engage with the multiple levels of corruption practiced by theBritish state of the early nineteenth century. As part of its confrontationwith a corrupt system of totalitarian proportions, the ‘counterpublicsphere’ developed what he calls a ‘radical countersystem’ that ‘sought toappropriate and mock the authority of a system that was not easilytranscended or superseded’.54 Such a strategy of engagement necessitateda flexible deployment of political language; one that seldom achieved theideological clarity of later radical movements but instead reflected, andsought to highlight, the vicissitudes of periodical production in a deeplyunstable and repressive intellectual environment. As Gilmartin puts it,‘A dialectically engaged radical opposition was keen to trace its own con-tradictions to the internal contradictions of a corrupt system.’55

The print culture of this ‘counterpublic sphere’ also challenges certainfundamental assumptions about Romanticist literary practice and theoriesof authorship during the period. The combined roles of author, editor,printer and publisher embodied in the leading radical intellectuals of theearly nineteenth century requires a more complex mode of cultural analysisthan the orthodox textual approach favoured by much Romanticist criti-cism. Gilmartin’s assessment of radical authorship in Print Politics givesa materialist inflection to the hallowed (and often politically disabling)Romanticist concept of the ‘literary imagination’, encouraging a renewedfocus on issues of cultural praxis. An example of this may be found inhis account of the intellectual practice of the journalist and radical leaderT. J. Wooler: ‘As author, printer, and publisher, he was wholly at homein the press. “Imagination” led immediately and effortlessly into printexpression. . . . [A]utomatic writing with a seditious edge played out ambi-guities within radical print culture, since it joined a materialist account oftextual production . . . with a more idealist, even romantic construction ofprint authority.’56 Citing the inadequacy of purely textual modes of criticalanalysis, Gilmartin underlines the social quality of radical print culture:‘To explain the unstamped press according to some internal logic orauthorial source would be to overlook the supportive role played byreaders, publishers, and distributors, and the hostile contribution oflawyers, legislators, and the conservative press.’57

If one of the key revisionist aspects of Radical Underworld was the cul-tural significance it attributes to previously marginalized figures such asEvans, Wedderburn and Cannon, a similar act in Print Politics would beGilmartin’s reconsideration of the radical public sphere’s most dominantand idiosyncratic voice: William Cobbett. Following the general thesis

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of the book, Cobbett’s many contradictory intellectual positions are por-trayed as a consequence of his engagement with the ideological instabilityof the wider ‘system’ of early nineteenth-century capitalism. As Gilmartinputs it, ‘Cobbett set out to describe and account for a corrupt system thatalready existed, in order to elicit its contradictions and encourage thepopular resentment that would hasten its downfall.’58 The elusive andprotean target of Cobbett’s social criticism – changing from the associatedand interlocking tyranny of ‘Old Corruption’ in the first decade of thenineteenth century to the nascent commercial-industrial system referredto as ‘THE THING’ in his Rural Rides series of the 1820s – reflectedthe contradictory dynamic of an intellectual project that ‘involved a simul-taneous urge towards simplicity and complexity’ where ‘he constantlyrevised his political analysis in the face of shifting interests and allianceswithin the system’.59 These intellectual tactics were part of a wider strategyof counter-systematic analysis that ‘had to penetrate misleading surfaces todisclose an underlying structure’.60

Given the sophistication of this analysis of Cobbett’s intellectual prac-tice, it is understandable that Print Politics has had its most immediate andapparent impact on the rapidly developing subfield of Cobbett studies.Perhaps ironically for a text by the only literary scholar included in thisarticle, its more important accomplishment in a disciplinary sense maybe to help dislodge the study of Romantic period culture out of its cosynook in university English departments and to encourage further engage-ments with its practices by scholars from the fields of intellectual history,social theory and cultural studies. In this respect Gilmartin’s book maybe viewed as the proper culmination of the development of cultural mate-rialist practice traced in this article, and, as such, an exemplary initial workin the attempt to understand the complex social history of intellectual andcultural practices in the early nineteenth century.

As Stuart Hall put it almost twenty-five years ago in what became themost influential theoretical mapping of British cultural studies, ‘In serious,critical intellectual work, there are no “absolute beginnings” and fewunbroken continuities’. ‘What we find, instead,’ he writes, ‘is an untidybut characteristic unevenness of development’.61 The attempt here totrace the three studies on the radical public sphere of the Romanticperiod back to The Making of the English Working Class resembles this‘untidy but characteristic unevenness of development’ more than any‘unbroken’ continuity originating in the ‘absolute beginnings’ of Thomp-son’s seminal work. To underline this unevenness of development linkingRomantic period cultural materialism to the British cultural studies tra-dition, I will conclude by interrupting the trajectory of influence, as itwere, through a brief examination of an essay on the radical publicsphere taken from the earlier academic narrative.

