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Textual Practice
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Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism,

cultural studies and the radical public sphere
Alex Benchimol

University of Glasgow
Published online: 04 Aug 2006.

To cite this article: Alex Benchimol (2005) Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism, cultural studies and the
radical public sphere, Textual Practice, 19:1, 51-70, DOI: 10.1080/0950236042000329645
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236042000329645

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Textual Practice 19(1), 2005, 5170

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Remaking the Romantic period: cultural materialism,

cultural studies and the radical public sphere

Romantic period studies, as it is now practiced from Canberra to

Cambridge and Los Angeles to London, is a field that has been experiencing something of a revolution in its aims and methods over the past two
decades, despite the lack of a coherent theoretical narrative to accompany
this global academic development.1 The most conspicuous sign of this
transformed intellectual agenda from a preoccupation with poetictextualist issues to an eclectic approach that borrows as much from
developments in cultural studies, social history and critical theory as
from literary criticism was the publication in 1999 of a major scholarly
companion on the period that set as one of its organizing aims the rediscovery of neglected historical figures and events that would in turn lead to
a shifting of our angles of vision.2 The manner in which An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age established itself so rapidly as a standard reference source illustrates merely the endpoint of a process of intellectual
consolidation in the field; a process initiated and sustained over twenty
years through the publication of clusters of ground-breaking studies by
scholars using methodologies that continuously challenged the critical
orthodoxy of Romanticist literary scholarship.3
Moreover, the companions attempt to highlight the fiery debates,
crushing commercial pressures, and chance events of a historical period
that was felt to be seething with conflict not only marks out the cultural
materialist aspects of the project as likewise its deliberately broad conception of cultural production in the period but also underlines the
ideological debt that this revisionist formation in Romantic period
studies owes to an older, more explicitly politicized form of scholarship.4
British Marxist cultural studies was an academic movement that first flowered in the 1960s, became institutionalized in the 1970s, and began to
fade under the dominant ideological onslaught of Thatcherism in the
1980s just when the current movement in Romantic period studies was
emerging.5 In the absence of any contemporary narratives exploring how
Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0950236042000329645

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the relationship between these two academic formations has led to a new
focus on the spaces of cultural resistance in the period embodied conceptually in the key historical-theoretical space of the radical public sphere it
may be worth mapping the origins, outlines and trajectories of this new
cultural materialist agenda in Romantic period studies.
Academic treatises on methodology, whether polemical, speculative
or analytical, have proven the most illuminating when general forms of
disciplinary critique are united with a critical focus on those episodes of
intellectual history that mark the development of new fields of study
within disciplines. In these writings, for reasons of historical perspective,
discrete cultural analysis is often subordinated in the imperative to classify
wider scholarly trends. The following essay is no different. Unlike the particular cultural materialist formation that it traces, this article does not
attempt to engage in any detailed form of cultural analysis, but rather
seeks to demonstrate links between two academic traditions of cultural
analysis British cultural studies and Romantic period studies that,
when properly understood, may perhaps shed new light on the role the
former tradition continues to play in the making of the latter, with reference to three key texts as case studies.
This kind of disciplinary mapping is necessary in part because the new
work in Romantic period studies lacks the foundational narrative that Alan
Sinfield and Jonathan Dollimore provided for the more widely known formation of cultural materialism in Renaissance studies in their seminal 1985
essay collection Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism. 6
Building upon Raymond Williams concept of cultural materialism as a
theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production
within historical materialism,7 Dollimore and Sinfield set out the basic
parameters for cultural materialist practice in the Renaissance:
our belief is that a combination of historical context, theoretical
method, political commitment and textual analysis offers the strongest
challenge and has already contributed substantial work. Historical
context undermines the transcendent significance traditionally
accorded to the literary text and allows us to recover its histories; theoretical method detaches the text from immanent criticism which seeks
only to reproduce it in its own terms; socialist and feminist commitment confronts the conservative categories in which most criticism has
hitherto been conducted; textual analysis locates the critique of traditional approaches where it cannot be ignored.8
In the explicitness of the political investments it makes, the cultural
materialist agenda outlined here is a contemporary manifestation of the
tradition of ethical scholarship on the intellectual Left that animated the

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Alex Benchimol Remaking the Romantic period

