Description

[004167] Southey, Robert. Wat Tyler, A Dramatic Poem. London: W. T. Sherwin, Reprint. 8vo. Unbound. Pamphlet. Good. [1], 2-15pp, [1], disbound

Lightly browned, lightly foxed and stained

Sherwin’s reprint of Southey’s disavowed poem. Southey, by the time this early poem was published, was Poet Laureate, and the anti-royal tone struck many as seditious. Hazlitt, in Leigh Hunt’s The Examiner, excoriated Southey, contrasting his early radicalism with his current servility (see Hoadley, The Controversy Over Southey’s Wat Tyler, in Studies in Philology, Vol. 38, No. 1, 1941. T

his Sherwin reprint is one of many printed by radicals, including Hone, after Sherwood, Neely, and Jones had, despite triumphing against Southey’s attempt to suppress the poem, decided to withdraw their edition from sale. The final page is a notice that the Republican which “would be more generally read if its title was changed; and I know that there are many, who agree with the principle, but who actually are afraid of a paper, bearing such a name, being found in their possession”, will be changed to Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register

The publisher was William T. Sherwin, a radical journalist and publisher, who worked closely with Richard Carlile, and it was apparently the success of this pamphlet that led Carlile to decide to become a bookseller (Wiener, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth-Century Britain, page 30)

For more on Sherwin see Baylen and Gossman, Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, Volume I, pages 445-446