I

The rapid circulation of news via print and the kind of breathless and panicked responses this could elicit from men in positions of authority were not new in 1830. The Reformation and the upheavals of the 1640s had pioneered new methods of political contestation.Footnote ¹⁵ The latter period had seen print weaponized for the spread of political disinformation, neatly defined in one recent intervention as ‘a process by which untruths were knowingly promulgated by partisan advocates with the aim of manipulating and mobilizing popular audiences’.Footnote ¹⁶

By the revolutionary decades of the late eighteenth century, the richly developed print culture of the wider Atlantic world could apparently support dizzyingly high circulations of individual texts. Few of these are more famous than Thomas Paine’s works, especially Common sense (1776) and Rights of man (1791–2). In recent decades, scholars have progressively downgraded the commonly cited numbers for the circulation of these texts. The work of Trish Loughran in particular revealed the typically cited figures for Common sense, which ranged from 100,000 to 500,000, as more the product of nationalist mythos than of archival research. William St Clair has made similar claims about the credibility-straining numbers used for the early circulation of Rights of man. Footnote ¹⁷ The point of such revisions is not, of course, to dispute the wider impact of what were still bestselling texts, but rather to ask for careful attention to be paid to their circulation as ‘an episode in material history’ as well as one in intellectual and political histories.Footnote ¹⁸For example, as well as being a standalone publication, Paine’s work circulated promiscuously as extracted paragraphs in other radical and, indeed, loyalist texts.Footnote ¹⁹ By imitation, excerption, and critique, these paragraphs shaped public discussion.

Will Slauter, in an important intervention, has made the case for historical studies of the paragraph as a unique reading technology, a specific form of political communication, and an efficient vehicle for news which was central to these developments. While its use blossomed from the late seventeenth century, Slauter places the decisive ‘politicization of the paragraph’ in the pivotal closing third of the eighteenth century. This focus on the formal qualities of the paragraph helps to explain why and how it became the ‘basic unit of political news’. It was integral to the copying cultures that sustained eighteenth-century newspapers, a pre-packaged module of news that could be slotted into an available space. As important as reproducibility, however, was the malleability of the paragraph. Its status as ‘a composite text ready to be revamped’ ensured it could be adapted for practical, ideological, or stylistic reasons to fit different publications.Footnote ²⁰

While Slauter’s focus was on the transatlantic circulation of news in the revolutionary Atlantic via the technology of the paragraph, there are compelling reasons to essay close microhistories of individual paragraphs to explore their functioning at later periods and to provide deep studies within national and regional cultures. In the UK context, it was precisely the kind of rapid circulation and dissemination that was facilitated by the paragraph that so alarmed elites from the 1790s onwards. The paragraph was an extremely effective delivery mechanism for those intellectual toxins that loyalist elites feared would ‘poison’ the minds of the people at large.Footnote ²¹ The advent of a cheap newspaper press, especially after 1816 and the innovation of William Cobbett’s ‘twopenny trash’, a cheaper version of his Weekly Political Register, was an especially fraught moment.Footnote ²² Cobbett himself was a pioneer in asserting the political importance of paragraphs as part of his focus on grammar as a weapon of political mobilization: ‘The actions of men proceed from their thoughts. In order to obtain the co-operation, the concurrence, the consent of others we must communicate our thoughts to them.’Footnote ²³ The building blocks for this communication were properly composed sentences and paragraphs.

The combination of paragraphs of free-circulating news and insurgent popular radicalism led directly to sustained discussion of and legislation for what constituted news. An effort was made to provide a legal definition of a newspaper in the Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, one of the notorious six acts passed in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo massacre; the act defined newspapers as:

The act thus provided a new departure from existing efforts to criminalize radical print, which had been pursued with mixed results. By weaponizing the fiscal system and bringing radical print within an existing regime of taxes on advertisements, paper, and stamps, the government ensured that paragraphs of news would be explicitly priced beyond the resources of working-class audiences.Footnote ²⁵

