Published on Reviews in History (https://reviews.history.ac.uk ) Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform Review Number: 719 Publish date: Sunday, 1 February, 2009 Editor: Michael Davis Paul Pickering ISBN: 9780754656197 Date of Publication: 2007 Price: £55.00 Pages: 236pp. Publisher: Ashgate Place of Publication: Aldershot Reviewer: Chris Evans Once, radicals of the late 18th and early 19th century appeared as distinctly respectable. They were earnest, improving, and mindful of the public good, which was all of a piece with the sober Dissenting stock from which many of them sprang. There was, of course, a revolutionary fringe, but this was inhabited by the overwrought or the immature. That revolutionary extremists made their foolhardy grabs at power was regrettable, but the insurrectionary attempts of these years – two parts tragedy to three parts farce – were a measure of the ruling elite’s selfish and shortsighted obstinacy; they did not detract from the essential rightness of the radical critique. In this view, which was not entirely dispelled by E. P. Thompson, the radicals of unreformed England were Gladstonian liberals in utero. All they lacked was the whiskers. That was before Iain McCalman’s Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge, 1988). McCalman lifted the lid on an altogether seamier side of radical endeavour. In the taverns and alehouses of the capital’s lowliest neighbourhoods he located a ‘blackguard’ tradition, nourished by irreconcilable enemies of the established order. These were people who had no notion that they were living through an age of reform – to use the phrase employed rather incongruously in the title of the collection under review. Even if they had, they would have wanted none of it. The denizens of the radical underworld were treasonable by instinct. They aspired to overturn, not to ameliorate. They were rancorous millenarians, scurrilously abusive utopians. They inhabited a criminal demi-monde where extortion, pimping or the publication of obscene squibs were admired ways of turning a penny. They scoffed at self-improvement. For them, ‘un-respectability’ was a badge of honour. Needless to say, they despised Francis Place, the arch-exponent of artisanal respectability. The feeling was mutual. Although savage mockery of all that was holy was the stock-in-trade of this radical underworld, its activists were deadly serious about what they were doing. Like Francis Place, many of them were veterans of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). The ‘Two Acts’ of 1795 made public agitation of the democratic cause, which the LCS had pioneered, a virtual impossibility, and in 1799 the organisation was proscribed outright. In the face of this legislative pounding, the democrats of the 1790s dispersed in different ideological directions. For Thomas Evans and a clutch of others who were to embody the ‘blackguard’ tradition the writings of Thomas Spence became pivotal. Spence (1750–1814) had been a down-at-heel presence on the London radical scene in the 1790s, but he was no orthodox democrat. Political equality, he