Conville & Walsh

The young and prodigiously talented historian Ben Wilson tells the remarkable and now largely forgotten story of William Hone, who from humble beginnings and virtual self-education became one of the most famous journalists of his generation. His withering satires and his pioneering journalistic interventions would prove a huge thorn in the side of successive British governments. He was finally to become a celebrity when, over three days and in three separate trials, he defended himself in December 1817 against Lord Ellenborough’s trumped-up charge of blasphemous libel – and in the process established the legal basis for the rights of the free press.

Despite his fame, Hone was to die a pauper and his achievements were buried under the growth of the fast-developing press institutions of the mid-nineteenth century. In addition to being a compelling and dynamic story of one man’s life, this is also an extensively researched and brilliantly analysed account of the rapid growth in ‘news’ selling which was to generate an explosion of popular interest in the processes of law and politics still seen today.