Loyalist Sociability and Its Discontents in the Eighteenth-Century Province

This chapter reads Polwhele’s ultimately acrimonious relationship with an East Devon literary coterie in terms of the nature of conservative sociability in the 1780s and 1790s and a politically loaded conflict between print culture and coterie publication. Tracing the conduct of this argument in the London periodical press, the chapter demonstrates the interpenetration of local and national within a geographically distributed literary culture. The episode highlights how Polwhele’s precarious professional and social status informs unexpected aspects of his class consciousness, aspects that reveal the tensions and accommodations within what is often seen as a monolithic discourse of loyalism.