first flowering of British cultural studies. Cultural materialism, as

Dollimore and Sinfield write, registers its commitment to the transformation of a social order which exploits people on grounds of race, gender and
class.9 Its focus on a materialist practice of textual analysis, as Sinfield
articulated in a later defence of the cultural materialist method, forces
scholars to engage with the histories and social conditions in which
reading and writing has occurred and may occur.10 In this it also
betrays 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 cultural texts as artefacts of cultural struggle. It is no criticism of the essays in
Political Shakespeare to observe that this ambitious theoretical agenda set by
Dollimore and Sinfield is yet to be fully realized. Indeed, judging by the
range of contributions in the collection that went on to become classic
illustrations of the new work in Renaissance studies, one would think
that the cultural materialist project outlined by Dollimore and Sinfield
could have been neatly extended to include other key periods in British cultural history with similarly insular, ideologically stifling critical traditions
defining the contemporary terms of scholarly practice, not least the
Romantic period. The story of the cultural materialist formation in
Romantic period studies is, however, more complex.11
The transformative impact of E. P. Thompsons seminal text of
Marxist cultural studies, The Making of the English Working Class
(1963), on the practice of historiography in the English-speaking world
is now widely acknowledged. The texts influence on the terms of debate
in Romantic period studies is less familiar, not least because of the
widely held perception that Thompson, as part of his revisionist historical
project, was more concerned with highlighting the neglected contexts of
radical political culture in the period than in attempting to situate radical
cultural practices in relation to the elite intellectual world of the major
Romantic poets more familiar to literary scholars. Another reason for
Thompsons work being overlooked as a key foundational text in Romantic
period studies was the attempt by professional critics to discipline the
new academic formation in strictly literary terms. This came about primarily through the efforts of critics based in English departments who sought
to appropriate the scholarship inspired by The Making as merely a useful
empirical supplement to the broader narrative of a largely unrevised traditional literary history, ignoring the implicit challenge this scholarship
posed to orthodox critical practices in the discipline. This attempt at neutralization through studied ignorance is not surprising. As Sinfield has
rightly observed, cultural materialism embarrasses Englit. . . by requiring
knowledges and techniques that we scarcely possess, or even know how
to discover with historiographical knowledge being perhaps the most

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fundamental (and most embarrassing) lack for a generation of literary

scholars conditioned to believe in their practical competence in the
writing of cultural history.12 The final and most important reason for
the marginalization of Thompsons influence on this new academic formation may be found in the peculiarly anti-theoretical impulses of
Thompson himself; an intellectual prejudice that prevented him from adequately conceptualizing the cultural space he described so vividly in The
Making which was to become so crucial for the subsequent mapping of
the radical public sphere in some of the key works of Romantic period
studies.13
The first Thompsonian work of Romantic period studies that engages
constructively with the narrative from The Making, while in some very
important ways challenging it, was produced not by a literary critic but
an historical sociologist. Craig Calhouns The Question of Class Struggle:
Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution
(1982) takes issue with the social homogeneity and cultural holism of
Thompsons narrative of popular radicalism and instead emphasizes the
ideological complexity of plebeian political culture during the early nineteenth century.14 As part of this re-examination of what Calhoun calls
the theoretical and empirical basis of Thompsons great work, The Question of Class Struggle develops what amounts to a cultural materialist
reading of those radical social formations which rose up in opposition to
industrial capitalism.15 Indeed, in his theoretical critique of Thompsons
methodology, Calhoun essentially restates Raymond Williams plea for a
critical method that restores the whole social material process to the
centre 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 ultimately
determined by the stage of social and economic development . . . .
Thompsons argument depends considerably on the notion of the
unequal development of different aspects of this social formation,
so that class could develop culturally in advance of social or economic definition.17
In his recasting of Thompsons radical artisans as more socially
specific reactionary radicals,18 Calhoun also provides the basic outline
of a new cultural concept for the period: the radical public sphere.19 In
a key illustration of his cultural materialist method, Calhoun presents
this cultural space as fundamentally constitutive of the wider political identity of these reactionary radicals: Reading Jacobin literature and listening
to oral traditions through the filters of their own attachments to communities 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 communities in which they lived and the concrete demands of their immediate
situations economic and social.21 Calhoun argues that Thompsons narrative, though rich in its description of a shared popular culture of rituals
and customary rights, ignores the specific manner in which the similar
experiences of the radicals were transformed into shared experiences; a
dynamic process in which their social rituals became part of the larger
articulation of a vital and wide-reaching symbolic culture.22
Crucially for later scholars of the radical public sphere, Calhoun
describes these rituals as communicative activities including a wide
variety of symbolic content.23 In his conceptual revision of Thompsons
thesis from The Making, Calhoun argues that this new kind of cultural
praxis was deployed by a threatened workforce as part of its collective
defence of the residual moral economy of the early nineteenth century.
Radical cultural activities became a key means of protecting the material
web of social relations which situates individuals in their communities
and in the world at large.24 According to Calhoun, Kinship bonds, informal meetings in public houses and the ability of many artisans to conduct
conversations at work helped to give an enduring basis to collective action
which did not have to be formally defined or mobilized on each new
occasion.25 For Calhoun, the problematic progression in Thompsons
narrative from an articulate Jacobinism of the late eighteenth century to
a fully formed industrial working-class consciousness of the 1830s
covered a period when cultural values were being defined in new social
contexts and when an ideology of popular resistance, based in part on
Jacobinism, was being developed in the minds of artisans, outworkers,
craftsmen, shopkeepers, journalists, and what we might now call intellectuals.26 For these participants in the new cultural space of the radical
public sphere, this ideology was embedded in their minds and in certain
crucial writings where it could be held on to for later application.27
So, from Thompsons broad overview of popular cultural resistance
in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a more specific and
carefully focused cultural narrative emerges in Calhouns study, one in
which the radical movements key modes of political activity may be
appreciated in all their rich ideological hybridity and symbolism. The Question of Class Struggle was a key intermediate text in the development of
Romantic period studies not only for the conceptual sophistication in
which it treated radical cultural activity of the time, but also for its
initial mapping of that activity as part of a larger radical public sphere
based, in different ways, upon the speeches and critical writings of mainstream radical reformers such as William Cobbett, T. J. Wooler and
Henry Hunt, and the more inchoate efforts of a London radical

