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

QUEEN CAROLINE AND THE PRINT CULTURE OF REGENCY RADICALISM
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in Sterne’s Tristam Shandy. It is advertised as ‘royal red hot slop, sevenpence
per pail; spooned out every morning at six o’clock, at 153, Fleet-street.
scavengers, sweeps, and others, employed in dirty work, gratefully
partake of this breakfast beverage’ (20). It is a violent attack on extreme
loyalist press and the ‘Constitutional Association’ inscribed in the tradition
of the parodic newspaper. [26] Th e ridicule imposed upon Stoddart can also
symbolise the ridicule of the pretensions to authority of some prominent
fi gures of the cultural establishment.
Hone was the publisher of Th e Printers’ Address to the Queen, And Her
Majesty’s Tribute to the Press, In Answer (BMC 13963), printed by John
Johnson. With 1,345 signatures, it was presented on 11 October by a deputation
of 138 Compositors and Pressmen. Th e illustration (BMC 13947) is a
‘Specimen of the Typographic Art’. Below a careful wood-engraving (21x31
in.) of the Stanhope Press, twelve lines of verse were inset, beginning ‘From
Th ee, O Press! What blessings fl ow!’ Th e Address ends by attributing the
victory of the Queen to the ‘force of Public Opinion, directed and displayed
through the powerful medium of a Free, Uncorrupted, and Incorruptible
British Press’.
In his contribution to the Caroline aff air, Hone did not deviate from
the main radical discourse of opposition. From his satires spring the same
confrontational discourse of Cobbett, Wooler, and Carlile and the same
conviction in the power of the radical press as a liberating force against the
corruption of state.
Th ese are the marks that link Hone with the journalists of the radical
press discussed previously, the more so as Hone edited in 1817 the shortlived
radical periodical Hone’s Reformists’ Register and Weekly Commentary
(1 February 1817-25 October 1817). Regency radicals were a community in
the political and cultural, as well as in the rhetorical sense of the word. Like
Cobbett, Wooler, and Carlile, Hone knew that cultural appropriation could
be an instrument of individual and collective emancipation.
In the preface to Ancient Mysteries Described, Hone stated that in his
pursuit for knowledge he violated the limits that the aristocracy had defi ned
as ‘the scope of knowledge proper for a man of my condition’ (Hone, 1823:
tor Slop, My Uncle Toby, & My Father (Hone, 1815). Th e title reveals the infl uence of Lawrence
Sterne. According to Grimes (1998b), Hone reprinted this pamphlet in 1820 (Buonapartephobia.
Th e Origin of Dr. Slop’s Name) probably because Stoddart had recently formed a conservative
propaganda organization called the ‘Constitutional Association’.
26 In 1819, three parodic newspapers were published: Th e New Daily Advertiser, Th e Quizzical
Gazette Extraordinary, and Th e Rump Chronicle (Wood, 1994: 202).
Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb 177 05-01-2012 09:38:28