ABSTRACT
The State Trials of 1794 were much more victories for the government and much more decisive defeats for the reform cause than the verdicts of not guilty might indicate. The trials clarified if they did not enlarge the limits of legal freedom of expression. One of the most striking changes after the 1794 trials was the falling away from the movement of the middle-class element which had started it in the first place and remained prominent in 1792-1794 even while working class participation was spreading. For the story of the English Jacobins of the 1790’s is part of the history of the last decade of the eighteenth century at the same time that it is the beginning of the reform movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More broadly, it was the beginning of the rise of the English working class when the old rural, landed order was giving way to the new urban, industrial order.
