Disaffected Parties, 1688–1832

This first chapter provides an overview of some of the changing guises taken by disaffected political attitudes between the 1688 Revolution and the onset of liberal governance in the early nineteenth century, examining how these took shape across a range of genres, including Nahum Tate’s poetry, the writings of Jonathan Swift, a 1770 visual print, and the early nineteenth-century periodical Egeria. The chapter attends to historical flashpoints including the fall of Robert Walpole and the movement around John Wilkes (by way of attention to the ‘parties’ assembled around a 1770 theatrical controversy) and concludes with attention to the ‘political science’ and reimagined sympathies that accompanied the transition into nineteenth-century liberalism. The chapter thus provides broad frameworks in which to locate the detailed case studies that follow and introduces this book’s expanded approach to the ‘parties’ of political activity.