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.