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Like much of his key early work in Marxist cultural historiography,Richard Johnson’s 1979 essay, ‘“Really useful knowledge”: radical edu-cation and working class culture, 1790–1848’, examines the developmentof popular education as a principal site of cultural conflict in the early nine-teenth century.62 What strikes current readers of the article is how, almosttwenty years before the publication of Print Politics, it maps a cultural spacethat manages to encompass the radical public sphere concept outlined byCalhoun, expanded in McCalman’s study and delineated with such theor-etical precision in Gilmartin’s text. In the article Johnson describes how themany discrete radical intellectual communities of the early nineteenthcentury developed into a coherent public sphere with overriding normativeaims:

radicals made their own cultural inventions. These included thevarious kinds of communal reading and discussion groups, the facili-ties for newspapers in pub, coffee house or reading room, the broadercultural politics of Chartist or Owenite branch-life, the institution ofthe travelling lecturer who, often indistinguishable from ‘missionary’or demagogue, toured the radical centres, and, above all, the radicalpress, the most successful radical invention and an extremely flexible(and therefore ubiquitous) educational form.63

Johnson interprets these radical educational movements of the first half ofthe nineteenth century – beginning with the Jacobin public sphere of the1790s and its plebeian successor centred around Cobbett’s prolific journal-ism – as essentially transformative and counter-hegemonic cultural for-mations.64 The essay contends that the ‘radical press remains theobvious route of entry into popular educational practices and dilemmas’;an argument with important implications for later scholars of the radicalpublic sphere who would represent the print practices of leading plebeianintellectuals such as Spence, Cobbett and Wooler as powerful acts of ideo-logical transmission to their wider publics.65

According to Johnson, radical intellectual leaders played a pivotal rolein this new form of cultural community, a role ‘that was part mediation orexpression of some popular feelings, and part a forming or “education” ofthem’.66 This form of pedagogical praxis developed by the leading radicalintellectuals was featured as part of a larger internal debate within theradical public sphere, a debate that viewed the education of the radicalpublic with the utmost seriousness ‘as a political strategy or as a meansof changing the world’.67

Johnson’s work was viewed at the time as the most compelling revi-sion of the thesis from The Making, constituting a key problematizationof the cultural holism intrinsic to Thompson’s narrative.68 It was also

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indicative of a widening epistemological division between the so-called‘structuralist’ and ‘culturalist’ paradigms within British cultural studies,seemingly exacerbated by Johnson’s appointment as Director of theCentre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) a year after theessay’s publication. These related developments coincided with the increas-ing profile of cultural materialism – in many ways a functional synthesis ofthe two paradigms – as the primary theoretical export of British culturalstudies to distinct but often associated fields such as English and culturalhistory in the 1980s, culminating in the appearance of Political Shakespearein 1985. The unacknowledged fact that, three years prior to the publi-cation of Dollimore and Sinfield’s collection, The Question of Class Strugglehad both challenged and revised key aspects of Thompson’s seminal studyin what amounted to a cultural materialist reading of popular cultural prac-tices in the early nineteenth century, exposes a crucial gap in the recentintellectual history of radical Anglo-American academic practice. This‘lost’ theoretical narrative, supplemented in the late 1980s and mid-1990s by the revisionist work on the radical public sphere of the Romanticperiod traced in this article, must be recovered before we can adequatelyassess the value of cultural materialism as one of the most consistentlyuseful modes of engaged critical analysis to emerge in the past twenty years.

University of Glasgow

Notes

1. Of course there have been seminal intellectual statements that greatly influ-enced the direction of this new formation in the field, most notably JeromeMcGann’s The Romantic Ideology in 1983. However, McGann’s powerfulpolemic against the stifling ideological consensus that existed amongleading Romanticist critics was intended to be more of a statement ofgeneral intellectual intent than a blueprint for the revisionist theoretical andhistoricist trends that later came to be known as ‘Romantic period studies’.See Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

2. Iain McCalman, ‘Introduction: a romantic age Companion’, in An OxfordCompanion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. IainMcCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. l–11 (p. 2). Iengage more fully with the disciplinary implications of this text in a recentreview. See Alex Benchimol, ‘On An Oxford Companion to the RomanticAge’, Romantic Circles Reviews 3.3 (2000), p. 8 pars. 24 kwww.rc.umd.edu/reviews/back/companion.htmll.