The radical press did not simply die in 1820. Embattled titles including the Republican and Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register were sustained, albeit within this new punishing regulatory context. New ventures such as the respectably Benthamite Westminster Review could be launched. In the immediate aftermath of the six acts, George IV’s ham-fisted efforts to achieve a parliamentary end to his marriage to Queen Caroline demonstrated that legislative efforts to restrict public news had their limits. In 1820, this cause célèbre saw an effervescent print culture emerge, as many radical journalists turned their pens and publications to offering searing critiques of the sexual politics of the British monarchy.Footnote ²⁶ It is impossible to doubt, however, that popular radicalism as it had existed between 1816 and 1819 in what E. P. Thompson dubbed its ‘heroic age’, was seriously constrained in its ability to access the powerful circulating mechanisms afforded by newsprint, and that this fact plays some role in explaining the apparent quiescence of the 1820s.Footnote ²⁷

The origins of ‘Nice pickings’ lay firmly within the efforts of radical journalists and editors to challenge and reverse these restrictions on the press. The literature on the so-called war of the unstamped after 1830 has tended to focus on its courageous open conflict with the law.Footnote ²⁸ From the autumn of 1830, several figures launched ventures which were self-conscious challenges to the definitional sleight of hand embodied in the legislation of 1819. In the run-up to the opening of parliament, William Carpenter began a series of unstamped epistolary newspapers, expressly designed to evade the ‘taxes on knowledge’ by being unnumbered and not sharing the same title. Shortly afterwards, Henry Hetherington began a series of penny papers which would become in due course the Poor Man’s Guardian, perhaps the most famous of unstamped newspapers, and Richard Carlile launched The Prompter.Footnote ²⁹ This penny press, with its open defiance of authority, played a major role in politicizing communities in the 1830s and 1840s. The shape and tone of radical reform, early socialism, and the chartist movement would be impossible to explain without it.

‘Nice pickings’, however, represented a different dynamic not captured by this heroic narrative of open confrontation with authority. It appeared first in the Weekly Free Press in June 1830.Footnote ³⁰ That paper had begun life in 1825 as the Trades’ Newspaper and Mechanics’ Weekly Journal, supported by the incorporated trades and aimed expressly at providing British mechanics with ‘a Newspaper of their own’.Footnote ³¹ By 1829–30, the radical William Carpenter was part-owner and editor, and the paper was loosely an Owenite organ supported by the British Association for Promoting Co-operative Knowledge. The future radical chartist publisher John Cleave was an editorial assistant. It is quite possible that his own future career as an innovator, through his enormously successful unstamped Weekly Gazette, was shaped at the Weekly Free Press. Footnote ³² The Press advertised itself in the provincial papers as the best edited newspaper in the metropolis and one that could reach Leeds and other northern cities fully twenty-four hours ahead of the London Sunday papers. If not perhaps in the first tier, it was certainly one of the go-to sources of paragraphs for both provincial and, indeed, other metropolitan papers and was a regular staple in many reading rooms.Footnote ³³

As opposed to a gauntlet laid down and a deliberate provocation to government, ‘Nice pickings’ undermined the authority of the existing regime more insidiously. Much more like the kind of pathogen feared by conservative commentators – ‘the pestiferous miasmata which spring from the publications of the Cobbetts and Carliles of the day’ – it spread through the mechanism of rapidly circulating daily and weekly news.Footnote ³⁴ Free-standing radical newspapers could be met by prosecution or indifference. The runaway growth of the London and provincial press, its speed of circulation, and the widespread copying and recycling of news left it much more open to the sorts of viral disinformation in which the single paragraph might excel.

II

In formal terms, ‘Nice pickings’ was custom-made to take advantage of what the experienced editor Gibbons Merle called ‘the paste and scissars [sic] part of the process of putting a newspaper together’.Footnote ³⁵ Comprising around 150 words and a string of numbers, it was presented in a visually arresting list format. Somewhere between a paragraph and a table, the piece was ideal fodder for editors looking to fill small gaps in their columns.

The figures that made up ‘Nice pickings’ were lifted directly from a highly circulated 1820 pamphlet, A peep at the peers. This was attributed to the radical editor of Lewis’s Coventry Recorder, William Greatheed Lewis, and had run to at least four editions.Footnote ³⁶ It presented an alphabetical list of all of the peers of England, Scotland, and Ireland, along with itemized lists of their offices, grants, and preferments. The pamphlet had been published by the radical William Benbow, who had set up shop in London as part of the city’s underworld of radicalism, piracy, and pornography.Footnote ³⁷ The Peep was dedicated to Queen Caroline and, while its politics were clear from both content and publisher, the pamphlet nonetheless essayed a tone of studied neutrality: ‘We are mere compilers of facts. We have not the presumption to put ourselves forwards as Legislators, or as Political Economists.’

