"Orator" Hunt Henry Hunt and English Working-class Radicalism

This first full-scale biography finally brings to light Hunt's vital role in molding the English working-class into an effective political force. Converted to the reform cause during the wars against Napoleonic France, Hunt gave popular radicalism a distinctly working-class perspective that countered the contemporary belief in a laissez-faire political economy. Hero of the unrepresented and repressed, scourge of the moderate reformers and gradualists, Hunt set the standard for the Chartist challenge. This work, based on a wide range of primary sources, reassessed Hunt's influential career and illuminates a formative period in the development of radical politics in England.