ABSTRACT
The appearance of The Radical Magazine in February 1821 was marked by all of the rhetoric of imminent revolutionary crisis that had become a hallmark of the radical press. An article in its first number entitled ‘On the approach of a crisis’ warned that ‘a convulsion must ensue ... unless a speedy amelioration of the labouring and middle classes was affected’ (p. 284). The Radical’s inception coincided with an ‘approaching storm’, it announced in its Introduction in the same number, ‘when merit, virtue, and true patriotism shall burst asunder the chains of infamy, of slavery, and power!’ (p. 274). It lacked neither idealism nor confidence. ‘The Radicals would lay the axe to the trunk of corruption, whose branches are monopoly, ministerial tyranny, and despotism; they would form a Parliament calculated to convene an assembly of the wisest, the most virtuous, and the least ambitious men, devoted entirely to guard the liberties of the people’ (p. 273). This sort of ‘radical change in the political system’ would not, of course, be universally embraced (p. 284). Those ‘mammoths of wealth and power’, ‘or, as the great Lord Chatham emphatically styled them—Muckworms, revelling in all the luxuries of life, and participating in all the interested feelings of avarice and party’, would respond to this dawning spirit of ‘public principle and public virtue’ by reducing the word ‘radical’ to a slur intended to ‘stigmatize and degrade’ (p. 273). Far from acquiescing to this sort of degradation, The Radical embraced it as an ironic badge of distinction which contrasted their own civic idealism with the paranoid selfishness of ‘the bloated citizen’ (p. 273) whose interests were diametrically opposed to the general good.
