The Discourse of Lawfulness in Representations of the Peterloo Massacre: A Lexical and Critical Discourse Analysis

The article employs critical discourse analysis to shed light on the linguistic construction of political discourse in the Romantic Period. The aim is to fill a gap in the literature by integrating the critical tools of applied linguistics with Romantic media texts. Such hermeneutic effort is intended to complement the cultural turn in Romantic Studies thanks to an unprecedented focus on the lexical and syntactical construction of both political debate and the dynamics of political struggle in England in 1819. The corpus consists of five texts published in three daily papers, The Times, The Morning Chronicle, and The Courier, and two weeklies, Sherwin’s Political Register and The Examiner in the immediate aftermath of the Peterloo massacre. These were selected as representative of a range of competing political stances and ideologies. The first part of the article presents the sociocultural discourse of lawfulness at the turn of the nineteenth century, and contains reflections on language, politics, and the law. The second part introduces the corpus and the methodology employed for its analysis (van Leeuwen’s social actor theory), as well as presenting the #Lancsbox software and its use in the analysis of the corpus. The third part analyses the corpus using social actor theory to demonstrate that media representations of Peterloo are acts of cultural appropriation that construe it either as a conspiracy or as a legitimate act of self-defence. In this fashion, the article wishes to complement work on Peterloo-inspired literature (poetry in particular), by offering an alternative perspective on the event and its diverse textual representations.