Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb - cehum - Universidade do Minho

QUEEN CAROLINE AND THE PRINT CULTURE OF REGENCY RADICALISM
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with a literary quality, oft en undervalued. [4] Th e tone of sophisticated wit
that defi nes the style of the BD is in agreement with the motto of the periodical
– ‘Satire’s my weapon’. Th e Government, the representatives of State
law, the King, and the Italian witnesses at the Queen’s trial were continued
targets of Wooler’s vitriolic criticism. Th e BD [5] was a blend of serious political
journalism, satire, and melodrama with a strong popular appeal.
William Hone (1780-1842) was an autodidact parodist, publisher,
bookseller, antiquarian and journalist, who in collaboration with George
Cruikshank (1792-1878) authored some of the most widely circulated and
infl uential satires printed between 1815 and 1822. [6] Until recently, Hone
was a marginalized fi gure of early nineteenth-century English culture.
Research by Marcus Wood (1994), Joss Marsh (1998), Kyle Grimes (1998a;
2003; 2007), among others, has triggered interest in the authorial, antiquarian,
and publishing work of William Hone, which Anne Bowden (1975)
suggests may amount to about 228 titles, nearly ninety per cent of which in
the period 1815-21.
Th ese ‘voices from below’ (Th ompson, 1993) presented an innovative
vision, discernible in the way the printed word and image were used as
weapons against the established political and cultural authority.
The Queen Caroline affair and the radical periodicals
Taking into account the post-war radical agenda centred on the denunciation
of political corruption and of the inequities of parliamentary representation,
the Queen’s aff air remained an improbable focal point of radical
contention. Th e question asked by the ‘Black Dwarf ’ to the ‘Yellow Bonze
at Japan’: ‘Th ou wilt ask me what I have to do with those things? What the
4 However, recent criticism challenges conventions about early nineteenth-century literature, by
situating it in the larger context of ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature (Jones, 2003: 1-3).
5 In the context of the social agitation of the year 1968, the New Left published, between 1968
and 1972, a political and cultural newspaper, Th e Black Dwarf, which borrowed its name from
Wooler’s periodical. To assert the continuity, the fi rst issue was numbered ‘Vol. 13 nº 1’. In 2008,
the British painter John Hoyland, one of the members of the board of the Black Dwarf in 1968,
wrote an article about this editorial experience in the Guardian 15 March 2008, to be viewed
at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/mar/15/popandrock.pressandpublishing. (accessed
09/08/10).
6 In his review of William Hone, Regency Radical: Selected Writings of William Hone, edited by
Kent and Ewen (2002), Grimes (2007) considers Hone ‘perhaps the best-selling writer in England
during the post-Peterloo and Queen Caroline aff air periods’. For Epstein (1994: 35), Hone
was ‘the greatest radical satirist of the Regency era’.
Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb 163 05-01-2012 09:38:27