An edited collection examining the construction of popular culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Part I. Introduction: 1. What is the people? Philip Connell and Nigel Leask; Part II. Ballad Poetry and Popular Song: 2. 'A degrading species of Alchymy': ballad poetics, oral tradition and the meanings of popular culture Nigel Leask; 3. Refiguring the popular in Charlotte Brooke's Reliques of Irish Poetry Leith Davis; 4. 'An individual flowering on a common stem': melody, performance and national song Kirsteen McCue; Part III. Politics and the People: 5. Rus in Urbe John Barrell; 6. The 'sinking down' of Jacobinism and the rise of the counter-revolutionary man of letters Kevin Gilmartin; 7. Shelley's Mask of Anarchy and the visual iconography of female distress Ian Haywood; Part IV. The Urban Experience: 8. Popularizing the public: Robert Chambers and the rewriting of the antiquarian city Ina Ferris; 9. Keats, popular culture and the sociability of theatre Gillian Russell; 10. A world within walls: Haydon, The Mock Election and debtors' prisons Greg Dart; Part V. Canon-Formation and the Common Reader: 11. Every-day poetry: William Hone, popular antiquarianism, and the literary anthology Mina Gorji; 12. How to popularize Wordsworth Philip Connell.