This book shows that the publishers and editors of the radical press deployed Romantic-era texts for their own political ends—and for their largely working-class readership—long after those works’ original publication. It examines how the literature of the British Romantic period was excerpted and reprinted in radical political papers in Britain in the nineteenth century. The agents of this story were bound by neither the chronological march of literary history, nor by the original form of the literary texts they reprinted. Godwin’s Caleb Williams and poems by Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, and Shelley appear throughout this book as they appeared in the nineteenth century, in bits and pieces. Radical publishers and editors carefully and purposefully excerpted the works of their recent past, excavating useful political claims from the midst of less amenable texts, and remaking texts and authors alike in the process.

Noting that working-class writers and editors actively sought to define for themselves the spiritual and political role literature played for an emerging working class, Murphy concludes that while there was no uniform working-class interpretation of literature, working-class journalists conducted a lively and continuing debate about literature, and that their agreements and disagreements show a thriving and evolving aesthetic.

William Wordsworth's poems are inhabited by beggars, vagrants, peddlers, and paupers. This book analyzes how a few key poems from Wordsworth's early years constitute a direct engagement with and intervention into the politics of poverty and reform that swept the social, political, and cultural landscape in England during the 1790s. In Wordsworth's Vagrant Muse, Gary Harrison argues that although Wordsworth's poetry is implicated in an ideology that idealizes rustic poverty, it nonetheless invests the image of the rural poor with a certain, if ambiguously realized, power. The early poems challenge the complacency of middle-class readers by constructing a mirror in which they confront the possibility of their own impoverishment (both economic and moral), and by investing the marginal poor with a sense of dignity and morality otherwise denied them.

First published in 1965, this work studies the House of Lords and the various proposals for its reform, abolition or limitation of its powers which have been made in the light o f prevailing theories of the nature and characteristics of the English government. The work also contains a history of the theory of mixed government that arose in Tudor England and lasted until well after the Reform Act of 1832. This history both illuminates the position of the House of Lords and also provides perspective for the study of Democracy in the movement for parliamentary reform. One of the book's most original features is an extensive account of Charles I's Answer to the Nineteen Propostions, out of which came the startling new theory of the constitution, known as "mixed monarchy".

This book is a comprehensive analysis of a neglected aspect of Chartism, its poetry. Here the Chartists are documented as poet-politicians. In order to show how much this poetry can contribute to a deeper understanding of the movement, the poems are treated as literary pieces and as historical sources. Being a mass phenomenon, these poems and songs served as a vehicle of Chartism. They not only express critical insights into society, but also, and even more so, reveal the emotions and values which brought about the mass consensus.

First published in 1974, The Industrial Muse is a study of the literary achievements of the working class. The focus is upon the cultural environment and assumptions of self-educated writers, their literary preoccupations and careers, and the content, form and structure of their writings. This literature must first be considered from the perspective of the working people who read and wrote it, for it functioned in their lives in a number of important ways. Its character was due in large part to the conscious efforts of educated workers who wish to gain cultural recognition along with social and economic justice. It helped to shape individual and class consciousness by giving order to working men's lives and clarifying their relationship with those who held cultural and political power. This literature asserted the autonomy of the working class, but did not posit a new worldview, lest the gains of class solidarity be lost irretrievably. This is an interesting read for scholars and researchers of working-class literature, english literature and working-class history.