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underground consisting of agrarian socialists (among the Spenceans in particular), opportunistic adventurers bent on coup detat, old Jacobins holding
to the notion that London could in 1816 or thereabouts play the role of Paris
in 1789, and a parcel of less clearly defined partisans.28 This latter radical
phenomenon was explored in all its complexity and detail by a different
kind of scholar this one a cultural historian based in Australia who
would provide Romantic period studies with another crucial narrative
based upon an imaginative engagement with Thompsons landmark study.
Iain McCalmans Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries And
Pornographers In London, 1795 1840 (1988) vividly re-creates the cultural
lifeworld surrounding one of the most marginal figures in Thompsons
narrative, the agrarian socialist, millenarian prophet and radical Enlightenment theorist Thomas Spence. The methodological inventiveness displayed in McCalmans evocation of the rich profusion of discourses,
narratives and symbols of the early nineteenth-century London radical
underground was such that he quickly established himself at the forefront
of the Romantic period studies movement, later acting as general editor of
what would become its most obvious collective manifestation in reference
form, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (1999). McCalman
confirmed his affiliation with the new critical developments in the field
in a 1993 Preface to Radical Underworld. In a rather explicit attempt at
retrospective contextualization, he writes with an informed awareness of
his studys relationship to what he calls the new historicist challenge to
canonical versions of Romanticism.29 Indeed, he confesses that the
study would have had both a wider resonance and a greater theoretical
interest had I known more of the work of such scholars as Marilyn
Butler and Jerome J. McGann within Romantic studies, or Stephen
Greenblatt within the Renaissance period.30
What distinguishes McCalmans study as a major work of Romantic
period cultural materialism is its remarkable reconstruction of an overlooked radical subculture of the time. Much like Thompson before him,
he develops a compelling narrative of diverse plebeian cultural practices
through a dedicated trawl of British government archives. However, it is
the imaginative extrapolation from these official sources that gives the
study its power as an academic counter-cultural narrative in its own
right, 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, McCalman
makes some important methodological recommendations based on his
study, arguing that cultural historians of the period must be alert to disguised motives, significant absences and encoded rhetorical strategies as
well 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 and

even vendor, and finally, that they must expect diverse, aberrant and contradictory textual reception in accordance with the social and psychological
attributes of reader and reading community.32 In short, cultural historians
and by clear implication in his Preface, literary critics as well should
begin to seriously engage with the complex and shifting cultural meanings
produced in the radical public sphere of the time.
A prominent contemporary review of Radical Underworld begins by
distinguishing McCalmans subject from that of Thompsons in The
Making with the observation that unlike the generally respectable,
secular, rationalist tradition mapped by Thompson, McCalman writes
of another world.33 This is true in one sense but seems to miss the
point in another. What McCalman does in Radical Underworld, to
adapt a notable turn of phrase from his introduction to An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, is to shift the angles of vision of Thompsons
more broadly focused study.34 McCalman both enlarges the narrative
focus from The Making to include the rich metropolitan cultural lifeworld
of the London radical underground, and narrows it as well, detailing this
London underworld through a series of compelling micro-historical narratives. More significant still, he re-emphasizes the social contexts of
Romantic period radicalism, illustrating the role played by the Jacobin
ultra-radicals described by Thompson in the development of a complex
public sphere complete with its own distinctive sites of discourse and cultures of print. As the review notes, McCalman provides a revisionist argument for the existence and importance of a heretofore slighted strain of
British plebeian radicalism.35 However, it is the way McCalman
expands the cultural contexts of British plebeian radicalism his incorporation of the morally transgressive radical other into the narrative first
initiated by Thompson that makes his book, much like Calhouns
before it, such an important illustration of how the new formation in
Romantic period studies has its roots in imaginative revisions of the
central narrative of cultural resistance provided by the British Marxist cultural studies tradition.
The studys significance may also be measured by the way it expands
the conceptual and cultural parameters of the radical public sphere.
Turning away from the normative aims of Thompson and Calhoun in
their respective treatments of the intellectual culture of the radical movement, McCalman brings the notion of a counter-culture in the modern
sense to his description of Romantic period dissidence. McCalmans
radical underworld, with its vividly evoked tavern debating clubs,
popular pornography and blasphemous chapels, provides contemporary
readers with a recognizably modern cultural geography through which to
relate 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 public