Its producer was also perfectly candid about its inaccuracies and breezily assumed that the figures drawn from place and pension lists from twelve years before their publication would still be broadly accurate. Even then, precision was a subsidiary concern: ‘who can believe it is possible for us to have secured accuracy as to every fact? We ourselves have no such pretension.’Footnote ³⁸ The figures were, in fact, woefully inaccurate, and they dramatically inflated incomes from pensions, reversions, and sinecures, the key pillars of old corruption. Such sources of income had been briskly eroded under the governments of Lord Liverpool and Wellington, with the result that figures that were out of date and inaccurate in 1820 were even more erroneous a full decade later.Footnote ³⁹

The base data presented in the original 1830 version of ‘Nice pickings’ were sourced from the Peep but new dimensions were added. First, while the list began with temporal peers, it was comprised overwhelmingly of bishops, tallying the value of their different livings. Second, while versions of the aggregate figures cited at the top of the piece – for the sums received by peers and their families sitting and not sitting in parliament – had featured in the Peep, an arresting final calculation was included in ‘Nice pickings’. This presented how many families could be sustained comfortably should the huge total figure be divided evenly among them.

From the Weekly Free Press ‘Nice pickings’ circulated via the copying vectors of the UK press in two distinct waves. The first, in June 1830, saw the paragraph picked up in a number of provincial newspapers, especially in Ireland.Footnote ⁴⁰ The second, more sustained wave, took place in the aftermath of a hotly contested general election, in the wake of another revolution in France, which had prompted widespread excitement and alarm across the UK, and at the formal commencement of the sustained and intensive period of frequently violent agricultural protest known as the Swing rising.

The key prompt for this second wave was the republication of ‘Nice pickings’ in the reformist Carlisle Journal in August 1830. This republication in a hotbed of radicalism and contentious politics demonstrates that cultures of copying were not simply a case of provincial papers recycling news from the metropolitan press.Footnote ⁴¹ Indeed, one prompt for Merle’s tour d’horizon of the provincial press had been the clear sense that, by 1830, it was being conducted by editors of ‘increased skill and talent’, capable of crafting editorial articles as well as cutting and pasting text from the London papers.Footnote ⁴² In this case, however, London and other papers lifted ‘Nice pickings’ directly from the Carlisle Journal. As in the first wave, the piece was usually printed verbatim, as an ideal and eye-catching paragraph to fill a gap.Footnote ⁴³ Indeed, one of the titles that ‘copied’ the paragraph in this second wave, from one of the London dailies, was the Weekly Free Press itself, adding a new gloss to present ‘some of the links which bind our Aristocracy and Clergy so closely to the support of the abuses which now glow in our glorious constitution’.Footnote ⁴⁴

In due course, some of these titles would become both alert to the loose factual foundations in the text and nervous about its radical origins and associations. The marquess of Bute, who headed the list of malefactors, was active in using the London dailies to refute the claims it made. He wrote to The Globe, which had published the offending article, and to The Times, which had not.Footnote ⁴⁵ The Morning Advertiser, two days after it included the paragraph, corrected the claims about Bute.Footnote ⁴⁶ Other papers printed letters from incredulous readers questioning the ‘tissue of infamous and mischievous lies’.Footnote ⁴⁷ In due course, newspapers including The Globe would print fuller retractions, by October referring to the piece as ‘a well known piece of calumny, called Nice Pickings, recently revived by a Carlisle paper, and inadvertently copied without examination by ourselves and other London papers’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Nonetheless, the paragraph, under its original title, still featured frequently in the provincial press at the end of November. By that point it had breached the four nations of the UK and gone global, appearing also in North American and Australian newspapers.Footnote ⁴⁹

By October the journey of ‘Nice pickings’ had also gone full circle, as the paragraph slipped from the newspapers back into the more popular forms of radical print from which its contents had initially emerged. The exploding circulation from there opened it up to the kind of adaptation, parody, and allusions that are characteristic of viral text.Footnote ⁵⁰ It existed as a single handbill or as part of a handbill in at least five distinct versions, published and printed in London, Devonport, Bristol, Bideford, Bath, Thorne, and Portsea. The wide circulation of these handbills was then reported back in newspapers, in correspondence between elites, and in parliament.Footnote ⁵¹

