The Chartist Press and the Emergence of a Plebeian Public Sphere: Doubleday's The Political Pilgrim's Progress and O'Brien's The Rise, Progress and Phases of Human Slavery

abstract: The early nineteenth-century radical press sparked an era of print culture that challenged the political economy of liberalism and created a counter-cultural, plebeian public sphere. The post-Napoleonic Wars economic crisis, the anti-New Poor Law movement, and the War of the Unstamped shaped an alternative anti-capitalist political economy and literature defined by working-class political identity and activism. This study examines working-class political economy popularized in the radical press, how it created a counter public sphere antithetical to liberalism, and how it conceptualized a society based on social, economic, and political equality. Featured texts include Thomas Doubleday's The Political Pilgrim's Progress in relation to the political-economy theories popularized by James Bronterre O'Brien in The Rise, Progress, and Phases of Human Slavery .