‘While the governments of most countries in Europe are perfectly despotic, and while those which are not actually such, appear to be verging fast towards it, the government of America is making rapid strides towards perfection …’ So wrote William Winterbotham (1763–1829), the Plymouth Baptist preacher, from Newgate prison where he had been jailed for four years (1793–7) and fined £200 for allegedly seditious content in two sermons he preached in November 1792. The government of America, he continued, perhaps with some feeling, ‘being contrary to all the old governments, in the hands of the people, they have exploded those principles by the operation of which civil and religious disqualifications and oppressions have been inflicted on mankind …’ While Winterbotham was confined, and in order to help meet some of the expenses of his conviction, he entered into various publishing ventures with his fellow political prisoners, the publishers James Ridgway, Daniel Holt and Henry D. Symonds. His most ambitious work was An Historical, Geographical, Commercial, and Philosophical View of the American United States, which was published in four volumes in 1795, and from which the opening quotation is taken – no small achievement for a journeyman silversmith, the son of a fuller, who had had little formal education.

It is not surprising that British radicals – about whose thinking and activities Harry Dickinson has written so perceptively and so humanely – continued to admire and be fascinated by the American political example after American independence, especially during the oppressive 1790s. They had sympathised with the colonial case against British government policy in the decade before the war and they had applied these arguments to the British situation, making the case for reform at home as well as independence for America. They had opposed the British war against the revolutionary Americans and they now found in the new United States of America a totem, an inspiration and, in some cases, an asylum from the increasingly politically repressive Britain of the 1790s.