The William Hone BioText

Bowden, Ann. William Hone's Political Journalism, 1815-1821. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Texas at Austin. 1975.

Though the work is a dissertation rather than a published book, it is nonetheless the most thoroughly researched critical and historical source concerned with Hone's popular writing during the post-Waterloo unrest.

Bowers, Rick. "Parody, Performance and Self-Defence: William Hone's Ancient Mysteries Described (1823)." English Studies 94.1 (2013): 42-56.

Bowers offers a detailed and admiring account of Hone as editor and publisher of the mystery plays in Ancient Mysteries Described. Bowers identifies a kind of proto-Bakhtinian spirit of the Carnivalesque in Hone's account and use of the mystery plays. "His work in parody ... clearly showed him that parody mingled popular jest and public life in remarkably suggestive ways going all the way back to the medieval drama and burlesque popular art of English song and celebreation—not in sentimental terms, but in terms of popular opposition and critical self-assertion" (55).

Downey, Edmund. "An Unpublished Letter from William Hone, Aged 12, to the 'Association for the Preservation of Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers.'" Notes and Queries 63.2 (2016): 211-13.

Downey reports on an unpublished letter dated 25 April 1793 that apparently accompanied Hone's printed copy of The Contrast. Downey claims that the letter shows that the very young Hone was more deeply engaged in the publication of his work than has previously been appreciated.

Freshwater, Peter B. "Thomas Sharp, William Hone, and Hearne's Hell-Mouth." The Library, 6th Ser. 3 (1983): 263-67.

Discusses a controversy over the rights to publish Hearne's Hell-Mouth. The print appears as a fold out page in Hone's Ancient Mysteries Described.

Gardner, John. Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Excellent study of the 1819-21 period. Gardner includes one chapter specifically about Hone and Peterloo (Chap. 3, pp. 33-71), but there are many other references and many cogent and well-informed analyses of Hone's activities during this dynamic period.

Gardner, John. "William Hone's 'New Vision of Judgement.'" Wordsworth Circle 42.1 (2011): 52-56.

Illustrated discussion of Hone's relationship with Robert Southey, particularly but not exclusively within the highly charged political atmosphere of the early 1820s. Good on Hone's parodic technique as a radical publicist.

George, Dorothy M. Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. London: British Library, 1935-54.

George's catalogues are an invaluable resource for the study of the productions of the ephemeral press of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Britain. Essential reading for students of Hone and Cruikshank's illustrated satires.

Gorji, Mina. "Every-Day Poetry: William Hone, Popular Antiquarianism, and the Literary Anthology". Romanticism and Popular Culture in Britain and Ireland. Ed. Philip Connell and Nigel Leask. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009. 239-261.

Grimes, Kyle. "Daniel Defoe, William Hone, and The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! A New Electronic Edition." Digital Defoe 4.1 (2012): 13 pars. Web. [external link].

Partly an introduction to the online edition here in the BioText, the article argues that as a collector for Defoe biographer Walter Wilson, Hone was a great admirer of Defoe's presswork and journalistic energy and may well have had Defoe's example in mind when he produced his own politically influential works.

Grimes, Kyle. "William Hone." British Reform Writers, 1789-1832. Dictionary of Literary Biography 158. Ed. Gary Kelly and Edd Applegate. Detroit: Gale, 1996, pp. 158-68.

A general-interest biographical article with particular emphasis on Hone's relations with the Reform movement.

Grimes, Kyle. "William Hone, John Murray, and the Uses of Byron." Romanticism, Radicalism, and the Press. Ed. Stephen Behrendt. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997.

Argues that Hone's publication of Don Juan, Canto the Third! in late 1819 effects a comic/rhetorical claim on Byron's poem, the first two cantos of which were published anonymously by Murray in July 1819.

Grimes, Kyle. "Spreading the (Radical) Word: William Hone's Liturgical Parodies of 1817." Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789-1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm Thomis. Ed. Michael T. Davis. Macmillan, 1998.

Essay traces the dissemination of Hone's 1817 parodies, discovering an informal but highly effective network for the circulation of comic, radical texts.

Hackwood, Frederick William. William Hone: His Life and Times. 1912. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970.

The standard, full-length biography. Opening chapters contain Hone's unfinished autobiography. The book is useful as a source of leads, but not always reliable in its facts and distinctly slanted against the Hone-as-active-radical in favor of Hone-as-pious-antiquarian.

