The Three Trials of William Hone
The present electronic text consists of several different files:
- First, there are transcriptions of the title page of the collected Three Trials as well as a transcription of Hone's opening "Address" that serves as a kind of preface to the whole.
- Transcription of the First Trial title page (the first trial, incidentally, was against The Late John Wilkes's Catechism), followed by an announcement of a "Subscription for Mr. Hone" which appeared opposite the first page of text in the early pamphlet-length versions of the trial. This front matter then leads to the text of the trial itself, divided for present purposes into the prosecution arguments and Hone's defense, both his opening argument about the circumstances of his arrest and trial and his subsequent citation of numerous famous scriptural parodies before his own. (The latter part of Hone's defense has yet to be transcribed.)
- Eventually, we hope to add the second and third trials to the BioText as well. These are, after all, important documents in the history of an English free press; they were frequently reprinted throughout the nineteenth century.
Note on the format: Hone's Three Trials employs a number of different typographic means (italics, small caps, peculiar quotation techniques, idiosyncratic font sizes, etc.) to emphasize the rhetoric. I have tried to duplicate these elements using the available HTML tags, though early browsers may not support all the font choices and some browsers may render these tags in rather idiosyncratic ways. The pages have been optimized for Internet Exporer 5.0.