sphere. Interestingly, in its re-creation of a morally anarchic cultural space
where the social hierarchies of the outside world are bracketed during the
fluid time of radical sociability in the taverns, McCalmans radical underworld most resembles the original Habermasian model of the liberal public
sphere where social intercourse disregarded status altogether.36 However,
for cultural historians and other scholars of early nineteenth-century radicalism, Radical Underworld will be appreciated chiefly for its ability to map
a coherent cultural space out of what was thought to be the unnavigable
political volatility of the Spencean underground.
McCalmans Spencean Jacobin underground is in many respects
the missing transitional cultural space linking the Jacobin public sphere
of the London Corresponding Society mapped by Thompson to the emerging periodical-based plebeian public sphere of the early nineteenth
century described by Calhoun, and later developed in more conceptual
detail by Kevin Gilmartin.37 McCalman describes the tavern free-andeasy the convivial debating clubs where members of the original Spensonian Society gathered as a feature of the Jacobin movement from the
outset which between 1798 and 1803 became its dominant form.38
These alehouse clubs proved to be ideally suited to the semi-covert organizational activities of the Spencean underground during the politically
repressive first decade and a half of the nineteenth century. In this
variant of the radical public sphere the outlines of a genuinely popular political counter-culture developed where Members of the [Spencean] circle
composed, sang and printed Spencean songs to the tune of popular folk
ballads. . . . [D]ebated Spences land plan and other topics and circulated
tracts, broadsheets, posters, poems and metal tokens advertising Spences
plan.39 Under the leadership of Thomas Evans, the Society of Spencean
Philanthropists the successor to the Spensonian Society developed a
cultural space that combined elements drawn from the traditional plebeian free-and-easy, the more formal radical debating club, the Jacobinstyle political society and the trades or benefit lodge.40 These Spencean
gatherings were also key sites for the dissemination of radical knowledge,
where numbers of Cobbetts Political Register and T. J. Woolers Black
Dwarf were read out occasionally for those unable to read or afford
publications.41
Despite this overlap with the journalism of two central postwar radical
intellectuals, McCalmans narrative essentially pivots around three representative figures of the ultra-radical underground and their associations.
The London Corresponding Society veteran and artisan-activist
Evans, the black itinerant tailor and radical Methodist preacher Robert
Wedderburn, and the middle-class lawyer, radical philosopher and perennial 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, their

shared experience in the Spencean society, these three occupied the
fringes of a larger radical public sphere whose more mainstream participants like those in the rival Hampden Clubs benefited from the steadying cultural presence and continuity provided by the leading postwar
radical 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 ideologically unstable texts. It would take another scholar, an American literary
historian with more direct connections to the discipline of English than
McCalman, to properly assess the cultural and conceptual value of the
mainstream periodical-based radical public sphere.
Kevin Gilmartins 1996 study Print Politics: The Press and Radical
Opposition in Early-Nineteenth Century England is, as he puts it in the
Introduction, pitched towards the upper reaches of the radical underworld mapped by Iain McCalman.44 Gilmartins work may be distinguished
from McCalmans Radical Underworld and from Calhouns study as
well in more than this one respect. Most specifically, it is the only one
of the three texts under discussion to be published after Jurgen Habermas
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was translated into English in
1989, and hence the only one to use the conceptual term of the public
sphere to describe the cultural activities of its subjects. Not surprisingly,
because of this theoretical investment in the public sphere model, Print
Politics is explicit in its articulation of the utility of the concept for the
study of media-based radical cultural practices. Gilmartin writes in his
Introduction that beyond romantic studies, theories of the public sphere
would seem to offer a promising framework for a study of the language,
organization, and public profile of the radical movement in print.45 His
adaptation of the original Habermasian model of the bourgeois public
sphere into what he calls a plebeian counterpublic sphere reveals a sophisticated understanding both of the history and uses of the concept in
recent academic contexts, as well as the wider politics of contemporary cultural theory. Perhaps most importantly, in its theoretical projection of the
print strategies of some of the leading intellectuals of the radical movement
as explicitly counter-hegemonic cultural practices, Gilmartins plebeian
counterpublic sphere functions as a crucial conceptual bridge between
Calhoun and McCalmans studies, linking the radical populist ideology
of intellectual leaders such as Wooler and Cobbett discussed in
The Question of Class Struggle with the notion of an active lifeworld of
counter-cultural resistance from Radical Underworld. In this respect,
Gilmartins book may be viewed as the most evolved example of the
particular Thompsonian fraction within Romantic period studies traced
here.

