1819 has always constituted a central year for historians of popular politics. It was the pivot of E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class (1963) and has recently been recovered by historicist literary criticism as an epoch-making year for men of letters. The above recollections of the minister, Edward Irving, adequately characterize the polarized politics that had emerged by the end of 1819. Explaining that process of polarization is more challenging. One approach would be to regard a revived radical movement in that year as a direct response to the recurrence of extreme distress in manufacturing districts. Distress was certainly acute and it clearly played a prominent role in the politics of radicalism. Such an explanation would also follow some contemporary and near-contemporary analysis. Henry Cockburn characterized radicalism, or ‘sedition of opinion’, as a product of ‘sedition of the stomach’ with radical politics and orators as the waste products of a chemical process: ‘They are the froth that rises and bubbles on the surface, when the mass of the people ferments’.