Radical Underworld

This highly acclaimed study draws on information from spy reports and contemporary literature to look at English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government Terror of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. The book traces for the first time the history of the underground revolutionary-republican grouping founded by the agrarian reformer Thomas Spence. Challenging conventional distinctions between high and low culture McCalman illuminates the darker more populist sides of Romanticism. Radical Underworld broadens the conventional boundaries of popular politics and culture by exploring a political underworld connected with poverty crime prophetic religion and literary culture.