Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry, 1790-1810

Citation

McKeever GL (2016) Sheffield: Print, Protest and Poetry, 1790-1810. BSECS Criticks Reviews [Online Book Review] 25.07.2016. https://www.bsecs.org.uk/criticks-reviews/sheffield-print-protest-and-poetry-1790-1810/

Abstract
First paragraph: ‘We’re only Swine!’ reiterates the author of ‘The Observations of a Swine’, published in The Sheffield Register for the 28th June 1793. In a reductio ad absurdum of Edmund Burke’s comment about the ‘swinish multitude’ three years earlier, the poem travesties British statehood, which is built on the ‘bristly back’ of ‘A nasty filthy grunting Breed!’ This furious sarcasm is indicative of the energy of the radical poetry published by the Register under the aegis of Joseph Gales, now resurrected by a digital anthology project based at the University of Sheffield. Aiming to illustrate an important ‘facet of the city’s identity’, the website updates an important reading experience from the turn of the nineteenth century ­– one that feels germane in a political climate obsessed by political extremism and definitions of freedom. With the project still in an early phase, the stress is currently on the final year of Gale’s editorship in 1793-4, before he was forced abroad by accusations of ‘conspiracy against the government’. The paper was then re-founded as The Sheffield Iris by the poet and abolitionist James Montgomery, and the content will grow across this historical narrative. Illustrating the proliferation of radical ideas in Northern England – including religious toleration, opposition to war and the broad terrain of ‘liberty’ – these sources capture a critical moment in the evolution of British imperial capitalism, as newly integrated networks of exchange played out upon a society still significantly modelled at the regional level.