ABSTRACT
Produced by London’s leading ultra-radical publisher, Thomas Davison, The Medusa maintained a stance of uncompromising and often belligerent dissent from February 1819 until the passage of the Gagging Acts made it impossible to continue at the beginning of the next year. Its opening pages set the tone with a satirical denunciation of the general populace’s discontent that simultaneously mocked the nation’s elite and, on a more subtle level, insisted on a romantic ideal of collective free will. ‘O YE factious, seditious, and discontented crew!’, it berated its readers — ‘Alias The “ignorantly-impatient Multitude’” — ‘will you never believe that you are happy, when no more than a bare belief is requisite to make you so?’ (p. 8). What it lacked in the detailed analysis offered by magazines such as The Gorgon it made up for in the tirade of spirited invectives that it kept up in a series of articles, satirical songs and poems, and endless letters to the editor, all directed against a ‘corrupt’ and ‘profligate’ government and their allies, ‘a bigotted and infatuated clergy’ (p. 69). The Medusa’s tone of determined insolence was, according to a letter entitled ‘religious and political delusion’, an inspiring example. ‘In reading your “Penny Politician,’” the correspondent announced, ‘it was with lively feelings I perceived, that another friend of freedom, combining truth, talent, and integrity, had come forward to advocate the cause of reason and justice’ (p. 20). Nor was the letter inaccurate in commending The Medusa for setting aside ‘false notions of forbearance and politeness’ in favour of a more forthright and rousing style (p. 21). Another letter, entitled ‘Concomitant Evils of Monarchy and Aristocracy’, was typical in its insistence that current hardships were the fault of ‘a wicked, and corrupt, abominable system of government’ rooted in ‘the luxury, and licentiousness, of kings and priests’ (p. 196). ‘I contemplate their want of natural humanity and common justice with detestation, their imbecility with contempt, their hypocrisy with disgust’, insisted yet another letter (p. 341). Whereas some radical journals sought to exploit the strategic promise of the public sphere by assimilating themselves to dominant forms of civility, The Medusa emphasised its distance from the dominant culture by revelling in a charismatic ethos of plebeian disdain.
