ABSTRACT
Taking its name from a conspicuous symbol of popular radicalism, The White Hat first appeared exactly two months after the Peterloo Massacre. Its commitment to providing an ongoing forum for important debates was short-lived. Like The Democratic Recorder, which had appeared two weeks earlier, it lasted only a single issue. Echoing many of the other radical weekly journals, it insisted on the determining influence of the ‘important crisis’ (p. 253) of the present day, the likes of which ‘our history, or indeed that of any other country, can furnish no parallel’ (p. 255). In response, it struck an activist posture that emphasised the continuities between writing and more aggressive forms of resistance. “At such a period’, it insisted, ‘it becomes no man to be silent or inactive, who thinks that he can serve his country ... The voice of the country, as that of one man, should cry aloud for Radical Reform. To promote that cry is the object of this publication’ (p. 253). Like many of the radical weeklies, it grounded this call to action in an Enlightenment rhetoric of the progress of knowledge, and warned that