The version of the text that most vexed authorities was a single sheet, most commonly headed ‘Englishmen Read!!!’ The postmaster of that storm centre of the Swing disturbances, Maidstone, reported the handbill as ‘industriously circulated’ and key evidence that ‘Evil Spirits are doing every thing that lies in their power to excite and stir up the people.’Footnote ⁵² This sheet was the production of Henry Hetherington, a close friend and ally of Cleave.Footnote ⁵³ It was a masterclass in radical propaganda. As well as the addition of the bolded patriotic imperative, some of the questionable arithmetic about the scale of elite peculation and therefore the equivalent numbers of families who could be supported was corrected.

Other versions expanded the list of peers and added a passage lamenting the starving state of the English poor.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hetherington later coupled the text from ‘Nice pickings’ with reports on the violent disturbances in Kent under the title ‘“Swing,” eh!’Footnote ⁵⁵ Other forms appeared under the title ‘The truth and nothing but the truth’ and coupled the text of ‘Nice pickings’ with an illustration of the inequitable burden of taxation, a version of Cromwell’s speech on dissolving the Long Parliament, and either an affecting passage detailing the burdens experienced by a poor widow or a comprehensive breakdown of the alleged peculations of the Wellesley family.Footnote ⁵⁶

Finally, the ‘Nice pickings’ paragraph hitched itself to the most popular journalist of the age, William Cobbett. From September 1830, Cobbett was busy delivering a series of lectures at Richard Carlile’s rotunda, his ‘temple of liberty’ on the south bank of the Thames. Cobbett took in the French and Belgian revolutions and related these to the distress of the industrious classes in town and country, the rapacious tax-eating state which sustained this distress, and the need for radical parliamentary reform as a first step in addressing it. The critique was familiar to any reader of Cobbett’s Register. The fourth lecture gave him the opportunity to distil it into a petition to the new king. This petition appeared in the published editions of the lectures and more immediately in Cobbett’s Register on 18 September.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the latter it was presented as a ‘manifesto’ for the coming struggle of the industrious classes against the aristocracy. When the text of the petition circulated more widely, in single-sheet and short-pamphlet forms, the peroration praying for parliamentary reform was normally followed by the truncated text of ‘Nice pickings’.Footnote ⁵⁸

These different versions litter the Home Office records, a good indicator of the wide and usually very public distribution of these texts. In contrast to the circulating mechanism of the stamped newspaper press, wide circulation of handbills was achieved principally through supplying itinerant hawkers and travellers. Hetherington and others looked to exploit commercial methods that had been singularly effective in flooding the country with loyalist and radical print in the 1790s. ‘Nice pickings’ was offered at four for a penny, one hundred for a shilling and sixpence, while ‘“Swing,” eh!’ was advertised as being ‘distributed and sold in the open air’.

Hawkers certainly had rich opportunities at Michaelmas, Martinmas, and other busy fairs and markets, which were ‘the mainstay of the itinerant’s rural circuit’.Footnote ⁵⁹ At Stratton in Cornwall, for example, the bill was read aloud at the fair by the hawker William Cocks. A worried justice near Barnstaple indicated that ‘The truth and nothing but the truth’ had been ‘most actively circulated amongst the Farmers and the lower classes at ever Fair and Market for this last month’. Another correspondent indicated something of the method in Barnstaple, which foreshadowed the kind of tactic that would become standard during the war of the unstamped: the Chelsea pensioner William Incledon sold straws for a penny and gave away the handbill with each purchase for free.Footnote ⁶⁰

III

By the close of 1830 ‘Nice pickings’ as a piece of text had achieved a remarkably wide circulation. This was clearly in large part down to its formal qualities, which made it exceptionally well suited to ride the vectors of early nineteenth-century print culture. The short and malleable format and the lack of any very controversial gloss or interpretive content made it a promising target for ‘paragraph grinders’ in the newspapers.Footnote ⁶¹ Its brevity and simple format similarly made it an attractive basis for popular handbills. Its content, however, also explains its wide circulation. The innovative radical publisher Henry Hetherington did not choose it as a passage to furnish a single-sheet handbill only because it was short and to the point.

