Cheap Repository Tracts

Literary/ Cultural Context Note

Litencyc Editors (Independent Scholar - Europe)
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The enormous popular success of Tom Paine's

The Rights of Man

(1792), which may have sold as many as 200,000 copies in its first year of publication, made Britain's conservatives and evangelicals aware that the spread of literacy in the working people, notably by Sunday schools (post 1790), was granting them access to radical ideas of the kind that encouraged the Revolution in France. The Cheap Repository Tracts were a strategic ideological response, comprising a series of ballads and tales designed with rakish titles and woodcuts so that they resembled the pamphlets usually sold for a penny or so by itinerant hawkers and chapmen.

The tracts were originated by Hannah More, following the success of her Village Politics which was published in 1792 under the pseudonym Will Chip and used

230 words

Citation: Editors, Litencyc. "Cheap Repository Tracts". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 14 April 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=1540, accessed 19 March 2024.]

1540 Cheap Repository Tracts 2 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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