‘Good for the Public Example’: Daniel Isaac Eaton, Prosecution, Punishment and Recognition, 1793–1812

Abstract

To live as a radical in Britain during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an existence fraught with danger. Stigmatized as Jacobins, rabble-rousers, subversives and members of the so-called unruly ‘swinish multitude’, radical artisans and literati alike faced a barrage of conservative propaganda, official legal repression and government persecution, and the sometimes more frightening intimidation of loyalist associations and militant Church and King mobs. This proscription at times made life as a reformer a virtual living hell and ultimately ‘rendered disloyalty unfashionable, sedition dangerous and insurrection almost impossible’.2 The prospects for radicals were unpromising and uninviting, to say the least. As one contemporary noted: ‘From the hot regions of a Court of Inquisition to the cold dark confines of the miserable Tolboothe [sic]; from the close fetid air of the dungeons of Newgate to the cold damp breezes of the Ocean. … These are the rewards and dispensations held out by our political Olympus to the swinish multitude. ’3 John Thelwall, the talented political orator and writer of the 1790s, recalled in 1819 how he was ‘proscribed and hunted — driven like a wild beast, and banished, like a contagion from society’.4