In November 1822, London’s New Times newspaper related the trial of a ‘wretched’, ‘shameless’ and ‘abandoned’ woman who appeared before the court of the King’s Bench.^[1] Susannah Wright was facing charges of blasphemy for the sale of two pamphlets from the notorious Fleet Street bookshop of imprisoned radicals Jane and Richard Carlile. A young Nottingham lace-worker, Susannah answered the Carlile’s calls for volunteers to keep the bookshop open and, assured of the support of her ‘atheistical friends’, vowed to ‘attend to the business at all risk’.^[2] Like the Carliles before her, and the legion of volunteers who followed, Susannah was soon prosecuted; in her case, for the sale of two tracts penned by Richard Carlile from his Dorchester prison cell. During her first trial in July 1822 she conducted her own defence, which lasted a formidable four hours. Retiring from the court to attend her to her baby, Wright returned to conclude her case, advising the Jury to ‘be firm and do your duty’ and insisting that she both scorned ‘mercy and demand[ed] justice’.^[3] The jury obliged, swiftly returning a guilty verdict. It would be four months before Wright again returned to court for sentencing. This time, her notoriety attracted more of the public gaze in both crowd numbers and press interest. When offered the opportunity to address the court in ‘plea of mitigation of punishment’ Wright instead challenged the validity of her guilty verdict, arguing that Christianity had no place in the law. The Chief Justice issued repeated warnings to her to desist from profaning the law and the church in his court. To the amusement of the crowded courtroom she retorted, ‘You, Sir, are paid to hear me’.^[4] Infuriated by her obstinacy the Judge sentenced Wright (and by default her infant) to be confined for 10 weeks in the loathed Newgate prison to deliberate on her plea.

Susannah Wright, the Carliles, and the other radicals who appear fleetingly in this essay, constitute a fragment of those prosecuted throughout the 1820s for political and religious heterodoxy. These prosecutions occurred at precisely the time when, Linda Colley contends, Britain began to unify as a nation.^[5] Colley’s seminal account of the forging of a British identity argues that unity was an expression of difference from an alien ‘other’; from France, from Catholicism and later from races encountered in the Empire. While Colley’s primary focus is on the forging of a national sense of identity from a collision with an ‘other’ located outside Britain’s immediate borders, she does concede both that Britishness was never all embracing and that internal schisms also had a role to play in the formation of a national identity in the period after Waterloo. ‘With little left to fear from without, and lacking now such an obviously hostile other across the Channel’, Colley argues:

Where criticism has been directed at Colley’s exceptionally well-received work, it has been for her neglect of the Irish question, her reliance on an uncontested notion of Protestantism, and for underplaying the internal struggle for an inclusive political nation.^[7] Colley sidesteps the ‘othering’ which continued at the veritable centre of the British world and overlooks the way in which internal contests contributed to the formation of a sense of Britishness.

The scope of this article allows only for a brief exploration of the type of ‘othering’ which occurred within the metropole far from the collision with an ‘alien other’. My focus is on the threat posed to Colley’s internal cohesion by the first vigorous wave of popular political dissent in the early decades of the nineteenth century and how the British elite responded to marginal political and freethinking groups.^[8] By prosecuting radicals under repressive new legislation, the authorities inscribed political heterodoxy with criminality — the radical was located both physically and morally with the much maligned and feared criminal ‘other’.^[9] Both the response by the authorities and the resistance of radicals reveals the fault-lines in the forging of the nation where white ‘home grown’ British subjects were being ‘othered’ on the basis of gender, of politics and of class. It reveals an internal struggle over what it meant to be British.

Ostensibly, Susannah Wright represented ‘the other’ in numerous respects. She was provincial in the metropolitan epicentre of the British world; she was a radical, beyond the pale of respectable politics; and she was a woman at a time when the public face of politics was dominated by men. To this the State sought to add a further label of otherness: she was a criminal. The attempts by radicals to resist the imposition of a criminal identity were couched in the language of both historic and natural rights. They saw the privileges of the freeborn English as the heritage of all. Here was the vision of an inclusive Britishness that is worth recording.

