Special Collections
Book of the Month, August 2006
This month’s featured publication is a radical periodical from the period of the French Revolution, promoting parliamentary reform and civil liberty. The journal’s motto, from the title page, is ‘The People, Liberty, the Law, and the King’ – the title page also features a putti holding a document clearly identified as ‘Magna Charta’. This image personifies the patriotic line of the journal which in ‘The Editors’ Address’ in the first issue refers to “the real, perfect, and truly excellent structure of the British Constitution” which is sadly mixed with “base and degrading alloy”. The Editors then go on to say that “A reform of abuses, and an equal Representation of the People, are the first objects of our Paper”
Patriotism was primarily an oppositional movement, originally anti-French and against corruption in government and parliament, but by the 1790s some radical patriots saw elements in the French Revolution which England could emulate to improve its polity. This line of thought follows, for example, Thomas Paine who, as Alexander MacLachlan describes in the Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age, “identified true patriotism with natural rights whatever their provenance”.
The Patriot’s editors were encouraged by the French Revolution to call for political change in Britain, and frequently point out the restricted nature of the electoral franchise. A series of articles entitled ‘Borough Representation’ features individual constituencies and on p. 93 points up the “gigantic strength of aristocratical influence, in the election of the representatives, as they are called, of the People, in the House of Commons”, in the introduction to a discussion of the constituency of Wendover, which as the article points out has: “Number of voters 130.”
The Patriot, only survived for three volumes, and is not widely held. These volumes have been acquired for the Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic Literature, and join the many radical periodicals from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries held in the collection.
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