ABSTRACT
In the year 1800, W. H. Reid, a spy for the government of William Pitt, published a pamphlet entitled The Rise and Dissolution of the Infidel Societies in the Metropolis that identified three different groups that were influenced in the 1790s by the French Revolution. This chapter attempts to filter the radical culture of 1790s England through the figure of the working-class intellectual. Despite their cultural and class distance, all three radical groups identified by Reid are implicated in the categories of “working class” and “intellectual” in some way. The literary output of Thelwall, Godwin, and Spence was equally popular with a laboring audience, and the three groups cultivated close links with one another. Quite different from the intellectual’s mediating role, the crowd deploys a vigorous, self-activating culture of the people seen in the figures of the “brave Doodley boys,” who threaten to “pull the housen deown” and “beat up all rogues and kne-avs.”.