There is abundant evidence of the peculiar influence of this paragraph across the second half of 1830. The fears of magistrates and elites were that the disinformation contained within ‘Nice pickings’ would lead to or was already generating action. They nervously recorded that the handbill had created ‘unpleasant feelings’ or ‘great mischief’.Footnote ⁶² Concerns were especially pronounced in those parts of England most affected by the Swing disturbances. What was most likely the Hetherington handbill was brought to parliamentary notice by Alexander Baring, MP for Callington, as one of those ‘outrageous and extravagant assertions’ which, along with parliamentary support from MPs such as Joseph Hume, were undermining the public peace.Footnote ⁶³ A fortnight after his speech, Baring could further lament the influence of ‘Nice pickings’ when Swing rioters attacked his country house in Hampshire, one of the most disturbed counties, and his son was ‘nearly murdered’ in attempting to repel them.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the height of the Swing disturbances, at a meeting of Tonbridge in Kent, only some fifty of the more than three hundred summoned to act as special constables against rioters and incendiaries assented. Lord Brecknock had ‘Nice pickings’ thrust into his hands by ‘the principal recusants’, presumably as justification for their reticence.Footnote ⁶⁵

One piece of evidence further establishing this wider influence is that the paragraph prompted several, often quite detailed, refutations. As well as the published corrections by Bute and retractions by newspapers, tailored loyalist tracts and detailed refutations took on the principal claims of ‘Nice pickings’.Footnote ⁶⁶ One adopted the classic format of a series of letters to England’s farmers, and articulated fears that material circulation would act as a prompt to political organization and action:

While its form clearly contributed substantially to this wide circulation and dynamic effect, what was it about the contents of ‘Nice pickings’ that also explains its rapid spread and its impact on elites? First, the figures it provided represented a working-class intrusion into a political culture increasingly defined by the presence of numbers and the use of statistics. It was not entirely novel, of course, for radicals to forward statistical evidence to support their evaluative arguments. Paine, for example, had included lists of data and tables in laying out his ideal form of government in the second part of Rights of man, and lists and tables were a common means of visualizing the extent of aristocratic influence in parliamentary elections.Footnote ⁶⁸ The source for ‘Nice pickings’ presented statistical information within an alphabetical directory of peers.

More substantially, John Wade, the crusading utilitarian journalist, frequently deployed figures and tables in his unmasking of the corruption on which the British state rested. His Extraordinary black book, published in individual numbers in 1819 and then as a single volume in 1820, treated in painstaking detail the mechanisms that effected the unjust transfer of wealth from the industrious to the idle. He was in the midst of revising his work for republication and it was ‘passing through the press’ as Wellington’s government reached its crisis in 1830. The revised edition included gargantuan alphabetized lists, taking up more than a hundred pages, of placeholders, pensioners and sinecurists, bishops, dignitaries, and pluralists, ‘the names and emoluments of those who chiefly profit by its abuses and perversions’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This more substantial form of annotated demonology, like ‘Nice pickings’, reached into the 1840s and beyond. It was reimagined by the formidable Leeds radical publisher Alice Mann and generated other imitators.Footnote ⁷⁰

The presentation of more or less unvarnished numbers was less common, especially in the kind of handbill format by which ‘Nice pickings’ circulated most widely. The milieu around the Weekly Free Press from which it first emerged was precisely those overlapping groups of radical and Owenite artisans identified by Lawrence Goldman as precocious statisticians ‘trying to defeat dogma by data, and ideology by numbers’.Footnote ⁷¹ The figures stood on their own as a distilled version of one of the most persuasive arguments for parliamentary reform. The trope of old corruption had been a powerful mobilizer in the post-war period of insurgent mass radicalism. It remained the stock-in-trade of radicals like Cobbett and Hunt, who highlighted the class of rapacious tax-eaters who unjustly gorged on the wealth produced by the productive people at large. Indeed, Wade himself may have learned something from ‘Nice pickings’. In the revised edition of his work he included a list of ‘Placemen and pensioners of the first class’, which fitted onto a single page and whose arresting calculations would be used to furnish reform arguments, articles, and letters in the months to come.Footnote ⁷²