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Indeed, Gilmartin makes a clear effort in the Introduction to Print Politics to situate his study within the wider formation of Romantic period
studies. This revealing gesture of affiliation is similar to McCalmans
attempt at self-contextualization in the 1993 Preface to Radical Underworld
and reflects the growing intellectual self-awareness of this academic movement in the mid to late 1990s. Gilmartin writes:
Recent initiatives in romantic studies, or what we should perhaps
learn to call romantic period studies, have informed the development
of this book. Where a first wave of romantic new historicism tended
to emphasize the way romantic poetry repressed, displaced, or idealized political and historical content, more recent work has moved
beyond the romantic canon and attended to positive rather than
negative 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 as
model examples, with the arguments and methodology of the former
finding a particular echo in Print Politics. A further reflection of the movements maturity is illustrated by the specificity with which Gilmartin is able
to locate his work within Romantic period studies. Citing Anne Janowitzs
notion of plebeian studies, Gilmartin suggests that his book belongs
within this particular subcategory of the formation, alongside such
pioneering work as Jon Mees Dangerous Enthusiasm (1992) and David
Worralls Radical Culture (1992). Gilmartin argues that this subfield
could be extended to include recent work on popular radical culture by
Jon Klancher, Michael Scrivener, Marcus Wood, Paul Thomas Murphy,
and Leonora Nattrass, adding rather significantly for the wider argument of this essay that all this work could be traced back to the formative influences of Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, and was part
of the collective recent effort that introduced romanticist scholarship to
the broader concerns of cultural studies.47
One of the principal manifestations of this ideological inheritance
from the Marxist cultural studies tradition in Print Politics may be found
in Gilmartins projection of radical print culture as a key practice of resistance in the early nineteenth century. For leading intellectuals of the
plebeian counterpublic sphere such as Cobbett, Wooler and Richard
Carlile, the overriding aim of their journalism was to confront the multiple
forms of political corruption and repression with compelling counterhegemonic cultural narratives: Notions of a counterpublic and of counterpublicity do help account for the oppositional imperative behind a reform
movement that undertook to write, speak, organize, and act against corrupt
institutions and practices. Strict polarization was among the movements

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first principles.48 However, what makes Gilmartins conception of the

radical counterpublic sphere so relevant to contemporary debates in
fields such as social theory and cultural history is how this negative engagement with corruption functions beyond a merely negative role and may
serve as a normative theory for radical publicity in and of itself.49 In
addition to this obvious theoretical utility, Gilmartins critical method in
Print Politics also significantly advances the development of cultural materialist practice in Romantic period studies with its insistence that a real
understanding of the radical press requires going beyond standard textualist forms of analysis to engage with the wider institutional complexity of
radical print culture. He argues that the popular radical public was both
representation and practice, elusive phantom and material body, producing a complex form of political protest articulated through a rich assortment of rhetorical strategies and institutional practices.50
Early in the study Gilmartin outlines the basic structure of radical discourse in the period, framing the ways in which a compelling narrative of
popular rights emerged in fundamental opposition to the ideologically
bankrupt disputes between competing Tory and Whig political
programmes. This is a story that has been told before, perhaps most
famously by Thompson, but in Print Politics these radical arguments are
examined in all their revealing and sometimes contradictory detail, uncovering a diverse assemblage of intellectual practices with which the radical
movement exercised the deliberative as well as the critical function of a
political public sphere.51 Gilmartins explication suggests the ways in
which this radical movement engaged in a process of differentiation with
other publics over control of the very basis of intellectual protest at the
time: the idea of an organized public. He writes: The radical press was
from the outset saturated with distinctions among publics, peoples, and
opinions, as it struggled with its enemies over control of these empowering
terms.52 An ongoing struggle over the material tools of intellectual protest
also helped to encourage the movements underlying didacticism it perceived itself to be foremost an instrument of ideological instruction to a
nascent political public unjustly excluded from the formal institutions of
political power. Gilmartin argues that what developed in radical discourse
was thus a limited and provisional version of the fourth estate, compatible
with the movements remedial self-image: the oppositional press could
provide a transitional instrument through which the people reclaimed
the authority in the House of Commons denied them by corruption.53
This surrogate model of civil society constructed by publicists such as
Cobbett, Wooler and Carlile helped to define the extra-textual nature of
radical discourse. The speeches and debates included in the leading
radical weeklies encouraged collective processes of dissemination, helping
to materialize in the many radical micro-communities scattered across

