ABSTRACT
The London Alfred literalised the radical press’s mediating role between the virtual space of critical exchange in print and popular protest by reprinting ‘a faithful and impartial account of the proceedings attendant upon ... any Meeting, where the liberty and prosperity of our country is concerned’ (p. 145). Launched just nine days after the Peterloo Massacre, its accounts of the Peterloo meeting itself and then of the mass meetings that were held in the weeks after the bloodshed conveyed a vivid sense of widespread public outrage. These accounts were often dominated by the resolutions and petitions passed at these meetings, and by the speeches of leading reformers, but the assembled crowds were well represented in the parenthetical cheers and occasional objections that were scattered liberally throughout these reports. At a meeting in York on 14 October, the MP Stuart Wortley insisted that, as the people’s representative, he deserved a fair hearing. Replies from the crowd —‘no, no, you do not represent us’ (p. 213) — suggest the multiple and highly mediated forms of representation that were contending with one another in the broader public sphere in this period. The London Alfred was both a faithful observer of, and an important participant in, these struggles. This double role reflected the warning offered to the Prince Regent, in the letter passed at a meeting in Finsbury Square on 1 November: ‘we beseech you, Sir, to judge upon the sign of the times, when men are ridding themselves of the prejudices of the darker ages, and returning to the practice of the unerring principles of Truth and Justice, both in their moral and political conduct’ (pp. 238–9). In the months of public outrage between the Massacre and the introduction of the Six Acts, which effectively repressed popular protest, these mass meetings were one of the most compelling signs of the times, evidence of a politically marginalised class in the process of defining itself as it asserted the power of its own moral sovereignty
