Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy

This book investigates the relationship between poetry and protest in the years immediately following the end of the Napoleonic wars—from 1815-1822. This book furthers knowledge of Romantic period culture by providing new and provocative information on canonical poets such as Byron, Lamb, and Shelley alongside anonymous poets, pamphleteers, balladeers and publishing pirates, by focusing on their relationship with contemporary political events. In a period when only 5% of the population could vote, poetry and politics became inseparable as disparate groups of poets struggled to control the representation of the most dramatic revolutionary events of the day. Consequently the gulf that separated 'high' literature from the literature of the streets shrank to allow a glimpse of a new kind of writing that denied the possibility of literary stratification, and, for this very reason, threatened the stratified society out of which it had been produced.