One of the most intriguing dilemmas that faced loyalist pamphleteers during the propaganda wars of the 1790s was the question of how to communicate with working-class readers. The Revolution Controversy introduced what Burke famously described as the ‘swinish multitude’ to a degree of political discussion and participation never witnessed before, and tales abounded of Paine's Rights of Man ‘poison[ing] the minds of the plebeian inhabitants of great cities’. Such developments were viewed with horror by conservative loyalists, but no one could effectively turn the clock back and undo the spread of literacy and political knowledge the working classes had, or were in the process of acquiring. All that was left was to somehow re-educate such individuals in the hope of replacing Painite reasoning and disaffection with acquiescence and ‘contentment’. But in so doing, as Don Herzog has pointed out, the counter-revolutionists were immediately confronted by ‘a vicious paradox’ – namely the contradictory, if not ‘self-defeating’ task of acknowledging the political involvement of individuals, who in their opinion, were unsuited to anything other than husbandry or labour. Furthermore, such an acknowledgement necessarily entailed addressing them through a medium that could potentially encourage further reading, participation and ‘corrosion of prejudice’ – ‘precisely what they wanted to avoid’ and which they had ‘come into existence to prevent’. Kevin Gilmartin's recent study, Writing against Revolution (2007) has opened up fascinating lines of further enquiry into precisely this quandary.