Despite the often deep ideological and organisational divisions in the nascent popular radical movement, radicals of all persuasions sought to reform the old order based on Church and King. Colley contends that most retained ‘a gut belief in the fundamental worth of the institution even as they called for its thoroughgoing reform’; their dissent was ‘expressed as much if not more in support for the nation state, as it was in opposition to the men who governed it’.^[10] Colley’s contention that radicals simply wanted ‘in’ to the existing political system has a strong foundation. But it perhaps undervalues the fact that in getting ‘in’ radicals were envisioning a new social and political order — whether (or not) it was from within existing political frameworks. The call for universal manhood suffrage was perhaps the most public and overt threat posed by radicals to Britain’s ruling elite, but radicalism also menaced much more. Elijah Riding, an energetic Lancashire radical, enthused that ‘Reform, revolution, improvement, innovation and regeneration are the talismatic words of the present time’.^[11] Radicalism offered the disenfranchised, the uneducated, the hungry, the poor and the powerless access to the privileges of ‘Britishness’.

Radical groups employed the discourse of ‘rights’ to both define these privileges and to argue an end to the status as the ‘other’ for a large majority of the populace. They championed the natural, intrinsic rights of man through the social and political frameworks set down by Thomas Paine. The dissemination of knowledge and instruction based on rational thought and reason was vital to achieve a more inclusive political nation.^[12] Although Paine rejected the British Constitution as ‘Political Popery’ for favouring the elite ‘parasites’ and for disentitling ‘at least ninety-nine parts of the nation out of a hundred’,^[13] many radical groups saw no incongruity in also appealing to the historic rights of Britons which they maintained had been guaranteed by the ancient Constitution but from which they had been dispossessed by the ‘Banditti’ — the ‘robbers’ of the ‘so-called higher classes’.^[14]

The spread of radicalism caused genuine fear among the British authorities. The ‘Nobility, Gentry, Clergy and Freeholders of the County of Durham’ might have spoken for many in the British elite when they lamented that ‘we cannot view without apprehension, the rapid strides which sedition and blasphemy are everywhere making’.^[15] They invoked their own claim as constitutional defenders when they argued that ‘publications of the most dangerous tendency are circulated in all parts of the empire, urging the people to disregard their duty to their God, to throw off their allegiance to the King, and to trample under foot our glorious constitution’.^[16] Their concerns were well founded. Between 1819 and 1821 the British government witnessed overt public discontent on an unprecedented scale and it responded with a raft of repressive legislation which criminalised all forms of heterodox political and religious expression. The Six Acts were passed in 1819 following the mass demonstration at Peterloo, aiming to cripple the burgeoning radical movement and all its outlets by placing severe restrictions on the numbers allowed at political meetings (only 50); by increasing newspaper duties to push even the cheaper radical publications outside the reach of the vast majority of people; and through the introduction of new banishment laws which meant that a radical charged with a repeat offence for blasphemy or sedition could now face transportation. They enshrined the centrality of the Church within British society by linking seditious and blasphemous libels as equally heinous and punishable by law. Moreover, the suspension of habeas corpus two years earlier allowed for the most ruthless form of containment; with the empowerment of local magistrates to prosecute for sedition, treason and blasphemy, the country’s gaols swelled with political prisoners.

Through the criminalising of political and religious heterodoxy and the confinement of radicals in prison, the authorities attempted to add another layer of social ‘otherness’ to those already considered outside the political nation. Both social commentators and the popular literature of the period depicted criminals as members of an underclass – operating outside the social and moral codes of British society.^[17] By transgressing the laws which reflected the accepted mores of society, criminals could be classified as non-subjects, forfeiting the rights and privileges of ‘Britishness’. Radicals generally shared the prevailing attitude towards the criminal other. Veteran radical Francis Place excluded ‘that class of wretched beings who seldom or never labour, but live or linger on in existence by the habitual practice of vice, and the perpetuation of crime’ from his vision of a new ‘inclusive’ political nation.^[18] Similarly, Richard Carlile had no objection to the law being upheld for ‘real’ crime against person or property and for transgressors of those laws to be treated with force. He reflected in his Journal in 1830 that ‘laws can never be too severe, nor too severely administered, where they deal with nothing but real crimes’.^[19]

Place was keen to distance the sober, industrious working class from the taint of the criminal poor. Historians of crime in this period differ on the extent to which the general attitude to criminals and to crime resulted from class fear.^[20] Despite public exposure of upper class crime, criminality was generally associated with the poorer classes. As Clive Emsley argues, ‘since the great majority of offenders came from one social class it was logical to locate the causes of crime within what were generally perceived as vices of this class.’^[21] Further, he contends that crime was seen as just one of the ways that the moral deficiency and profligacy of sections of the poorer classes manifested itself.

