This study of English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government 'Terror' of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism challenges conventional distinctions between 'high' and 'low' culture, revealing the links between the political underworld and literary culture, poverty, crime and prophetic religion.

This highly acclaimed study draws on information from spy reports and contemporary literature to look at English popular radicalism during the period between the anti-Jacobin government "Terror" of the 1790s and the beginnings of Chartism. The book traces for the first time the history of the underground revolutionary-republican grouping founded by the agrarian reformer, Thomas Spence. Challenging conventional distinctions between "high" and "low" culture, McCalman illuminates the darker, more populist sides of Romanticism. Radical Underworld broadens the conventional boundaries of popular politics and culture by exploring a political underworld connected with poverty, crime, prophetic religion, and literary culture.

McCalman vividly evokes the milieu and culture which revolutionary artisans shared with the celebrated engraver-poet William Blake ... the radical mouthpieces of a rich, fascinating, and too little known underground radical culture of the world we have lost. Roy Porter, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences