Ian Haywood is Reader in English at the University of Surrey Roehampton. He is the author of The Making of History: A Study of the Literary Forgeries of James Macpherson and Thomas Chatterton (1986), Faking It: Art and the Politics of Forgery (1987), Romantic Period Writings 1798–1832: An Anthology (1998 co-edited with Zachary Leader) and Brave New Causes: Women in British Postwar Fictions (1998 co-written with Deborah Philips).

• Illustrations; Abbreviations; Introduction; Part I. 'A New Area in Our History': 1. The people's Enlightenment: the radical diffusion of knowledge in the late eighteenth century; 2. Writing for their country: the plebeian public sphere in the 1790s; 3. The pax femina? Hannah More, counter-revolution, and the politics of female agency; Part II. 'Virtuous Public Excitement': 4. The Palladium of liberty: radical journalism and repression in the postwar era; 5. 'Democratic fervour and journal ascendancy': popular culture and the 'unstamped' wars of the 1830s; Part III. A Literature of Their Own: 6. The Chartist revolution; 7. Fathers of the cheap press or 'able speculators'? Edward Lloyd and George W. M. Reynolds; 8. The rights and wrongs of women; 9. Acts of oblivion: 1848 and after.