ABSTRACT
The Democratic Recorder appeared for a single issue on 2 October 1819 in the wake of the Peterloo Massacre. Beginning with the uncompromising spirit of its opening declaration that ‘if ever it was the duty of Britons to resort to the use of arms to recover their freedom, and hurl vengeance upon the heads of their tyrants it is now’ (p. 243), the Recorder worked to feed the momentum for popular protest by denouncing the sins of the government, offering a list of public meetings in London and the provinces in the weeks after Peterloo, providing a graphic account of the peaceful meeting in St Peter’s Field and the murderous intervention of the Manchester Yeomanry Calvary, and maintaining a critical gaze on its aftermath. A column entitled ‘Reform’ emphasised the important role of the radical weekly press in mobilising the people on behalf of their own interests. The ‘extended circulation of Periodical Writings’, it insisted, ‘have wrought a change in the people of England for which there is no parallel in History’ (p. 245). Led by Cobbett’s decision in August 1816 to reprint a two-penny version of his Political Register in order to avoid the stamp tax, the radical press had played a key role in promoting the ‘mental regeneration ... of the poorer classes’. It had helped to foster a state of ‘improved education’ which, it suggested, lay at the heart of the renewed spirit of popular activism (p. 245). Its single issue may not have played a central role in furthering this process, but it did nonetheless pay eloquent testimony to both the political intensity of this period and the clarity with which the radical weekly press envisioned its own part in these struggles.
