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.