Winifred Gales & Radical Print Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century Sheffield

York Georgian Society Lecture

The Hartshead Press operated in Sheffield during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, providing the city with a printer, bookshop and the Sheffield Register and Sheffield Iris newspapers. The press was founded by Joseph Gales in 1784, and later run his apprentice, James Montgomery, following Gales’s flight to America in 1794 as a fugitive charged with treason and sedition. This is a narrative cemented decades later by the heliographic Memoirs of the Life and Writing of James Montgomery (1855), which doubles as a panegyric, self-congratulatory history of the Hartshead Press.

However, the handwritten, private memoirs of Joseph’s wife, Winifred Gales, penned in her later years long after their escape to America, tell a different story. In her Recollections, Winfred, ever a fierce defender of her husband’s commitment to radicalism and reform, reveals the extent to which she managed the bookshop, mentored her sisters-in-law when they set up their own bookshop, provided Joseph with entrepreneurial advice and, whilst he was in hiding, managed the printshop by herself whilst also caring for several children. In fact, she describes being interrogated for several hours by magistrates, alone, whilst heavily pregnant. In an especially extraordinary sequence during their journey to America, she tells of how their ship was boarded by privateers and, given that Joseph was incapacitated with sea sickness, it was Winifred who negotiates their release. This paper will consider how and why Winifred’s agency has been obscured, and propose means for its recovery.

Biography:
Adam James Smith is an Associate Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature at York St John University. His work explores the role played by cheap print in mediating the relationship between citizen and state during the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in works or protest and satire. He co-edited and contributed to Poetry, Conspiracy and Radicalism in Sheffield (Spirit Duplicator, 2016), Print Culture, Agency and Regionality in the Handpress Era (Palgrave, 2022), People of Print: Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge, 2023), People of Print: Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2025) and Impolite Periodicals: Reading Rudeness in the Eighteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, forthcoming 2025). Chief Editor of Criticks, the online reviews hub for the British Society for Eighteenth Century Studies, he is also an eighteenth-century section editor for the Literature Compass journal and co-director of the York Research Unit for the Study of Satire.

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