This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1970.

John Payne Collier (1789–1883), one of the most controversial figures in the history of literary scholarship, pursued a double career. A prolific and highly influential writer on the drama, poetry, and popular prose of Shakespeare's age, Collier was at the same time the promulgator of a great body of forgeries and false evidence, seriously affecting the text and biography of Shakespeare and many others. This monumental two-volume work for the first time addresses the whole of Collier's activity, systematically sorting out his genuine achievements from his impostures. Arthur and Janet Freeman reassess the scholar-forger's long life, milieu, and relations with a large circle of associates and rivals while presenting a chronological bibliography of his extensive publications, all fully annotated with regard to their creditability. The authors also survey the broader history of literary forgery in Great Britain and consider why so talented a man not only yielded to its temptations but also persisted in it throughout his life.

This book is the first overall survey of the British West Indian press in the early nineteenth century—a critical period in the history of the region. Based on extensive and ground-breaking archival research, this volume provides an in-depth history of early nineteenth-century British West Indian newspapers and potted biographies of the journalists who produced them. The author examines the economics underpinning newspapers, and a political spectrum, unique to the West Indian press, is also posited. Towards one end sat a small group of ‘liberal’ newspapers that outraged white colonists by arguing for civil and political rights to be extended to so-called free coloureds and for the abolition of slavery; scattered at various points towards the other end of the spectrum were newspapers still best collectively described as the ‘planter press’—the traditional term used in the literature. Starting from this basic conceptual framework, the volume shows how the press landscape in the British Caribbean at this time was more volatile and complex than has been previously thought. This volume will be of value to academics, undergraduates and postgraduates studying Caribbean and media history and those interested in modern history.

An important revisionist history that casts eighteenth-century British politics and imperial expansion in a new light In this bold debut work, historian James M. Vaughn challenges the scholarly consensus that British India and the Second Empire were founded in "a fit of absence of mind." He instead argues that the origins of the Raj and the largest empire of the modern world were rooted in political conflicts and movements in Britain. It was British conservatives who shaped the Second Empire into one of conquest and dominion, emphasizing the extraction of resources and the subjugation of colonial populations. Drawing on a wide array of sources, Vaughn shows how the East India Company was transformed from a corporation into an imperial power in the service of British political forces opposed to the rising radicalism of the period. The Company's dominion in Bengal, where it raised territorial revenue and maintained a large army, was an autocratic bulwark of Britain's established order. A major work of political and imperial history, this volume offers an important new understanding of the era and its global ramifications.

Recent work on the growth of British naval power during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has emphasised developments in the political, constitutional and financial infrastructure of the British state. Naval Power and British Culture, 1760-1850 takes these considerations one step further, and examines the relationship of administrative culture within government bureaucracy to contemporary perceptions of efficiency in the period 1760-1850. By administrative culture is meant the ideas, attitudes, structures, practices and mores of public employees. Inevitably these changed over time and this shift is examined as the naval departments passed through times of crisis and peace. Focusing on the transition in the culture of government employees in the naval establishments in London - in the Navy and Victualling Offices - as well as the victualling yard towns along the Thames and Medway, Naval Power and British Culture, 1760-1850 concerns itself with attitudes at all levels of the organisation. Yet it is concerned above all with those whose views and conduct are seldom reported, the clerks, artificers, secretaries and commissioners; those employees of government who lived in local communities and took their work experience back home with them. As such, this book illuminates not only the employees of government, but also the society which surrounded and impinged upon naval establishments, and the reciprocal nature of their attitudes and influences.

The eighteenth century remains contemporary more than 200 years later because the fundamental questions raised then about politics in both the American and French Revolutions still speak to us. The writings of Edmund Burke on these and other political events of his time are today acknowledged as the basis of modern conservative thought. This volume brings together an outstanding collection of interpretative essays on Burke, and serves as a basic introduction to this seminal thinker. A member of the British Parliament from 1766 to 1794, Edmund Burke had sympathized with the American War of Independence and argued for reform of British policy toward Ireland and India, but he surprised many of his friends by his early, vehement opposition to the French Revolution. This volume brings together assessments of these and other statements by Burke by contemporaries such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt, along with essays by Irving Babbitt and Russell Kirk, who established his significance for twentieth-century conservatism. This is a collection of the best, previously published interpretive essays on Burke. It will be of interest to all those interested in the philosophical roots of conservatism, in the history of political thought, in revolution, and in modern political ideologies.

This work provides the first full-scale examination of the eighteenth century periodical Political Controversy and of the essay-sheets reprinted therein, Briton, Auditor, North Briton, and Monitor. These essay-sheets were published in England at the end of the Seven Years' War with France, in support of and in opposition to Lord Bute's proposed terms in the treaty negotiations. Political Controversy reprinted the essay-sheets weekly along with the editor's annotations, material from other publications, and original contributions from readers. The journal provides modern readers with a good example of eighteenth century propaganda techniques, and is a guide to the issues revolving around the war, the struggle for governmental control, the British Empire, and the liberty of the press. This book provides a clear analysis of the methods used in the political propaganda of the journal and the essay-sheets, including the writings of three significant authors, Tobias Smollett, Arthur Murphy, and John Wilkes. The work opens with a discussion of the essay-sheets and their relationship to one another, and follows with two chapters devoted to Political Controversy. The final chapter covers the most significant case for freedom of the press in England up to that time, North Briton, No. 45. This book will be of interest to scholars and students concerned with journalism, history, political science, and literature.

John Wilkes remains one of the most colourful and intriguing characters of eighteenth-century Britain. Born in 1725, the son of a prosperous London distiller, he was given the classical education of a gentleman, before entering politics as a Whig. Finding his party in opposition following the accession of George III in 1760 he took up his pen with sensational effect, and made a career out of excoriating the new administration and promoting the Whig interest. His charismatic style and vicious wit soon ensured that he became a figurehead for the radical cause, earning him many admirers and many enemies. Amongst the latter were the king, and the artist William Hogarth who famously depicted Wilkes as a grinning, squint-eyed, pug-nosed agent of misrule. Whilst Wilkes's political career has been much explored, particularly the period between 1763 and 1774, much less has been written about his remarkable private life. This biography provides a more comprehensive examination of Wilkes throughout his long life than has hitherto been available. Taking a thematic, rather than chronological approach it is divided into six main chapters covering family, ambition, sex, religion, class and money, which allows a much more rounded picture of Wilkes to emerge. In so doing it provides a fascinating insight, not only into one of the most intriguing characters of the Georgian period, but also into wider eighteenth-century British society and its shifting attitudes to morality, politics and gender.