ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 unfolds in four parts. First, as depicted in the government-sponsored press and reports of parliamentary committees of secrecy, the events of late 1816 and early 1817 appeared to replay those of 1794–95. From debates over the reinstitution of government repression, the chapter turns to the publication of the dramatic poem Wat Tyler and the displaced sentiments of Southey’s Jacobin youth. The third section concerns the plans for the Blanketeers’ march from Manchester to London, with radicals’ overt references to Wat Tyler’s confrontation with the king, while suppressing the parallel to the “Marseillais” and the French Revolution. The chapter concludes with a reading of Shelley’s An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte, in which the poet views the young princess’s death as an occasion for private rather than public mourning, directing attention to the deaths of the Pentrich rebels and the real tragedy worthy of national mourning: the death of Liberty. Shelley’s address went unpublished. It was left to radical journalists to address the nation’s misdirected feelings of sorrow, juxtaposing Charlotte’s untimely death with the fate of poor laboring men entrapped by a corrupt government and branded as traitors.