Female criminality contained yet another layer of ‘otherness’. Lucia Zedner, who has to date produced the most comprehensive survey of women and crime in Victorian England, suggests that since women were generally considered more pure and moral by nature than men, the women who fell from this elevated pedestal through criminality were considered the very ‘negation of femininity’, and, as such, could be dehumanised and demonised as ‘monsters’.^[22] Female criminality was firmly conflated with prostitution and when the ultra-conservative New Times labelled Wright a ‘wretched and shameless woman’ and an ‘abandoned creature’ they immured her (and her blasphemy) with the most liminal of the criminal underworld — the women considered as whores and outcasts and among the most irreclaimable of the prison population. Similarly, Richard Carlile’s sister, Mary-Ann Carlile (who also endured a prison sentence in the Dorchester family cell for her work in the bookshop), was subjected to public deprecation from the centre of political power when Evangelical Christian and Tory MP, William Wilberforce, referred to her during a parliamentary debate as ‘wretched’ and ‘fallen’.^[23] Such high profile castigation acted to contain women’s public political involvement at a time when moral virtue was beginning to define the feminine ideal.

The approach to crime and criminality after the turn of the nineteenth century, suggests Victor Bailey, was to protect the ‘honest and independent poor’ from the ‘moral infection’ of marginal groups such as vagrants, prostitutes and thieves.^[24] To Bailey’s list we might add radicals and freethinkers. Reports such as those from John Stoddart’s New Times reflect the concern for the protection of younger minds from the corrupting influence of radicalism. They portrayed Wright as the harbinger of moral turpitude and the ‘monsters in female form’ who openly supported her as ignorant and repugnant vassals: ‘her horrid example has depraved the minds of others, who are perhaps already mothers of families, or to whom the temporal and eternal happiness of a future offspring may be committed’.^[25] By 1821, almost half the English population was under 20 years of age and the young, particularly from the poorer classes, were increasingly perceived as posing a new problem to the moral and social order.^[26] So when radicals began to talk publicly in pamphlets and in trials denying the divinity of Jesus and speaking of Christ as an imposter and a murderer,^[27] they were identified as a threat to the very moral fibre of the under-aged country. In the trial of William Tunbridge, another of the Carlile shop volunteers, the Lord Chief Justice forewarned that:

London’s more mainstream and better known Times newspaper also conceded that it ‘would be a most extraordinary state of society in which the privilege of defaming that religion on which all its institutions were built should be conceded’.^[29] Trial reports suggest that the Judges saw it both as their legal and moral duty to prosecute radicals as not simply a matter of law, but of upholding the moral character and well-being of the nation by protecting the sanctity of its very basis, that of the Church.^[30]

By the early-nineteenth century Judges could choose from two types of prisons in which to confine and punish those threatening the prevailing British way of life. By the 1820s the concepts of crime and punishment had undergone vigorous debate and change and were reflected in new prison architecture and new attitudes towards criminals. Prisons built after the mid 1790s realised the reform vision of separate and solitary confinement, mandatory religious instruction, hard labour, and sometimes brutal hygiene measures, to effect moral reform and spiritual redemption. These new prisons, such as Coldbath Fields and Dorchester, operated alongside the (sometimes) ancient, unreformed and hitherto unregulated prisons such as Newgate. Despite earning the epithet the ‘mansion of misery’ by radicals in the 1790s, by 1820 the architectural plans of Newgate prison still allowed for the separate confinement of political prisoners in the State side of the prison, revealing a spacial hierarchy of criminal ‘otherness’.^[31] Radicals in this period entered prisons under conditions quite unlike their 1790s counterparts. The newly regulated prison system dispensed with the old prison economies which allowed wealthier or well supported prisoners to purchase comforts and separate accommodation to cushion the harsher effects of prison life.

During the 1820s radicals were dispersed among both old and new prisons. Radical literature of this period is rich in episodes in which political prisoners not only defied the identity of the criminal other — but also contested the authority, purpose and legitimacy of the prison and the authorities, regardless of the type of prison a Judge chose. Radicals at several different prisons reported being banned from the otherwise mandatory chapel services for proving so fractious and irreverent. Indeed, they regularly taunted the prison chaplains to engage in debates over the validity of the Christian religion. Nor did they acquiesce quietly in their confinement; many petitions were organised from prison complaining of their treatment, and many fierce letters were penned to those they held responsible for their incarceration.

