Commemorating Peterloo

Michael Demson is Professor of English at Sam Houston State University. He coedited, with Christopher Clason, Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms (2020) and, with Regina Hewitt, Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-making during the Romantic Era (2019). He has published articles in European Romantic Review, Romanticism, Romantic Circles, The Keats-Shelley Journal, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, among others. His graphic novel, Masks of Anarchy: From Percy Shelley to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, was published in 2013. Regina Hewitt is Professor of English at the University of South Florida. Her most recent publications include Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making during the Romantic Era, co-edited with Michael Demson (2019), and an edition of Lawrie Todd for the Edinburgh Edition of the Works of John Galt (2023). Formerly Co-Editor of the European Romantic Review, she now serves as a Consulting Editor for that journal.

• IllustrationsAcknowledgements ContributorsIntroduction, Michael Demson and Regina Hewitt1. Peterloo, Ambivalence, and Commemorative Culture, Stephen C. Behrendt 2. The Sounds of Peterloo, Ian Haywood3. Henry Hunt’s White Hat: The Long Tradition of Mute Sedition, Murray Pittock4. Staging Protest and Repression: Guy Fawkes in Post-Peterloo Performance, Frederick Burwick5. Responses to Peterloo in Scotland, 1819-1822, Gerard Carruthers6. ‘The Most Portentous Event in Modern History’: Ireland Before and After Peterloo, James Kelly7. Political Suicide: Castlereagh, Rebellion, and Self-Directed Violence, Michelle Faubert8. William Cobbett, ‘Resurrection Man’: The Peterloo Massacre and the Bones of Tom Paine, Katey Castellano9. The Church and Peterloo, John Gardner10. ‘Reform or Convulsion’: Jeremy Bentham and the Peterloo Massacre, Victoria Myers11. Wordsworth After Peterloo: The Persistence of War in The River Duddon . . . and other Poems, Philip Shaw12. Shelley’s Poetry and Suffering, Michael ScrivenerIndex

This timely gathering of excellent scholars refreshes and deepens our understanding of "Peterloo." Reading it as now providing an argument for non-violent popular action and now revealing dispersed state violence, the collection broadens our approach to Peterloo to responses in painting, poetry and plays and to reactions from Ireland, Scotland and America.