It was crucial that the initial publication of ‘Nice pickings’ did not make these claims of corruption explicit, but simply presented the information in a relatively neutral and visually attractive manner. This had earned it entry into the bloodstream of the metropolitan and provincial newspaper press. In turn, this very publication history became a powerful part of the rhetorical appeal of the piece as it appeared in more popular forms. The most widely circulated version cited the source for the figures as the Morning Advertiser for 26 August 1830. That paper, having itself copied the passage from the Carlisle Journal, speedily threw doubt onto the accuracy of the figures.Footnote ⁷³ Nevertheless, for Hetherington, the source was a carefully chosen one. The Morning Advertiser was one of a number of weekly trade newspapers, this one established by publicans. This ensured wide circulation and high visibility. In common with other trade titles, the Advertiser was also avowedly non-partisan.Footnote ⁷⁴

The attribution to the Morning Advertiser aimed to transfer claims of political neutrality and independence to the artefacts of radical journalists. In a period when the notion of journalistic ethics and objectivity was in flux, this sleight of hand conferred the emerging authority of the commercial press onto a piece of calculated political disinformation circulated most industriously by the conductors of what Lord Eldon had contemptuously dismissed a decade before as the ‘pauper press … administering to the prejudices and passions of a mob’.Footnote ⁷⁵ When the radical Bath printer Samuel Bennett came under fire from the municipal authorities, who sent a copy of his version of the handbill to Sir Robert Peel at the Home Office, he used the origins of the passage in the ‘respectable’ London press as part of his published defence:

In most versions, however, ‘Nice pickings’ did not rely only on ‘the objective force of the mathematical’ for its impact on readers.Footnote ⁷⁷ Even the rough-and-ready calculation of the numbers of families such a sum could support furnished what might be termed now a form of ‘data storytelling’, where the apparently unburnished figures are deployed as a gateway to compelling narratives. The effect of stories in prompting political mobilization has formed a recent focus for work in the social sciences.Footnote ⁷⁸ The kinds of narrative into which the figures for ‘Nice pickings’ were most likely to lead were both familiar recent talking points and well calculated to maximize the impact of stories in appealing to readers’ emotions.

In fact, the principal narrative with which the text and figures of ‘Nice pickings’ were paired was one of the most meaningful stories of the previous year: the notion that England was suffering from ‘universal distress’. Certainly the persistence of acute distress across many parts of society was not in doubt. Bad harvests, along with the resumption of cash payments and changes within poor law provision, were the seedbed from which Swing would erupt in the countryside. Many manufacturing and export industries – masters, journeymen, and labourers alike – were suffering equally acutely from increased competition, the long-term fallout from the national financial crisis of December 1825, and the brutal realities of boom-and-bust economic cycles.Footnote ⁷⁹ Distress was the topic of 1830, especially when the king referred to distress only in ‘some parts of the United Kingdom’ in the speech opening parliament in February 1830. This ensured that public discussion would be dominated by rhetorical contests over how partial or universal the distress was and by endless debate around its causes and remedies.Footnote ⁸⁰

Unsurprisingly, ‘Nice pickings’ circulated prodigiously in the locus for many of these discussions, the English countryside. The emphasis on clerical emoluments and the ways in which that emphasis was framed lent it a ready appeal in this context. In a nuanced study of the politics of hunger in England, Carl Griffin has recently highlighted the persistence of the ‘discourse of starvation’ within languages of political protest.Footnote ⁸¹ One of the more widely circulated versions of ‘Nice pickings’ enshrined that language of starvation and looked forward to the melodramatic tropes of radical and chartist languages of hunger that would oppose the new poor laws in the 1830s and would reach their apotheosis in the much-mythologized ‘hungry forties’:

The figures for ‘Nice pickings’ acted as a cognitive gateway to this and many similar stories. Cobbett’s Letter to the king, for example, whose printed version ended with ‘Nice pickings’, contrasted the tax-eating of bishops and aristocrats with a working population degraded from ‘the best fed and best clad and most moral in the world’. This acute condition was grounded in a series of examples which rehearsed many of the exaggerated melodramatic tropes of Victorian stage and fiction:

‘Nice pickings’ therefore opened onto a range of emotive images and themes that had furnished public discussion over the preceding year.

