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One of the illustrations in William Hone’s  (1819) is of a printing press opposite a group of six state functionaries, who are “the vermin / that plunder the wealth / that lay in the house, that Jack built”. The press is the “the thing / that in spite of new Act, / And attempts to restrain it, / by soldiers or tax, / will poison the vermin / that plunder the wealth / that lay in the house, that Jack built”. It is a triumphant symbol of the power of the printed word in radical causes.

William Hone (1780-1842) was a seasoned political writer and publisher when he wrote these lines. He had moved in the Westminster circle of radicalists and reformers from about 1809 onwards, had published works by Byron, Cobbett, and William Hazlitt, and had joined forces with illustrator George Cruikshank to produce several political pamphlets of his own. 

Most famously, in 1816-17 Hone published three pamphlets lampooning the government for which he was prosecuted in three separate trials over three days, attended by 20,000 people. The publications in question were The Late John Wilkes's Catechism of a Ministerial Member, The Political Litany Diligently Revised to be Said or Sung until the Appointed Change Come, and The Sinecurists' Creed or Belief. The parodies followed the form of the church catechism, the creed, and the Anglican litany (including the Lord’s prayer and the ten commandments), and the charge, intended to suppress freedom of the press, was blasphemy. 

Hone took on his own defence and proved with many examples of existing literature that his target was contemporary politics, not religion. Famously, he won, in a victory for himself and the cheap press. You can read early editions of the publications and his 1818 issue of the trials at Senate House Library.

Hone collaborated with Cruikshank to produce The Political House that Jack Built in the wake of the Peterloo massacre, in which magistrates sent in troops to suppress 60,000 people at a peaceful mass meeting on St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. The troops killed eleven people and wounded another 421. The pamphlet attacked government repression and defended the free press (sometimes subversive) and reform. It copied the form of the nursery rhyme The House that Jack Built, which Hone’s young daughter was reading at the time. 

The Political House that Jack Built was a bestseller, running into 54 editions which between them sold over 100,000 copies. Its thirteen woodcuts broadened its appeal to people with low levels of literacy, and it spawned numerous imitations and counter-imitations. The range of its appeal can be ascertained from the former owners of copies, which range from the third to the 53rd edition, in Senate House Library. A couple belonged to the mathematical historian Augustus De Morgan (1806-1871); an imperfect copy is bound behind Robert Huish’s Memoirs of George the Fourth in the much later library of Sir Louis Sterling (1879-1958), whose interest was not in Hone, but in Cruikshank. Together with a range of editions of the single piece in Senate House Library, worth looking at for an idea of how small, cheap, easy to acquire and pervasive it was, there is a copy in a collected edition of pamphlets issued by Hone himself in 1821 and there are three of its parodies, two of them anonymous, later bound in a volume lettered: “Houses that Jack built, etc.”.

Hone attempted to avoid prosecution for the charges laid against him in 1817 by immediately withdrawing the three satirical pamphlets. But the intervention of another radical publisher, Richard Carlile (1790–1843), new to the world of printing and politics, ensured that Hone and Carlile himself were incarcerated. 

In August 1817, Carlile re-published the three parodies, despite Hone’s threats to sue him for breach of copyright. It was a political challenge to the Tory government of Lord Sheffield and an effort to exploit the growing market for radical publications. Alongside his name as printer and publisher in the pamphlets’ imprint, Carlile stated that they were to be sold ‘by all those who are not afraid of incurring the displeasure of His Majesty’s Ministers, their Spies or Informers.’ Carlile was promptly arrested on charges of seditious libel and blasphemy and held in custody until Hone’s acquittal in December.

Carlile was an independent tinplate worker who had moved his family from Devon to ������Ƶ in 1813 in the hopes of making a better living in increasingly precarious economic conditions. By 1817, like many artisans he was facing poverty as work dried up. With increasing unrest among the working classes, Carlile threw himself into radical politics, firstly as a hawker of pamphlets and journals and after meeting the radical journalist William T. Sherwin, printing, and publishing. 

Carlile agreed to become the publisher of Sherwin’s newspapers (1817-1819), taking on the legal responsibility for the publication, a risky proposition at a time when the government was encouraging magistrates to crackdown on seditious and blasphemous material. But the agreement with Sherwin gave Carlile access to a print shop in Fleet Street and the means to become a printer and publisher himself.

One of Carlile’s most significant contributions to radical publishing was the re-issue and popularisation of the works of Thomas Paine, including , a work banned in 1797. Carlile published them in cheap weekly pamphlets and collected sets, making the texts, considered by many in authority to be seditious, available to a wide audience of working-class readers. 

Carlile was present on the stage at St Peters Field and witnessed the massacre. He escaped arrest and returned to ������Ƶ where he published his account in the radical journals The Weekly Political Register and The Republican. This, and his publication of Paine’s works, led to several prosecutions for seditious libel and a lengthy imprisonment from 1819 to 1825. During this time, Carlile continued to publish, and when he could not, the work was picked up by his fellow publishers and print shop workers, as well as his wife Jane and sister Mary-Anne, who were also imprisoned in 1821 and 1822.

Among the many works published by Carlile in the Library is a volume of pamphlets which includes reports on the trials and defences of Richard, Jane, and Mary-Anne Carlile, as well as several of the addresses, letters and tracts Carlile wrote from Dorchester Goal. One publication, (1821)has the imprint of Mary-Anne.

The publications of Hone and Carlile featured are from the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature. Herbert Somerton Foxwell, whose library is the kern of the Goldsmiths’ Library, was distinguished from other economic historians of his time by the large view he took of his subject to embrace early socialist writers and the early history of trade unionism. The broad subject areas of the printed catalogue of his collection include ‘social conditions’, ‘socialism’ and ‘politics’. When the contents of the Goldsmiths’ Library to 1850 were digitised, the name of the resulting database reflected this catholicity, as Making of the Modern Economy quickly became  Alongside Hone and Carlile as radical publishers you will find many works by such radical authors as Thomas Paine, Henry Hunt, Richard Oastler, William Cobbett and others, which you can view either as hard copy within Senate House Library or online. Try them out!

By Tansy Barton, Academic Librarian: Manuscript and Book Studies and Dr Karen Attar, Curator of Rare Books and University Art, Senate House Library