William Hone

William Hone, journalist, publisher, pamphleteer, reformer and writer of doggerel was hugely famous from 1815 until the mid 1820s. His readership encompassed the full range of society, from Cabinet ministers to the barely literate and disenfranchised, and Hone himself maintained a similarly extensive range of personal and professional friendships: he was friendly with the literary elite: William Hazlitt, Leigh and John Hunt, John Cam Hobhouse and Charles Lamb, and yet he maintained ties with the sometime pornographer William Benbow, reformers such as William Cobbett, Major Cartwright and Henry Hunt, and revolutionaries like “Doctor” Watson and Arthur Thistlewood.