Many of these had spread in ways similar to ‘Nice pickings’ itself. The idea of peasants as ‘beasts of burden’, dragging coals or other commodities, for example, began to radiate out from a story centred on Highworth in Berkshire at the very end of 1829.Footnote ⁸⁴ The Highworth tale was joined by accounts of labourers being auctioned or of teams of sixteen to twenty labourers yoked to wagons of flour and potatoes and bringing these thirty to forty miles from Cheshire into Manchester.Footnote ⁸⁵ It was a powerful trope. Impoverished, bestial peasantries were stock features of the English image of continental Catholic ‘others’ and so a ready index of a degraded Englishness. This was reinforced in the context of the revived and escalated agitations for the abolition of slavery, in which comparisons of domestic oppressions with West Indian slavery were extremely common.Footnote ⁸⁶

A version of this story ultimately reached parliament. On 25 February 1830, the fourth Earl Stanhope rose to propose that the House of Lords form a committee to inquire into the state of the nation. He was ably supported in a powerful speech by another ultra-tory, the fifth duke of Richmond, a veteran of Waterloo. The two men drew the glaring contrasts between a yoked peasantry in the once-free country of England. Richmond was a keen farmer, well known for his close relationship with his tenantry. He did not, however, base his account on personal experience. He instead focused on the mechanism that would, a few months later, lend ‘Nice pickings’ its own degree of authority: ‘those facts which were seen every day in the newspapers – that peasants, guiltless of any crime, were harnessed to waggons, and degraded to the labour of brutes’.Footnote ⁸⁷

IV

‘Nice pickings’ had an influence that far outweighed its relatively slight content and innocuous appearance. It circulated rapidly and widely using the mechanisms of a newspaper print culture still largely reliant on cutting and pasting copy between publications and via the part-oral, part-print practices of the itinerant hawker. The large number of extant copies of the text (in a range of different versions), the frequency of its presence as a cause of concern and comment to magistrates and elites, and the fact that it elicited a range of dedicated denials and counterblasts are all suggestive of this wider influence. From June 1830 its reuse and remediation exploded for a period of six months. In the following years, the phrase and some of the format of ‘Nice pickings’ as a shorthand for corrupt peculation reappeared intermittently in other contexts, but never with the same viral intensity as had marked its origins.Footnote ⁸⁸

As a case study of nineteenth-century viral text, ‘Nice pickings’ furnishes both conclusions about the origins of the reform movement after 1830 and suggestive hints about the wider relationship of the nineteenth-century press to popular politics. First, our understanding of the radical press as a head-on challenge to authority and to legitimate or stamped print should make space for other approaches. The war of the unstamped was carried on by espionage and infiltration as well as by open conflict. The argument developed here suggests that we should examine the rhetorical velocity of texts. By presenting what was either calculated disinformation – or at the very least data which was widely known to be unreliable – in the fashionable guise of facts or statistics, ‘Nice pickings’ earned easy entry into the bloodstream of British public discussion. Newspaper circulation, in turn, laundered this disinformation and added even greater authority to its dissemination in different, cheaper, and less regulated formats.

Second, viral text provides a window onto how connections were made not only between the press and popular politics in general, but also between different modes and styles of popular politics. Texts in circulation drew together movements which historians have otherwise treated as distinct. The close study of ‘Nice pickings’ demonstrates how political reference points could become common across a range of different groups and contexts. In the second half of 1830, these included metropolitan radicals, provincial editors and readers, and Swing insurgents. ‘Nice pickings’ furnished a ready and apparently evidence-backed shorthand for the corruption and misgovernment which all of these groups confronted.

Common landmarks were crucial in buttressing the ‘national’ reform movement that developed over the next eighteen months. Denials by peers who featured in the list, or retractions in the newspapers, or efforts to smear the content as ‘nice lying’ somewhat missed the central point of the text. The figures were out of date and inaccurate even when they had been first presented in 1820. What they did, however, was act as an effective focus for data storytelling and a lens for what Cobbett, Cleave, Hetherington, and other likely circulators regarded as a wider truth: that an inequitable organization of the polity and the economy saw the systematic transfer of wealth from the industrious classes to unproductive aristocrats and bishops. When this version of the data was coupled with other narratives – of the return of starvation, or of peasants treated as beasts of burden – ‘Nice pickings’ acted as a gateway to highly emotive and mobilizing stories which would underpin the popular understandings of reform after 1830.