Prochaska, F.K. "English State Trials in the 1790s: A Case Study." The Journal of British Studies 13.1 (1973), 63-82.

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F.K. Prochaska frames his discussion of the trial of Gilbert Wakefield and others accused of disseminating his work by evoking radicals’ and whigs’ feeling of hopelessness concerning the freedom of the press at the turn of the nineteenth century. In disagreement to historians such as Emsley, Prochaska asserts that freedom of speech and the press “came increasingly under attack by His Majesty’s courts” (64). While there were few high treason convictions in 1790s, juries were more likely to convict radicals of imprecisely-defined seditious libel, especially with the help of the Attorney General, “special juries” used when trials were considered to be too complex for the uneducated to understand, ex officio charges, and otherwise packed juries.

Prochaska illustrates these themes in the trials of Gilbert Wakefield, Joseph Johnson, Jeremiah Jordan and John Cuthell. Wakefield gets himself into trouble by imprudently welcoming any potential French invasion of Britain, but the others were prosecuted for publishing and selling his work even though they revealed the author, a new development in the repression of British radicals which several contemporaries considered a death knell to freedom of the press. This article discusses the strategies and themes used by Wakefield in defending himself and the arguments of the loyalist Attorney General and judge. All four of the accused men were convicted, and Prochaska, while acknowledging that they acted out of a fear of domestic upheaval and a desire to preserve English law, passes judgment on the prosecutors and judiciary of the time as “unoriginal, ignorant of history, and insensitive to the grievances of the poor” (81).

Entered by Sara on 02 August 2004 at 12:16 AM.