In 1819 Viscount Castlereagh, England's Foreign Secretary and perhaps the most hated member of the Government, complained in parliament that the journalist, T. J. Wooler (1786?-1853), had become “the fugleman of the Radicals.” His weekly journal The Black Dwarf was circulating from radical Westminster to northern colliery districts, where it could be found “in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you meet.”Early nineteenth-century popular radicalism took form in its journalism and its political tracts, pamphlet satires, caricatures, posters, and ballads. The best of the radical publications were shaped in turn by traditional popular attitudes and forms, including the rich resources of popular humor. Wooler's writing was unmistakably political, and often earnest in the manner of the polemical journalism of William Cobbett and Richard Carlile or the oratory of Henry Hunt. But his favorite tone was satirical, and this made him prominent among those radicals who did the most in the late Regency years to promote a public attitude of anti-authoritarianism rather than deference, of contempt for an unjust government rather than fear of it. E. P. Thompson has shown that it was “not the solemnity but the delight” with which the radicals “baited authority” that made the old order vulnerable. Wooler's journalism is a fine example of the political uses of popular humor, and a key to understanding the distinctive character of Regency radical culture.IRegency radicalism was a mixture of traditional and Enlightenment political ideas of natural rights and freedoms and an emerging class-consciousness of economics and society.