Foremost in their defiance of the ‘othering’ imposed by their criminal status was the demand for the right to be separated from the ‘common’ criminal, both in terms of physical location and the conditions under which they were held. The radical Whig MP Henry Grey Bennet noted in his 1818 report into conditions at Newgate prison that little attempt had been made to classify prisoners so that the ‘political libeller was confined with the perjured, fraudulent and persons convicted for attempts to commit abominable crimes’.^[32] William Linton, writing the biography of radical stalwart James Watson, protested with indignance that during his second term in Clerkenwell prison Watson had been forced to petition parliament after being ‘subjected to the companionship of the vilest and most brutal criminals, a compelled listener to the most horrid swearing and the grossest licentiousness, refused even occasional withdrawal to the retirement of a solitary cell.’^[33] Of all the complaints reported by imprisoned radicals in the entire period they found their treatment under the same rules and conditions as felons the most galling. Thomas Riley Perry’s 1825 petition from Newgate objected that ‘the regulations of the prison place your Petitioner under the treatment of a convicted felon; all which annoyances, and degrading regulations amount to a total exclusion of all your Petitioners friends’.^[34] They particularly sought ‘the removal of those grievances which place the moral Philosopher, on the same footing with convicted felons.’^[35]

Fortuitously for the radicals, the spread of popular radicalism in the early decades of the nineteenth century gave them a crucial advantage in effecting their physical separation from other classes of prisoners. The authorities were now even more alert to the dangers of exposing the ‘morally-wanting’ to the apostasy of radical views and publications. Mary-Ann Carlile complained that the Carliles’ access to the prison yards for fresh air and exercise was severely restricted because of the fears of the magistrates that they would ‘corrupt their Christian felons with a glimpse of Reason and Truth’.^[36] Yet in spite of the forced separation between radicals and the ‘common criminals’, radicals often scoffed at the fears of the prison authorities, believing that most prisoners were incapable of understanding the most basic tenets of Richard Carlile’s radical texts; ‘the men who are generally the inmates of such places will not take the trouble to examine either Christianity or atheism’.^[37]

Prominent radical prisoners did make some use of their access to public forums to expose more general prison abuses. Henry Hunt, confined in Ilchester Gaol in 1820, claimed to have assisted fellow inmates with letter writing and petitioning before composing his pamphlet A Peep into Prison to document the widespread abuses within the gaol.^[38] He also used the example of his own intervention in general prison affairs at his ‘own personal risk, and by my own exertions’ to aid the wider prison community to accuse Richard Carlile of self-interest in focusing only on his own prison hardships during a fierce public brawl between the rival radical spokesmen conducted from their prison cells.^[39] Carlile’s retort was to claim that he had been subjected to harsher conditions than Hunt; he had been forced to endure the tyranny of ‘solitary’ confinement because of the threat posed by his exposure to the other prisoners. Hunt’s pamphlet and the magistrates inquiry which followed did lead to changes in the management and conditions at the prison (albeit temporarily) both for Hunt and the other prisoners.

Where radicals did intervene to expose the abuses of the prison regimes, they generally appear to have done so to highlight their own grievances. The general tone of radical prison writing suggests a disdain for other prisoners. Richard Hassell, another of the Carlile shopmen, coolly remarked in 1826, ‘I never felt the least interest in the fate of any one who was executed [in Newgate]’.^[40] Yet the fears of prison authorities and magistrates for the potential for contagion from political prisoners to the wider prison community were not entirely unfounded. The case of Edward Cockerill, a young forger awaiting execution in Newgate, caused radicals to momentarily rethink their view of the general prison population. In an effort to alleviate overcrowding in the gaol, the Keeper moved Cockerill to the State side of the prison for the six weeks prior to his execution. There he shared a ward with imprisoned Carlile shopmen William Campion, John Clarke and Richard Hassell.^[41] The radicals reported that Cockerill ‘had the free use of our library, and the benefit of some philosophical and blasphemous conversations’ and, despite being a ‘stranger to infidelism’, he read with ‘avidity’ during the six weeks. By the time of his execution, they claimed, he had ‘imbibed our principles’.^[42]

To the disgust and despair of the prison chaplain, the Keeper, and the conservative press, Cockerill refused religious consolation and shunned God during the entire proceedings at the gallows.^[43] His radical roommates instead had prepared him with the ‘consolation of philosophy’ to see his fate as the ‘inevitable result of life’ as ‘merely the termination of sensation, a perfection of that state of unconsciousness which he nightly experiences in an inferior degree’.^[44] The conservative press reported his long and painful death on the gallows as a consequence of his impiety, juxtaposing it against the instant death of a fellow condemned prisoner who had allowed the presence of God during his final days.^[45] Perhaps unsurprisingly, the radicals instead related a different version of events, where the two men suffered equally at the gallows.

