Perspectives on Peterloo at 200: Construing and Representing the Event

ABSTRACT The tragedy that became crystallized in cultural memory as ‘Peterloo’ provided one of the darkest pages in British history, but also one of the best documented nineteenth-century events. The interest of the press, and the large number of participants, produced a polyphonic, multifarious corpus made of reports, eyewitness accounts, memoirs and testimonies, as well as poetic and prose texts. As a critical introduction to this monographic issue of The Keats-Shelley Review, the article discusses ‘Peterloo’ as an event whose historical and sociopolitical significance is also dependent on its manifold representations across time, genres, and discourses. Both factual or fictional, texts, it is suggested, contributed to construing Peterloo as an event by interrogating and emplotting facts, thus determining their shape and significance.