Cheap Repository Tracts

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.06: English Writing and Culture of the Romantic Period, 1789-1837.
Vol. editors: Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Daniel Robinson (Widener University)

Domains

Church of England (Anglicans)
Publishing

Dates

Date of occurrence 1795-1798

Places

United Kingdom (Location)

The enormous popular success of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man (1792), which may have sold as many as 200,000 copies in its first year of publication, made Britain's conservatives and evangelicals aware that the spread of literacy in the working people, notably by Sunday schools (post 1790), was granting them access to radical ideas of the kind that encouraged the Revolution in France. The Cheap Repository Tracts were a strategic ideological response, comprising a series of ballads and tales designed with rakish titles and woodcuts so that they resembled the pamphlets usually sold for a penny or so by itinerant hawkers and chapmen.

The tracts were originated by Hannah More, following the success of her Village …

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230 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Cheap Repository Tracts". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 April 2005 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1540, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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Cheap Repository Tracts

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