Peterloo and ‘Fairburn’s Editions’

ABSTRACT John Fairburn's London firm published cheap print of many kinds, though often with a reformist political bent, over half a century from the 1790s. Among this prolific output was a poem entitled The Field of Waterloo in the year of that event. In price and address, however, this was somewhat of an outlier in their mass of sixpenny pamphlets. This essay examines the rhetorical and stylistic features of this pamphlet and its several contexts in the ongoing paper war over the French Revolution and its Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic aftermath. These contexts include the formation of a distinctive plebeian modernity, Fairburn’s usual stock in trade, as a form of cultural citizenship grounding claims to the political franchise.