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the country the larger communitarian ideal argued for in radical plebeian
cultural discourse.
Another key aspect of Gilmartins conception of the counterpublic
sphere in Print Politics is his mapping of an associated politics of countersystem to engage with the multiple levels of corruption practiced by the
British state of the early nineteenth century. As part of its confrontation
with a corrupt system of totalitarian proportions, the counterpublic
sphere developed what he calls a radical countersystem that sought to
appropriate and mock the authority of a system that was not easily
transcended or superseded.54 Such a strategy of engagement necessitated
a flexible deployment of political language; one that seldom achieved the
ideological clarity of later radical movements but instead reflected, and
sought to highlight, the vicissitudes of periodical production in a deeply
unstable and repressive intellectual environment. As Gilmartin puts it,
A dialectically engaged radical opposition was keen to trace its own contradictions to the internal contradictions of a corrupt system.55
The print culture of this counterpublic sphere also challenges certain
fundamental assumptions about Romanticist literary practice and theories
of authorship during the period. The combined roles of author, editor,
printer and publisher embodied in the leading radical intellectuals of the
early nineteenth century requires a more complex mode of cultural analysis
than the orthodox textual approach favoured by much Romanticist criticism. Gilmartins assessment of radical authorship in Print Politics gives
a materialist inflection to the hallowed (and often politically disabling)
Romanticist concept of the literary imagination, encouraging a renewed
focus on issues of cultural praxis. An example of this may be found in
his account of the intellectual practice of the journalist and radical leader
T. J. Wooler: As author, printer, and publisher, he was wholly at home
in the press. Imagination led immediately and effortlessly into print
expression. . . . [A]utomatic writing with a seditious edge played out ambiguities within radical print culture, since it joined a materialist account of
textual production . . . with a more idealist, even romantic construction of
print authority.56 Citing the inadequacy of purely textual modes of critical
analysis, Gilmartin underlines the social quality of radical print culture:
To explain the unstamped press according to some internal logic or
authorial source would be to overlook the supportive role played by
readers, publishers, and distributors, and the hostile contribution of
lawyers, legislators, and the conservative press.57
If one of the key revisionist aspects of Radical Underworld was the cultural significance it attributes to previously marginalized figures such as
Evans, Wedderburn and Cannon, a similar act in Print Politics would be
Gilmartins reconsideration of the radical public spheres most dominant
and idiosyncratic voice: William Cobbett. Following the general thesis

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of the book, Cobbetts many contradictory intellectual positions are portrayed as a consequence of his engagement with the ideological instability
of the wider system of early nineteenth-century capitalism. As Gilmartin
puts it, Cobbett set out to describe and account for a corrupt system that
already existed, in order to elicit its contradictions and encourage the
popular resentment that would hasten its downfall.58 The elusive and
protean target of Cobbetts social criticism changing from the associated
and interlocking tyranny of Old Corruption in the first decade of the
nineteenth century to the nascent commercial-industrial system referred
to as THE THING in his Rural Rides series of the 1820s reflected
the contradictory dynamic of an intellectual project that involved a simultaneous urge towards simplicity and complexity where he constantly
revised his political analysis in the face of shifting interests and alliances
within the system.59 These intellectual tactics were part of a wider strategy
of counter-systematic analysis that had to penetrate misleading surfaces to
disclose an underlying structure.60
Given the sophistication of this analysis of Cobbetts intellectual practice, it is understandable that Print Politics has had its most immediate and
apparent impact on the rapidly developing subfield of Cobbett studies.
Perhaps ironically for a text by the only literary scholar included in this
article, its more important accomplishment in a disciplinary sense may
be to help dislodge the study of Romantic period culture out of its cosy
nook in university English departments and to encourage further engagements with its practices by scholars from the fields of intellectual history,
social theory and cultural studies. In this respect Gilmartins book may
be viewed as the proper culmination of the development of cultural materialist practice traced in this article, and, as such, an exemplary initial work
in the attempt to understand the complex social history of intellectual and
cultural practices in the early nineteenth century.
As Stuart Hall put it almost twenty-five years ago in what became the
most influential theoretical mapping of British cultural studies, In serious,
critical intellectual work, there are no absolute beginnings and few
unbroken continuities. What we find, instead, he writes, is an untidy
but characteristic unevenness of development.61 The attempt here to
trace the three studies on the radical public sphere of the Romantic
period 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 Thompsons seminal work. To underline this unevenness of development linking
Romantic period cultural materialism to the British cultural studies tradition, I will conclude by interrupting the trajectory of influence, as it
were, through a brief examination of an essay on the radical public
sphere taken from the earlier academic narrative.

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Like much of his key early work in Marxist cultural historiography,

