ABSTRACT
Robert Shorter’s Theological Comet attacked head-on what for many radicals was one important issue amongst many: the role of Christianity or ‘priestcraft’ in propping up a morally bankrupt political regime. On the eve of Richard Carlile’s 1819 trial for publishing a new edition of Age of Reason, ‘comes boldly forth’, its first edition announced, ‘The Theological Comet, whose object is to advocate reason, to inquire for truth, [and] to destroy delusion’. The Theological Comet exploited the performativity of ideological critique by figuring radical narrative as confrontational drama through the rhetorical excess of its prose. Shorter’s own immersion in the struggles, which were simultaneously legal, religious and political, inevitably led to discussions of radical print culture as the fulfilment of the Enlightenment dream of a public sphere of critical debate.