3. See Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature andIts Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); CraigCalhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular

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Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); JonKlancher, The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790–1832 (Madison:University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld:Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993 [1988]); David Worrall, Radical Culture:Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Detroit: Wayne State Uni-versity Press, 1992); Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and theCulture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in EarlyNineteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1996); Anne Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1998); James Chandler, England in 1819: The Poli-tics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1998).

4. McCalman, ‘Introduction: A Romantic age Companion’, p. 2. In a recentaccounting of An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age Emma Masonobserved that its ‘open and productive’ use of the term ‘Romantic age’ andthe broad conception of cultural practices implied in the title ‘indicate the cul-tural materialist origins of the project’. See Emma Mason, ‘The nineteenthcentury: the Romantic period: general’, in The Year’s Work in EnglishStudies, vol. 80, ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), pp. 428–55 (p. 428).

5. There are a number of excellent accounts of these developments in the BritishMarxist cultural studies tradition. For the two most influential narratives fromwithin the tradition, see Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’, Media,Culture and Society, 2 (1980), pp. 57–72; and Richard Johnson, ‘What is cul-tural studies anyway?’, Social Text, 16 (1987), pp. 38–80. For the most inci-sive narrative from without, see Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism inPostwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies(Durham, N. C. Duke University Press, 1997).

6. See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: NewEssays in Cultural Materialism (2nd edn) (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 1994 [1985]).

7. See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1977), p. 5. Later in the study he developed this definition intowhat he calls a ‘Marxist cultural sociology’ that is ‘recognizable, in its simplestoutlines, in studies of different types of institution and formation in culturalproduction and distribution, and in the linking of these within whole socialmaterial processes’. See Marxism and Literature, p. 138.

8. Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, p. vii.9. Ibid., p. viii.

10. Alan Sinfield, ‘The persistence of Englit.’, in Jonathan Dollimore and AlanSinfield, ‘Culture and textuality: debating cultural materialism’, Textual Prac-tice, 4 (1990), pp. 91–100 (p. 97).

11. Although it is a well-rehearsed point of discussion in theoretical circles, thisexplication of the cultural materialist agenda brings up inevitable comparisons

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with the aims and methods of new historicist scholarship. Indeed, like muchof the innovative work on the Renaissance in Political Shakespeare, there areenough points of common theoretical and methodological interest that itmay be more constructive to describe the major works of Romantic periodstudies as both cultural materialist and new historicist, with only differencesconcerning the articulation of political agency providing a useful basis fordifferentiation. Dollimore’s introduction to Political Shakespeare cites thisissue as a defining point of difference between the two critical approaches:

According to Marx, men and women make their own history but not in con-ditions of their own choosing. Perhaps the most significant divergencewithin cultural analysis is that between those who concentrate on cultureas this making of history, and those who concentrate on the unchosen con-ditions which constrain and inform that process of making. The formerallows much to human agency, and tends to privilege human experience;the latter concentrates on the formative power of social and ideologicalstructures which are both prior to experience and in some sense determiningof it, and so opens up the whole question of autonomy. (Dollimore, ‘Intro-duction: Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism’, p. 3)

For other discussions of the differences between new historicism and culturalmaterialism, see Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary andCultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 184–6;and John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York:Macmillan, 1998), pp. 8–10. Although clearly not a formal debate betweenthe two theoretical formations, the productive exchange in the pages of thisjournal between Catherine Belsey and Dollimore and Sinfield about culturalmaterialist practice helped to clarify some of the most salient differences. SeeCatherine Belsey, ‘Towards cultural history – in theory and practice’, TextualPractice, 3 (1989), pp. 159–72; and Dollimore and Sinfield, ‘Culture andtextuality: debating cultural materialism’, Textual Practice, 4 (1990), pp. 91–100.

12. Sinfield, ‘Culture and textuality’, p. 98.13. Richard Johnson has argued that Thompson’s study ‘remains a work whose

findings are seriously under-exploited by the author himself’. He writes ofThe Making:

It is full of profound insights about the relations between the lived, culturallevel and the transformative ideological practices, whether those of Metho-dist preachers or of radical journalists. For such insights to become fullyavailable they would have to be stated more abstractly, or generally.. . .Theirrelation to a more general debate about, say, culture and ideology, wouldhave to be explored and a specifically theoretical contribution developedfrom them. . .. A work of this stature ought to produce theory.

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See Richard Johnson, ‘Three problematics: elements of a theory of working-class culture’, in Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory, ed. JohnClarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson andCCCS, 1979), pp. 201–37 (p. 216).