Richard Johnsons 1979 essay, Really useful knowledge: radical education and working class culture, 17901848, examines the development
of popular education as a principal site of cultural conflict in the early nineteenth century.62 What strikes current readers of the article is how, almost
twenty years before the publication of Print Politics, it maps a cultural space
that manages to encompass the radical public sphere concept outlined by
Calhoun, expanded in McCalmans study and delineated with such theoretical precision in Gilmartins text. In the article Johnson describes how the
many discrete radical intellectual communities of the early nineteenth
century developed into a coherent public sphere with overriding normative
aims:
radicals made their own cultural inventions. These included the
various kinds of communal reading and discussion groups, the facilities for newspapers in pub, coffee house or reading room, the broader
cultural politics of Chartist or Owenite branch-life, the institution of
the travelling lecturer who, often indistinguishable from missionary
or demagogue, toured the radical centres, and, above all, the radical
press, 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 of
the nineteenth century beginning with the Jacobin public sphere of the
1790s and its plebeian successor centred around Cobbetts prolific journalism as essentially transformative and counter-hegemonic cultural formations.64 The essay contends that the radical press remains the
obvious route of entry into popular educational practices and dilemmas;
an argument with important implications for later scholars of the radical
public sphere who would represent the print practices of leading plebeian
intellectuals such as Spence, Cobbett and Wooler as powerful acts of ideological transmission to their wider publics.65
According to Johnson, radical intellectual leaders played a pivotal role
in this new form of cultural community, a role that was part mediation or
expression of some popular feelings, and part a forming or education of
them.66 This form of pedagogical praxis developed by the leading radical
intellectuals was featured as part of a larger internal debate within the
radical public sphere, a debate that viewed the education of the radical
public with the utmost seriousness as a political strategy or as a means
of changing the world.67
Johnsons work was viewed at the time as the most compelling revision of the thesis from The Making, constituting a key problematization
of the cultural holism intrinsic to Thompsons 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 Johnsons appointment as Director of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) a year after the
essays publication. These related developments coincided with the increasing profile of cultural materialism in many ways a functional synthesis of
the two paradigms as the primary theoretical export of British cultural
studies to distinct but often associated fields such as English and cultural
history in the 1980s, culminating in the appearance of Political Shakespeare
in 1985. The unacknowledged fact that, three years prior to the publication of Dollimore and Sinfields collection, The Question of Class Struggle
had both challenged and revised key aspects of Thompsons seminal study
in what amounted to a cultural materialist reading of popular cultural practices in the early nineteenth century, exposes a crucial gap in the recent
intellectual history of radical Anglo-American academic practice. This
lost theoretical narrative, supplemented in the late 1980s and mid1990s by the revisionist work on the radical public sphere of the Romantic
period traced in this article, must be recovered before we can adequately
assess the value of cultural materialism as one of the most consistently
useful 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 influenced the direction of this new formation in the field, most notably Jerome
McGanns The Romantic Ideology in 1983. However, McGanns powerful
polemic against the stifling ideological consensus that existed among
leading Romanticist critics was intended to be more of a statement of
general intellectual intent than a blueprint for the revisionist theoretical and
historicist 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 Oxford
Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776 1832, ed. Iain
McCalman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. l 11 (p. 2). I
engage more fully with the disciplinary implications of this text in a recent
review. See Alex Benchimol, On An Oxford Companion to the Romantic
Age, 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 and
Its Background, 17601830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Craig
Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular

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4.

5.

6.
7.

8.
9.
10.
11.

66

Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); Jon

Klancher, 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, 17901820 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992); Jon Mee, Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the
Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992);
Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early
Nineteenth-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 Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
McCalman, Introduction: A Romantic age Companion, p. 2. In a recent
accounting of An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age Emma Mason
observed that its open and productive use of the term Romantic age and
the broad conception of cultural practices implied in the title indicate the cultural materialist origins of the project. See Emma Mason, The nineteenth
century: the Romantic period: general, in The Years Work in English
Studies, vol. 80, ed. William Baker and Kenneth Womack (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2001), pp. 42855 (p. 428).
There are a number of excellent accounts of these developments in the British
Marxist cultural studies tradition. For the two most influential narratives from
within the tradition, see Stuart Hall, Cultural studies: two paradigms, Media,
Culture and Society, 2 (1980), pp. 57 72; and Richard Johnson, What is cultural studies anyway?, Social Text, 16 (1987), pp. 38 80. For the most incisive narrative from without, see Dennis Dworkin, Cultural Marxism in
Postwar Britain: History, the New Left and the Origins of Cultural Studies
(Durham, N. C. Duke University Press, 1997).
See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New
Essays in Cultural Materialism (2nd edn) (Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 1994 [1985]).
See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 5. Later in the study he developed this definition into
what he calls a Marxist cultural sociology that is recognizable, in its simplest
outlines, in studies of different types of institution and formation in cultural
production and distribution, and in the linking of these within whole social
material processes. See Marxism and Literature, p. 138.
Dollimore and Sinfield, Political Shakespeare, p. vii.
Ibid., p. viii.
Alan Sinfield, The persistence of Englit., in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan
Sinfield, Culture and textuality: debating cultural materialism, Textual Practice, 4 (1990), pp. 91100 (p. 97).
Although it is a well-rehearsed point of discussion in theoretical circles, this
explication of the cultural materialist agenda brings up inevitable comparisons

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with the aims and methods of new historicist scholarship. Indeed, like much
of the innovative work on the Renaissance in Political Shakespeare, there are
enough points of common theoretical and methodological interest that it
may be more constructive to describe the major works of Romantic period
studies as both cultural materialist and new historicist, with only differences
concerning the articulation of political agency providing a useful basis for
differentiation. Dollimores introduction to Political Shakespeare cites this
issue as a defining point of difference between the two critical approaches:

