Contested Imprints: the letters of the Black Dwarf in London to the Yellow Bonze at Japan

Abstract

Together with William Hone’s satires, the “Letters of the Black Dwarf in London to the Yellow Bonze at Japan” constitute some of the most original examples of what Marcus Wood (1994: 271) perceptively termed “the desire to glory and imaginatively exploit unrespectability”. These letters were authored and published by Thomas Jonathan Wooler in The Black Dwarf, the radical periodical he edited between 1817 and 1824. The current paper contextualizes Wooler’s literary and political intervention and analyses the sophisticated wit of the fictional “Letters of the Black Dwarf ”. It focuses on two moments of crisis in post-war Britain: the years of popular agitation that culminated in Peterloo, and the so-called Queen Caroline affair. In Wooler’s “Letters of the ‘Black Dwarf ” satire becomes an art form and journalism itself a politico-cultural act.