The Politics of Sedition in Long Nineteenth-Century Britain Gender, Activism, Spatial Politics and Legality

1 Prolegomena: Free-born British People - Dave Steele; 2 'Five shillings per day': the 1819 Yorkshire Miners' Strike - Joe Stanley; 3 Radical Landscapes and Seditious Spaces: Contested Meanings in Early Nineteenth Century Radical Events - Caitlin Kitchener; 4 The Irrational Repressive State: Surveillance, Infiltration and Legislation - Dave Steele; 5 'What business do you have in this house? Reform!': Electoral Violence, National Politics and Local Spaces in Rural England, c. 1820-1892 - Leonard Baker; 6 Fifty Years of Female Sedition and Blasphemy: 1816-1866 - Judy Cox; 7 'Law-Breaking Justified': Women and Challenges to the State in the Early Nineteenth Century - Sarah Richardson; 8 'Firmness, but wisdom: union, but peace!': Chartism, Radicalism and Sedition in Nottingham, 1848 - Aaron Ackerley; 9 The Revival of the Elizabethan Act against Seditious Words and Rumours against the Chartists - Stephen Basdeo; 10 G. W. M. Reynolds and the Seditious Threat: Sublimating Emotions in Chartist Fiction - Lourdes Salgado; 11 The Newspapers of Edward Lloyd - Joy Vick; 12 'Teaching by the eye those who do not or cannot hear the spoken truths': Mapping the Public Display of Suffrage Posters in Women's Fight for the Vote, 1910-1914 - Tara Morton; 13 Afterword: Chartists and Charlatans - Tim Malloch

Biography

Dave Steele is Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, where he completed his PhD on The Reputational Power of English Reform Crowds 1816–1848. His research argues that reform crowds were significantly smaller than previously thought yet paradoxically successful in projecting power, provoking disproportionate state responses. He has spoken at the Tolpuddle Radical History School and the Kennington Chartist Project. Publications include 'The Somatic Crowd: The Bodily and Sensory Experience of Reform Crowds in Britain, c.1816–48', Parliamentary History 45 (2026); 'Peaceably if we may' in Resist: Stories of Uprising (Comma Press, 2019); and 'People's Vote march: when it comes to crowds, history shows it's not all about size', The Conversation (March 2019).