ABSTRACT
The Register’s parliamentary focus reflected William Hone’s insistence on electoral reform as the great end of popular radicalism, a necessary antidote to ‘the ignus fatuus of power and patronage’ which had ‘dazzled and led astray’ ‘the Ministers and their dependants’. Hone was sometimes willing to allow that the intensity of his emotional response to obvious injustices unsettled his capacity for accurate reporting. Hone’s use of his own case to interrogate the complicity of the courtroom with the government’s arbitrary authority added a heroic dimension to his ongoing self-representation as a writer struggling with the Goliath of state power. Nor, like Cobbett, was Hone averse to commercial self-promotion in the name of radical activism. In the final edition Hone took a lengthy and ‘very unwilling leave of my readers’. His main antagonists were not Castlereagh or Sidmouth or loyalist clergy but ‘the bad conduct of certain of my agents in the country’.