Haywood, Ian. "Paper Promises: Restriction, Caricature, and the Ghost of Gold." Romanticism, Forgery, and the Credit Crunch. ed. Ian Haywood. Romantic Circles Praxis Series 2012. [external link].

Thoroughly researched and generously illustrated, Haywood's article presents the historical and economic backgrounds regarding the Bank Restriction act with particular focus on forgery, counterfeiting, and Hone & Cruikshank's Bank Note and Bank Restriction Barometer.

Heyes, Robert. "John Clare and William Hone: A Letter Redated." John Clare Society Journal 33 (2014): 48-56.

Heyes reports that a letter from Clare to Hone is incorrectly dated as 18 May 1823 in Storey's The Letters of John Clare. The correct date is 18 May 1828. This correction raises a number of other issues about Clare's relationship with Hone as well as with the Behnes brothers.

Hill, Jonathan E. "William Hone." British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789-1832. Dictionary of Literary Biography 110. Detroit: Gale, 1991, pp. 126-38.

General biographical article.

Hodgetts, Lucy. "William Hone and the Reading Public, 1825-26." Victorian Network 4.1 (2012). [external link].

Hodgetts describes the place of The Every-Day Book within the context of an emerging popular reading audience. Useful commentary on collective authorship and on the increasingly democratic forms of author/reader relations. Hodgetts presents intriguing comparative analysis of Hone's and Dickens's accounts of Greenwich Fair.

Hone, J. Ann. "William Hone, 1780-1842, Publisher and Bookseller: An Approach to Early 19th Century London Radicalism." Historical Studies [Melbourne] 16 (1974): 55-70.

Offers a sound summary of Hone's activities as a radical writer and publisher with emphasis on links between Hone and other radicals.

Hough, Graham. "Some Coleridge Marginalia." Modern Language Notes 66.6 (1951): 361-65.

Hough examines four detailed notes Coleridge wrote in his copy of Hone's Apocryphal New Testament in 1924. The focus is chiefly on Coleridge's textual scholarship, though there are incidental comments on Hone's controversial publication.

James, Louis. " 'A Storehouse of Past and Present Manners and Customs': the Private Scrapbook becomes a Communal Record in the Journals of William Hone." 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 5 (2007). [external link]

A brief but useful account of Hone's antiquarian miscellanies, The Every-Day Book and The Table Book. James places these within the scrapbook tradition, seeing them as means by which the private collection becomes a public property.

Jones, Steven E. "Mocking Monuments: The Regent's Bomb, Satire, and Authority." Publishing, Editing, and Reception: Essays in Honor of Donald H. Reiman. ed. Michael Edson. Newark, DE--Lanham, MD: U of Delaware P--Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. 43-61.

Focusing on Hone's Regent's Bomb, Jones presents a rich and thoroughly researched exploration of the satirical discursive environment of the late Regency—a period in which Hone developed his characteristic modes of multimedia political satire. Highly recommended.

Jones, Steven E. "The Print in Regency Print Culture." Keats-Shelley Journal 61 (2012): 71-84.

Using Hone & Cruikshank's A Slap at Slop as a key example, Jones argues for a conception of "print culture" that includes the material forms of satirical prints rather than merely printed and bound texts.

Kent, David A. and D. R. Ewen, eds. Regency Radical: Selected Writings of William Hone. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

A very useful anthology of Hone's writing. The book is divided into four sections containing materials on Hone's 1817 trials, a selection of the satires and parodies of the later Regency, brief excerpts from the later prose works, and (most valuable of all) selected letters.

Kent, David A. and D. R. Ewen, eds. Romantic Parodies, 1797-1831. Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1992.

Useful if idiosyncratic collection of parodic writing.

Ledger, Sally. "From Queen Caroline to Lady Dedlock: Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination". Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 575-600.

Ledger argues that Dickens was powerfully influenced by Hone's popular satires, particularly those on Peterloo and the Queen Caroline affair. The essay offers several parallels—in both image and text—between Dickens and Hone/Cruikshank texts.

Luke, Hugh J. Drams for the Vulgar: A Study of Some Radical Publishers and Publications of Early Nineteenth-Century England. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Texas at Austin. 1963.

Valuable accounts of Hone, Carlile, and Benbow.

Manning, Peter. "The Hone-ing of Byron's Corsair." Reading Romantics: Texts and Contexts. New York: Oxford, 1990, pp. 216-37.

Strong on the vexed relationship between Hone and Byron, especially considering Hone's piracies, rewritings, and imitations of Byron's works.

Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. (See esp. pp. 18-60.)

Essential reading. The book offers the best assessment to date of the significance of Hone's career--both his famous defense of 1817 and his subsequent activities as publisher, parodist, and antiquarian--on the development of nineteenth-century print culture. Marsh establishes continuities between Hone and, for example, Dickens.

McElligott, Jason. "William Hone (1780-1842), Print Culture, and the Nature of Radicalism." Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century English Radicalism in Context. Ed. Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan. London: Ashgate, 2011, pp. 241-60.

Excellent biographical account articulates between Hone's remarkable knowledge of early printed books and his inventive modes of intervention into the print culture of the early nineteenth century.

de Morgan, Augustus. A Budget of Paradoxes. 2nd. ed. Ed. David Eugene Smith. 2 vols. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 1915. (see pp. 180-87)

Patten, Robert L. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. Volume I: 1792-1835. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1992. (See esp. chapters 9-11, pp. 121-86.)

Excellent, detailed, thoroughly researched biography of Cruikshank, Hone's friend and partner in, among other projects, the squibs of 1819-21. Cruikshank, incidentally, is one key link between Hone and Dickens.

Peterson, Ted. "The Fight of William Hone for British Press Freedom." Journalism Quarterly 25 (1948): 132-38.

Basic background account of the 1817 trials.

Rickword, Edgell, ed. Radical Squibs and Loyal Ripostes: Satirical Pamphlets of the Regency Period, 1819-1821. Bath: Adams and Dart, 1971.

Well-reproduced facsimile editions of Hone and Cruikshank's most famous pamphlets of the post-Peterloo and Queen Caroline Affair years; includes as well some royalist responses. Rickword's introductory essay and biography is a brief but useful and reliable account of Hone's life.

Robinson, J. W. "Regency Radicalism and Antiquarianism: William Hone's Ancient Mysteries Described (1823)." Leeds Studies in English 10 (1978): 121-144.

Excellent reading of Hone's 1823 antiquarian work and its highly controversial predecessor, the Apocryphal New Testament (1820).

Routledge, James. Chapters in the History of Popular Progress Chiefly in Relation to the Freedom of the Press and Trial by Jury. London: Macmillan, 1876.

An early and very sympathetic account of Hone's significance in the nineteenth-century movement for a free press. Routledge had access to Hone's own papers and correspondence.

Sikes, Herschel M. "William Hone: Regency Patriot, Parodist, and Pamphleteer." Newberry Library Bulletin 5 (1961): 281-94.

Introductory; a handy assessment of the various Hone pamphlets in the Newberry Collection.

Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1791-1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Details a split in conceptions of language as the "coarse" or "vulgar" language of the so-called "lower orders" becomes increasingly distinct from and hostile to the more "refined" language of the upper classes. With a chapter on Hone's 1817 trials, the book offers valuable socio-linguistic background for understanding the classist assumptions of both prosecution and defendant.

Tuite, Clara. "Not Guilty: Negative Capability and the Trials of William Hone." Censorship and the Limits of the Literary: A Global View. ed. Nicole Moore. New York: Bloomsbury, 2015. 33-48.

A theoretically dense article exploring the dynamics by which the parodic and spectacular censorship trial can become productive of new discourse--suggesting even that Hone's trials illustrate the emergence of a distinct discursive category of literature.

Vitale, Marina. "The Domesticated Heroine in Byron's Corsair and William Hone's Prose Adaptation." Literature and History 10 (1984): 72-94.

A feminist reading of the two works finds that Hone's adaptation presents a less egalitarian view of the status of women even than Byron's poem.

Wardroper, John. The World of William Hone. London: Shelfmark Books, 1997.

Excerpts from The Every Day Book, The Table Book, and The Year Book, Hone's antiquarian and popular-cultural anthologies of the late 1820s-early 1830s, arranged by subject with a valuable introduction.

Wilson, Ben. The Laughter of Triumph: William Hone and the Fight for the Free Press. London: Faber, 2005.

Amusing and accessible portrait of Hone, particularly in the context of his 1817 trials and their impact on the freedom of the press.

Wood, Marcus. Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790-1822. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994.

Perhaps the most thorough and well-researched account to date of Hone's work as radical publicist in the post-Napoleonic years. Considerable emphasis on interplay between advertising and political rhetoric. The appendix has Wood's transcription of the manuscript of The Late John Wilkes's Catechism (1817) from the British Library.