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Seditious Libel

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the libel laws were used to repress rebellion against the government, but their implementation was inconsistent. Writers and producers of newspapers and radical literature were under constant threat of prosecution and, when taken to court, were often faced with a hostile judge and jury. A defendant’s counsel could raise points of law, but could not summarise the case on behalf of the defendant until 1836. On the other hand, the Home Office lacked the means to prosecute everyone who published seditious matter and the writers often took their chances and got away with it. The prosecutions dwindled because defendants frequently managed to obtain an acquittal by exploiting the language in which the arraignment was made, and the legal authorities gave up trying for all but the most serious cases.

The year of 1816 was known as ‘the year without a summer’, not only in England, but all over the world, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. The year before there had been a huge explosion in the Mount Tamboura volcano on the Dutch East Indies, which had been rumbling since 1812. Thirty-eight cubic miles of dust and ash was sent up into the atmosphere, the ash column rising thousands of feet. The debris, including vast quantities of sulphur, took a year to circulate, its sheer volume obliterating the sun. The result was a cold, wet and miserable 1816. It rained off and on from May to September and, without sunlight, temperatures dropped dramatically. In the English countryside crops rotted in the fields before they could be harvested and those that were gathered rotted in storage because of the damp. Farm labourers were put out of work and added to the unemployed soldiers returning from the war with Napoleon.