Such a public conversion to the infidel cause from one facing imminent death was abhorrent to the Christian community in early-nineteenth century Britain. It was also a direct affront to the central tenet of prison reform, which now aimed to redeem the fallen criminal through mandatory religious instruction. Campion reported that the incident ‘occasioned the consultation of a coterie of Alderman’ who determined that ‘no more prisoners were to be mixed with us, and that all communication between us and any other prisoners should, as far as possible, be prevented’.^[46] The risk posed by the seepage of such heretical views through the wider prison population created a spacial conundrum for the prison authorities. The four rooms that housed the remaining three radical prisoners in Newgate in 1826 would have otherwise accommodated between 40 and 50 prisoners in other parts of the prison. As Campion quipped, the prison authorities had only three choices: send in more prisoners to share the space and risk their ‘souls be[ing] lost to Jehovah — or keep the yard solely for us — or send us to another prison.’^[47] Indeed, the men claimed a significant victory, reporting triumphantly that their endeavours had resulted in a permanent change to prison rules. Special legislation was enacted to effect their removal from Newgate to the Giltspur Street Compter which decreed that ‘no prisoners convicted on charges of misdemeanour should from that time be kept in the gaol of Newgate’.^[48]

It was not only in their agitation for separate accommodation that radicals were able to defy their containment in the prison space. By continuing to disseminate their trenchant political and social messages through prison publications, the imprisoned shopmen who formed the editorial collective of Newgate Monthly Magazine in 1824 were drawing on a long tradition of literary pursuit from within prisons walls.^[49] As Kevin Gilmartin has observed, the ‘ability to work through repression, and especially imprisonment, became a litmus test for the viability of radical protest in print.’^[50] It was; but prison publications also suggest much more. They were a manifest form of prisoner resistance and an outlet for the expression of political identity. As radical poet Elijah Ridings wrote to the editors:

The use of ‘Newgate’ in the title of the magazine announced clearly to the wider public that the walls of the prison would not serve to silence them, nor suppress the right to a free press. For radical supporters, Carlile’s own prison publications and the shopmen’s Newgate Monthly Magazine, provided a legitimising intellectual activity for what James Epstein has termed Britain’s ‘other’ political nation.^[52] The Newgate Monthly Magazine was heralded as a publication of ‘the greatest utility’, and as a ‘medium for the interchange of sentiments uncorrupted by the prejudices of the times, and untainted by servility’.^[53]

Perhaps the greatest irony of this period of radicalism was that the confined space of the prison allowed for a freer expression of radical principles than was possible outside the prison walls. In the tradition of radicals imprisoned at the beginning of the ‘reign of terror’ in the 1790s, Richard Carlile successfully continued his publishing business from his cell in Dorchester prison; and like his earlier counterparts his cell afforded him a measure of protection from further prosecution. As the New Times remonstrated, imprisonment did not ‘in the slightest degree check the publication of fresh blasphemies on [Carlile’s] part’.^[54] Carlile’s freedom to publish his trenchant political journal, the Republican, was also noted in parliamentary debates. Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, Tory MP and confessed member of the prosecuting loyalist group, the Society for the Suppression of Vice,^[55] noted indignantly yet with reluctant acceptance:

The leniency with which the authorities approached the prison publications (choosing instead to prosecute those responsible for selling the literature) suggests that attempts to silence radicals in prison might have been regarded as contrary to a fundamental British right. During Susannah Wright’s trial for the sale of tract penned by Carlile from his prison cell, she maintained that it would be ‘scandalous indeed to shut the mouth of a man in prison’.^[57] Radical complaints of being denied the use of pens, books and paper drew much public sympathy. Even conservative commentators, such as those from the Courier newspaper, observed that such deprivations acted to magnify their punishment in comparison to felons who were unaccustomed to such necessities.

Through their publications radicals argued forcefully against attempts to strip them of their rights. They vehemently denied the criminality of their actions, maintaining their right to publish and promote what they considered amounted to mere opinions. Crucially, not only were radicals being deprived their liberty as freeborn Britons, but also their natural rights of humanity, of inquiry, of reason and of truth.