According to Marx, men and women make their own history but not in conditions of their own choosing. Perhaps the most significant divergence
within cultural analysis is that between those who concentrate on culture
as this making of history, and those who concentrate on the unchosen conditions which constrain and inform that process of making. The former
allows much to human agency, and tends to privilege human experience;
the latter concentrates on the formative power of social and ideological
structures which are both prior to experience and in some sense determining
of it, and so opens up the whole question of autonomy. (Dollimore, Introduction: Shakespeare, cultural materialism and the new historicism, p. 3)

For other discussions of the differences between new historicism and cultural
materialism, see Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and
Cultural Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), pp. 1846;
and John Brannigan, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (New York:
Macmillan, 1998), pp. 810. Although clearly not a formal debate between
the two theoretical formations, the productive exchange in the pages of this
journal between Catherine Belsey and Dollimore and Sinfield about cultural
materialist practice helped to clarify some of the most salient differences. See
Catherine Belsey, Towards cultural history in theory and practice, Textual
Practice, 3 (1989), pp. 15972; and Dollimore and Sinfield, Culture and
textuality: debating cultural materialism, Textual Practice, 4 (1990), pp. 91100.
12. Sinfield, Culture and textuality, p. 98.
13. Richard Johnson has argued that Thompsons study remains a work whose
findings are seriously under-exploited by the author himself. He writes of
The Making:

It is full of profound insights about the relations between the lived, cultural
level and the transformative ideological practices, whether those of Methodist preachers or of radical journalists. For such insights to become fully
available they would have to be stated more abstractly, or generally.. . .Their
relation to a more general debate about, say, culture and ideology, would
have to be explored and a specifically theoretical contribution developed
from them. . .. A work of this stature ought to produce theory.

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14.

15.
16.
17.
18.

See Richard Johnson, Three problematics: elements of a theory of workingclass culture, in Working Class Culture: Studies in history and theory, ed. John
Clarke, Chas Critcher and Richard Johnson (London: Hutchinson and
CCCS, 1979), pp. 20137 (p. 216).
In his major revisionist work of Romantic cultural studies, England in 1819,
James Chandler observes: Thompsons history is now celebrated for having
achieved a powerful sympathetic identification with the energies and hopes
of the historical actors who form its subject and that identification seems
to radiate backward and forward in his narrative from his imaginative
reenactment of the radical possibilities of Peterloo in 1819. He goes on to
note that Calhouns study constituted a primary left critique of this counterfactual speculation on the grounds that it exaggerates the depth of the radical
movement that stirred Britain in these months. See James Chandler, England
in 1819, pp. 20 1; p. 21n.
Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle, p. 4.
See Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 138.
Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle, p. 49.
In his Preface, Calhoun argues that traditional communities were the crucial
social foundation for radical collective action, with the activities of populists
or reactionary radicals providing a key basis for action in the period. He later
elaborates his description of reactionary radicalism:
This populism was radical; it rejected the very foundations on which capitalist society was being built in England. At the same time, however, the
movements of early nineteenth-century workers were reactions to disruptions in a traditional way of life, a resistance to new pressures working
against the realization of old aspirations. . .. Their radicalism was intrinsically connected to their particular situations in the midst of social and economic 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, Calhoun
would edit the single most important study to date on the use of the Habermasian 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.
30.
31.
32.

33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.

43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.

McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. viii.

Ibid., pp. vii viii.
Ibid., p. ix.
Ibid. In a conference paper given seven years after the publication of this
Preface, McCalman noticeably retreated from his earlier enthusiasm for
deconstructionist methods. See Iain McCalman, Cultural history and cultural
studies: the linguistic turn five years on, from the conference Challenging
Australian History: Discovering New Narratives, with text available from
the National Library of Australia website at http://www.nla.gov.au/events/
history/papers/Iain_McCalman.html.
See Thomas Laqueur, Iain McCalman. Radical Underworld, American Historical Review, 95.3 (1990), pp. 820l (p. 820).
See McCalman, Introduction: A Romantic Age Companion, p. 2.
Laqueur, Iain McCalman. Radical Underworld, p. 820.
See Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An
Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick
Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 36.
See McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 1825.
Ibid., p. 21.
Ibid., p. 22.
Ibid., p. 99.
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., pp. 34. Pornographic literature plays an important thematic role
within Radical Underworld, providing McCalman with a key link between
the worlds of popular politics and crime, and therefore the figure of
William Benbow might constitute a necessary addition to this radical triumvirate. See Radical Underworld, pp. 204231.
George Cannons several pseudonymous contributions to the Political Register
between 1813 and 1815 were an obvious exception to this. See Radical Underworld, pp. 76 9.
Gilmartin, Print Politics, p. 3.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 1 2.
Ibid., p. 2.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 5.
Ibid., p. 18.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 57.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., p. 110.
Ibid., p. 159.
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. 96119.
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 theoretical critique of Thompsons method in The Making, forcefully articulating the
limitations of its underlying culturalist epistemology. See Richard Johnson,
Thompson, Genovese, and socialist-humanist history, History Workshop
Journal, 6 (1978), pp. 79100.

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