'A Political Dictionary Explaining the True Meaning of Words' by Charles Pigott

Considering the fact that Charles Pigott's satirical A Political Dictionary (1795) is regularly quoted and referred to in analyses of late eighteenth-century radical culture, it is surprising that until now it has remained unavailable to readers outside of specialised research libraries. Until his death on 24 June 1794, Pigott was one of England's most prolific satirists in the decade of revolutionary unrest following the French Revolution, writing a number of pamphlets and plays of which only a small part has survived. The Dictionary was a brilliant satire on the "language of Aristocracy" and combined radical politics with a high entertainment value. Indeed, part of what he wrote was considered so scurrilous that the printer left out certain lines in the printed version. Modern scholars will find Pigott's work an unrivalled resource for mapping the rhetorical landscape of political debate in the 1790s, and one that yields a unique insight into the sentiments and rhetoric of radical discourse.