14. In his major revisionist work of Romantic cultural studies, England in 1819,James Chandler observes: ‘Thompson’s history is now celebrated for havingachieved a powerful sympathetic identification with the energies and hopesof the historical actors who form its subject – and that identification seemsto radiate backward and forward in his narrative from his imaginativereenactment of the radical possibilities of Peterloo in 1819.’ He goes on tonote that Calhoun’s study constituted a primary left critique of ‘this counter-factual speculation on the grounds that it exaggerates the depth of the radicalmovement that stirred Britain in these months’. See James Chandler, Englandin 1819, pp. 20–1; p. 21n.

15. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle, p. 4.16. See Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 138.17. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle, p. 49.18. In his Preface, Calhoun argues that ‘traditional communities were the crucial

social foundation for radical collective action’, with the activities of populistsor ‘reactionary radicals’ providing a key basis for action in the period. He laterelaborates his description of reactionary radicalism:

This populism was radical; it rejected the very foundations on which capi-talist society was being built in England. At the same time, however, themovements of early nineteenth-century workers were reactions to disrup-tions in a traditional way of life, a resistance to new pressures workingagainst the realization of old aspirations. . .. Their radicalism was intrinsi-cally connected to their particular situations in the midst of social and econ-omic transition.

See Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle, pp. xii–xiii; p. 4.

19. A decade after the publication of The Question of Class Struggle, Calhounwould edit the single most important study to date on the use of the Haber-masian model of the public sphere in the English-speaking academic world.See Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1992).

20. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle, p. 8.21. Ibid., p. 9.22. Ibid., p. 16.23. Ibid.24. Ibid., p. 46.25. Ibid.26. Ibid., p. 37.27. Ibid., p. 38.28. Ibid., p. 99; p. 75.

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29. McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. viii.30. Ibid., pp. vii–viii.31. Ibid., p. ix.32. Ibid. In a conference paper given seven years after the publication of this

Preface, McCalman noticeably retreated from his earlier enthusiasm fordeconstructionist methods. See Iain McCalman, ‘Cultural history and culturalstudies: the linguistic turn five years on’, from the conference ‘ChallengingAustralian History: Discovering New Narratives’, with text available fromthe National Library of Australia website at http://www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Iain_McCalman.html.

33. See Thomas Laqueur, ‘Iain McCalman. Radical Underworld’, American His-torical Review, 95.3 (1990), pp. 820–l (p. 820).

34. See McCalman, ‘Introduction: A Romantic Age Companion’, p. 2.35. Laqueur, ‘Iain McCalman. Radical Underworld’, p. 820.36. See Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An

Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with FrederickLawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 36.

37. See McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 18–25.38. Ibid., p. 21.39. Ibid., p. 22.40. Ibid., p. 99.41. Ibid., p. 117.42. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Pornographic literature plays an important thematic role

within Radical Underworld, providing McCalman with a key link betweenthe worlds of popular politics and crime, and therefore the figure ofWilliam Benbow might constitute a necessary addition to this radical trium-virate. See Radical Underworld, pp. 204–231.

43. George Cannon’s several pseudonymous contributions to the Political Registerbetween 1813 and 1815 were an obvious exception to this. See Radical Under-world, pp. 76–9.

44. Gilmartin, Print Politics, p. 3.45. Ibid.46. Ibid., pp. 1–2.47. Ibid., p. 2.48. Ibid., p. 5.49. Ibid., p. 6.50. Ibid., p. 5.51. Ibid., p. 18.52. Ibid., p. 23.53. Ibid., p. 27.54. Ibid., p. 57.55. Ibid., p. 59.56. Ibid., p. 73.57. Ibid., p. 110.58. Ibid., p. 159.59. Ibid., p. 160.

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60. Ibid., pp. 161–2.61. Hall, ‘Cultural studies: two paradigms’, p. 57.62. For a key example of this early work, see Richard Johnson, ‘Educational policy and

social control in early Victorian England’, Past and Present, 49 (1970), pp. 96–119.63. Richard Johnson, ‘“Really useful knowledge”: radical education and working

class culture’, in Working-Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory, pp. 75–102 (p. 80).

64. Ibid., p. 86; p. 76.65. Ibid., p. 75.66. Ibid., p. 76.67. Ibid.68. A year earlier Johnson published what was to become the most important theor-

etical critique of Thompson’s method in The Making, forcefully articulating thelimitations of its underlying ‘culturalist’ epistemology. See Richard Johnson,‘Thompson, Genovese, and socialist-humanist history’, History WorkshopJournal, 6 (1978), pp. 79–100.

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