Mt Davis

‘That Odious Class of Men Called Democrats’: Daniel Isaac Eaton and the Romantics 1794–1795

Daniel Isaac Eaton was one of Londons leading radical publishers during the 1790s, co-ordinating his printing and bookselling business with his active involvement in the metropolitan reform movement. After enduring a sequence of trials in 1793 and 1794, on charges of publishing seditious libels, Eatons reputation reached a peak during the years 1794–5. His bookshop functioned as an important rendezvous for radicals living in London and those dispersed more widely throughout the country. After a brief examination of Eatons democratic connections, this article explores the links, during the mid-1790s, between the radical publisher and the Romantic poets, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. Focusing on the transmission of the manuscript of Southeys Wat Tyler and the publication of the radical journals The Citizen and The Philanthropist, it is shown that Eaton and his publishing business had a significant role to play, either potential or actual, in some of the best-known plans and projects of the three young poets.

'Good for the Public Example': Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793-1812

To live as a radical in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an existence fraught with danger. Stigmatized as Jacobins, rabble-rousers, subversives and members of the so-called unruly ‘swinish multitude’, radical artisans and literati alike faced a barrage of conservative propaganda, official legal repression and government persecution, and the sometimes more frightening intimidation of loyalist associations and militant Church and King mobs. This proscription at times made life as a reformer a virtual living hell and ultimately ‘rendered disloyalty unfashionable, sedition dangerous and insurrection almost impossible’.2 The prospects for radicals were unpromising and uninviting, to say the least. As one contemporary noted: ‘From the hot regions of a Court of Inquisition to the cold dark confines of the miserable Tolboothe [sic]; from the close fetid air of the dungeons of Newgate to the cold damp breezes of the Ocean. … These are the rewards and dispensations held out by our political Olympus to the swinish multitude. ’3 John Thelwall, the talented political orator and writer of the 1790s, recalled in 1819 how he was ‘proscribed and hunted — driven like a wild beast, and banished, like a contagion from society’.4

The British Jacobins: Folk Devils in the Age of Counter-Revolution?

According to Edmund Burke, on 29 October 1795 the streets of London from St James’s Palace to the House of Lords were the stage for enacting a diabolical and dangerous performance. It was the day, he said, that ‘one of the most violent and dangerous seditions broke out …. menacing to the publick security, endangering the sacred person of the King, and violating in the most audacious manner the authority of Parliament’.1 As George III made his way to and from the opening of parliament, ‘a murderous yell’ reverberated through the crowded public thoroughfares along which the royal procession made its way.2 The ‘desperate Mob, consisting of the very dregs of the people’,3 greeted the king with impassioned shouts of ‘Down with George!’, ‘No King!’, ‘Bread, bread!’, ‘No Pitt!’. On several occasions, they turned their attention to the state coach, assailing it with mud, stones and other projectiles. One of these missiles made a small hole in a window of the king’s carriage, providing enough evidence to a nervous monarch that he had been shot at by an assassin. While nobody was arrested for the alleged attempt on the king’s life, despite the offer of a reward for information leading to the conviction of the regicide, the authorities concocted a range of charges to apprehend five men from the massive crowd of 150,000 to 200,000 people. One of the detainees was Kidd Wake, a twenty-seven-year-old journeyman printer, who was originally charged with high treason.

Sources of Reform in Britain: A Review Article

Books reviewed in this article: Anna Clark and Sarah Richardson, History of Suffrage Gregory Claeys (Ed), The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850