In this way, radicals used the treatment meted out by the authorities to question which side of the political divide had the ‘truer’, more authentic vision for Britain. Because they spoke for the whole nation (albeit with the exception of the criminal other) radicals both believed and promoted the fact that theirs was a purer patriotism, a more legitimate claim to ‘Britishness’. It was the State that was behaving like the oppressive regimes on the continent in ‘un-British’ ways. As the editor of the Black Dwarf scolded in the wake of Susannah Wright’s trial (in characteristically gendered terms):

This is Colley’s Britishness with a twist.

Through the prison publications, the radical community found a collective voice with which to object to the un-British nature of the treatment of radicals in prison. Supporters rallied across the country to protest the actions of the government and to raise subscription funds for imprisoned radicals and their families. Even though radicals maintained that special juries were employed to secure convictions against them, trial by jury was still seen by radicals as the ‘bulwark of our liberties’.^[60] As W.A. Johnson’s impassioned letter to the radical weekly the Black Dwarf in 1822 asserted:

Clearly radicals saw that their sense of Britishness involved defending both the natural right of ‘truth’ and the historic right of ‘liberty’.

Susannah Wright’s trial defence also shows that the two rights discourses were not incompatible for radical ends, even for a staunch disciple of Thomas Paine. She provided the historical example of the futility of such prosecutions against reason and truth; ‘As the blood of the Christian martyrs became the seed of the Christian Church, so shall our sufferings become the seed of free discussion’. James Epstein argues that in the radical trial of Joseph Gerrald in 1794, Gerrald — a Godwinite and believer in natural rights — was forced by the court room environment to couch his defence in terms of ‘our ancient constitution’.^[62] Wright’s defence invoked the language of historic rights, but without any overt appeal to the constitution. Rather her appeal to the freedom of expression and opinion rang with overtones of the rights of the freeborn English. That Carlile could not respond to his detractors in the clergy ‘without dooming some member of his family to a dungeon’ left Wright to question, ‘Is this a land of liberty?’^[63] She appealed to the Jury to ‘discountenance’ the persecutions led by the ‘bigoted, tyrannical and the dishonest’ to ‘stay the disgrace which it leaves on our Courts of Law and on the country at large’. Yet the defence was performed in the language of natural rights as well: ‘Is it become a blasphemy and profaneness to wish for universal and constant peace among the human race, or to point out the means of attaining it? Is it blasphemy … to recommend the best of all charities, a mutual toleration of opinions?’ The nature of the 1820s prosecutions for blasphemy necessitated an engagement with the discourses of natural rights; radicals argued that their vision of Britain allowed for the right to use reason, logic and inquiry to base one’s own opinions on truth alongside the rights enshrined by notion of the freeborn English.

The episodes discussed here suggest that the prison experiences of the early-nineteenth century radical have much to reveal about the development of a sense of Britishness and the rights and privileges it secured for ‘home grown’ British subjects. The prison language of radicalism in this period was the language of liberty, of reason, of truth and of humanity. Despite some fierce opposition to the use of constitutionalism by some quarters of the radical movement, clearly most did not consider that invoking the natural rights of man and those enshrined by the ‘ancient constitution’ as incompatible. The ‘moral torture’ of being immured with the criminal other gained the radical movement significant public attention and sympathy for the plight and status of political prisoners, allowing radicals to question the authorities’ vision of Britishness. As E. P. Thompson argued in his epochal Making of the English Working Class, it was the radical movement — the artisans and workers — who between the 1790s and 1836 made the notion of British rights — ‘of the rights of the press, of speech, of meeting and of personal liberty’ — their own.^[64]

That the authorities recognised the extent of this threat posed by Britain’s ‘other’ political nation is evident in the harsh repression of radical activity throughout these decades. By appealing to the ‘moral torture’ of co-habiting with criminals, radicals could amplify the injustice in trampling on their rights by treating them as felons. Despite the very real hardships suffered by radicals during this period, prison practices reveal concessions that were unavailable to other classifications of prisoners. Radicals believed that they had to fight hard to secure these concessions as part of their rights as freeborn Britons, but the authorities were just as keen to isolate them from the general prison population; the threat of contagion of their ideas to the wider prison population was simply too great. Both the physical separation from the general prison population, and the public sympathy aroused by the encroachment on their rights — both natural and historical — allowed radicals to resist the attempts by the authorities to stigmatize them as the criminal ‘other’. As for Susannah Wright, it is clear that prison inspired neither reform nor redemption. Following almost two years of imprisonment she returned to Nottingham to open a radical bookshop — continuing to champion the natural rights of all Britons and to resist all the layers of ‘otherness’ ascribed to her.