ABSTRACT
This chapter owes a great deal of Scottish Enlightenment conception of English popular radical culture to the social and cultural historiography of H. N. Brailsford, Christopher Hill, E. P. Thompson, George Rud, Linda Colley, Kathleen Wilson and Gwyn Williams. From their respective historical narratives trace the distinctive institutional outlines of a radical plebeian public sphere in England, constituted out of a series of confrontations between popular radical movements and the official political authority of the state. It argues the cultural, political and ideological continuities of popular English radicalism run in both directions, from the 1790s to the early nineteenth century. A Remonstrance of Many Thousand Citizens usefully compresses the most salient aspects of the radical public sphere of the English Revolution into a single representative document. Thelwall's pioneering project of popular intellectual praxis was also representative of both the recent historical tradition of English radicalism more generally, as well as a reflection of its specific historical predicament.
