“An alarming state of affairs”: Rhetoric, Resistance and the Nation in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Speech of 20 April 1798
“An alarming state of affairs”: Rhetoric, Resistance and the Nation in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s Speech of 20 April 1798

Summary/Abstract: On 21 April 1798 the Morning Post printed a speech, given the night before, by the Foxite politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan. Sheridan had sought to rouse the nation against threatened French invasion. The French must be resisted at all costs, he insisted, and he explained why: “What is it they want? Ships, commerce, manufactures, cash, capital, and credit; or, in other words, they only want the sinews, bones, marrow, and heart’s blood of Great Britain.” Such passionate rhetoric contained a change of argument. Sheridan had previously opposed British warmongering and had maintained a liberal sympathy for France and the cause of reform. The Morning Post’s account of Sheridan’s speech confirms its importance to a liberal audience, but what is equally remarkable is that several other newspapers carried similarly extensive but politically different versions of what Sheridan had said. By confronting this contested mediascape, this article examines Sheridan’s speech, analysing his arguments and rhetoric but also appraising the competing ways in which the speech was reported. The article thereby raises broader questions about the status of printed transcriptions of parliamentary speeches, the dissemination process and the methodological problems of studying different versions of a famous speech.

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