[In contrast with the moderate voices of Williams and Taylor above, and the reformist Brougham below, Thomas Wooler's The Black Dwarf sees popular education as inevitably leading to radical social change. Running from 1817 to 1824,The Black Dwarf was one of several important radical periodicals of the time; as Kevin Gilmartin notes, it was ‘filled with the rhetoric of improvement,’ which it used to powerfully ‘oppositional’ ends. Wooler, like the CPS member and radical publisher William Hone, was a victim of repressive legislation against the press; in 1817 he was prosecuted twice for seditious libel. He won one trial and successfully appealed against the guilty verdict in the other, but was tried again in 1819 on political grounds, and was this time convicted and jailed. The passage below, which was published during the final months of the essay-circle's existence, pictures popular education as part of a conflict with the armed forces of the state; both the rhetoric and the premises of Wooler's claims would probably have horrified Faraday and his friends, since they reflect the antagonistic model of the class politics of education and popular enlightenment which the essay-circle does its best to ignore.]

The progress of public opinion is now unimpeded. The heartless enemies of reform content themselves with holding their entrenchments, in the forlorn hope of defending the citadel of corruption from our assaults. Defeated in the field, notwithstanding the glitter of the bayonets in their centre, and embarrassed in their finances, they dare not venture to cope with us openly any longer. By all the petty artifices congenial to little and malignant minds, they still endeavour to irritate, and to injure: and in some instances they still succeed. […] Their agents are actively on the watch for a sortie upon any supposed defenceless friend of freedom; but for open, honest warfare with us they have no further stomach. They scowl at us with the angry glare of a toothless tiger—‘willing to wound, but yet afraid to strike’. In the meanwhile, KNOWLEDGE, the TRUE FORCE, is rapidly embodying the energies of reason. Thousands of enquirers throng to the means and opportunity of instruction; and the thirst for information is too strong to receive any serious check.